I don’t use the word fatuous often when referring to the lyrics of the poet Laureate of The Nobby Works, Mister Bob Dylan, but I’m afraid I have to in regards to one of his more oft-quoted lines from the song Love Minus Zero/No Limit: "…there's no success like failure/And…failure's no success at all."
The intelligent mind is always a sucker for paradox of course, and that line’s got the patina of paradox all over it. But to raise the question Robert Zemickis raised in a film of similarly deceptive depth: What Lies Beneath? I’ve heard the song sung maybe a thousand times and loosely thrown the line out nearly as much. But when I stop to think about it, to examine it for actual meaning, I end up in Mister Jones’s shoes. There may be something happening here, but I don’t know what it is.
I mean is Bob really saying that failure is success—that Custer’s last stand, New Coke, the Challenger, the Edsel, the Mondale campaign, Chernobyl, the Kardashian-Humphries marriage were successful? Is he saying that success weighed in wealth, honors, renown, or lovers doesn’t count? Is he challenging that most American of bumper sticker philosophies: He who dies with the most toys wins?
In pondering Bob’s meaning over the years, I’ve come up with my own tweak of his line, where I would make it: There’s no measure of success like failure, and success that can’t overcome failure is no success at all. I think we can most tell who’s successful and who’s not by how much of a pass they get for their screw-ups. The truly successful people get numerous passes for their failures; most failures simply can’t, as they are likely to say, buy a break. A few examples—
George Lucas got a huge pass for the major flop that was Howard the Duck; Michael Cimino whose Deer Hunter was better than any one of Lucas’s six Star Wars films, never recovered from the failure that was Heaven’s Gate.
Elvis spent the better part of his career making insipid movies, forgettable music, and becoming a fat, drugged-out lounge singer but still managed to die “The King.” Johnnie Ray, an equally soulful, sexy white guy, who could also sing with the most badass angels, couldn’t even survive a not guilty verdict for soliciting some man-on-man sex with an undercover cop.
Ronald Reagan got numerous passes for raising taxes, expanding the national debt, and negotiating with terrorists. Bill Clinton got numerous passes for botching healthcare, selling out the Democratic Party to Wall Street, and of course Monica. Reagan and Clinton, if we are to judge success by the number of failures you can get away with, were enormous successes. George H.W. Bush, on the other hand, Liberator of Kuwait, could never get past “Read my lips, no new taxes.” And then there’s George’s stupid son W. who went AWOL from the military, developed a coke habit; bankrupted multiple companies; ignored the “bin Laden to attack USA” memo; launched a 10-year, multi-billion dollar war looking for nonexistent WMD and phantom connections to 9/11; ignored Katrina; and fiddled while the American economy crashed and burned. If free passes for screw-ups are as much a measure of success as I believe they are, George W. Bush may, in fact, be the most successful man who ever lived.
This formula for judging success doesn’t just hold for public figures, though those can be most illustrative. We can all make a fairly good judgment on the success of the marriages and friendships we see around us by assessing how much failure they tolerate. If he’s willing to look the other way while her butt expands, her mindless chatter increases, and her obsessions turn to pillow or doll collecting and she’s willing to look the other way as his gut pours over his belt, his silences suck up air, and youporn is how he spends his quality time, you’re probably talking about a pretty solid marriage. If you have a friend who gets his politics from Limbaugh, his guns from Wal-Mart, and his religion from TV and you still enjoy his company, then you’re probably looking at a life-long friendship.
It’s really rather remarkable when you think about the amount of slack we extend to those we like (or need) and the intolerance we have for the failings of those we don’t like (or don't need). It’s even more remarkable when logic is brought to bear on assessing alleged successes, and it goes for naught because ultimately it’s really not a matter of the head, but of the heart. No amount of “evidence,” for instance, is ever going to convince someone who hates Reagan that he brought an end to the Cold War, and no Clinton hater is ever going to be persuaded by “evidence” that he was responsible for the economic boom of the 90s.
I’m much in mind of all this as my football team, The New England Patriots, heads into their fifth Super Bowl in 11 years, a record of success by most any measure. But in the build-up to the game, furious questions have been swirling about what it means to their legacy. At midweek, former New York Giant Amani Toomer went so far as to claim that if the Patriots do not win this Sunday against his old team, it will throw into question all their past success because of the scandal known as Spygate.
For the uninitiated, Spygate is for Patriot fans what Italian Fascism is for (ahem) Italophiles or what Clinton’s blow-job is for Democrats. It’s that extremely unpleasant experience of having to go out and defend something that is lousy and embarrassing in part because of your allegiance to a greater whole. This awkwardness is sometimes reduced to a bumper sticker that proudly proclaims My Country Right or Wrong. I know that my fellow liberals largely recoil from that sentiment, but we practice it in myriad ways in spite of ourselves. Like our enemies on the other side of the barricades, we can get ourselves into high dudgeon, say, over Clarence Thomas’s Long Dong Juan shamelessly waving before Anita Hill’s innocent eyes, but parse ourselves into pretzels over Bill Clinton’s angular penis in Monica Lewinsky’s seductive mouth. (And Clarence Thomas—there’s another one who qualifies as a success under our criteria of getting free passes, although his long career as the dumbest, most useless piece of driftwood ever to wash up on the shores of American jurisprudence may ultimately render the judgment on him as poor.)
Anyway, when I first heard Amani Toomer’s declaration, I quickly reached for that useful cliché about the similarity between opinions and assholes and dismissed it. But the more I started to process how widespread and deep was the loathing for the Patriots throughout the football world, the more I came to think that Toomer may be right. The Pats may very well be playing for their legacy on Sunday.
Why I think the stakes are that high is that—for one--the loathing against the Pats is driven by a witch’s brew of righteous indignation, jealousy, and ignorance. And for two—unsated vengeance. The legions of Pat haters in the ranks of NFL players, media, and fans alike were not at all satisfied by the severe official penalties that were imposed on the Pats by the league office in 2007, nor their stunning defeat in that season’s Super Bowl at the hands of the underdog Giants, nor even the fact that their 2008 season began with their star player suffering a year-long injury in the first game. The hounds want more. We’re talking major league bloodlust. We’re talking pound of flesh time. They want the Giants to crush the Pats this Sunday. And if that happens, I am convinced that the enemies of the Pats throughout football will be so emboldened as to completely bury the Patriots’ legacy and spit on its grave. This will be the one failure these New England Patriots will not be able to overcome. So the stakes couldn’t be higher for the team and its fans on Sunday. The legacy is on the line...they're playing to see if they will go down as the Elvis of football or the Johnnie Ray.
Another line Dylan should’ve written instead of the sorry one he did write: There’s no success like a beat-down, and a beat-down’s the sweetest success of all—Pats 38 Giants 13.