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Essayist Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service considers some good losers.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: After Frank Sinatra died, like a lot of other Americans, I replayed the recordings, marveled again at the cashmere voice, Sinatra, the winner, the chairman of the board, the man who did it his way, is wonderful enough. But there was another voice that he sounded, the voice of the loser--when it's quarter to 3 and he's alone at the bar.FRANK SINATRA: (singing) It's quarter to 3. There's no one in the place, ‘cept you and me.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Americans love winners, the commonplace runs. Though all over the American South, that part of America most haunted by loss, there are statues to the losers in the Civil War. And the most cherished monument in Texas is the Alamo, remember its defeat. Just as our most cherished war monument in Washington, though, is the Monument to the Vietnam dead, our unresolved loss. Regardless of the exceptions, the general rule survives. We are a country famous all over the world for our optimism. We incline toward the gold. If you don't win the gold, your face will never get on the cereal box. Perhaps that is why other nations tell us we don't know tragedy. But, of course, we do. Slavery, dead pioneers and dead Indians. Northern Unionists and Southern Confederates—blood soaks our soil—it's just that we don't dwell on it. People don't die in America. They pass away into euphemism. Oh, we forgive people for losing, we admire Christopher Reeves for overcoming tragedy. It's an old American Protestant knowledge. Character is formed by defeat. Richard Nixon, our most complicated political losers. Right after he lost to John Kennedy in 1960, that he realized that every great person in American History knew loss. The truly great leaders of history learned to overcome loss. And yet, despite our love of the winter, despite the cheering for the golden hero, another theme, another subversive note sounds in America, our two most enduring American musics—country and blues—connect poor whites and poor blacks.
(WOMAN SINGING)
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Billie Holliday sings in a different register, some terrible knowledge that Tammy Wynette also knew.
TAMMY WYNETTE: (singing) Stand by your man. Give—
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: In general, women sound their suffering louder than men in America. Men are more eloquent when they suffer in silence. The great silent clowns, for example, always are male. Emmett Kelly made us laugh because he was so sad, such a loser. Red Skelton also. Charlie Chaplin, the comic genius, ruled the movies, especially in those years before there was sound. France had Edith Piaf; America had Judy Garland.
JUDY GARLAND: (singing) The night is bitter. The stars are glitter.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Some entertainers seem to live off their sadness, seem even to doom themselves to play out the tragic lyric. Thoreau remarked that the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. It's his word "quiet" that has always interested me—the unspoken sadness in life—the look in a parent's eye, for example, the exasperation when there isn't money enough for food and extras, never enough. Most of us don't win the gold, or even win the lotto. Most of us are not heroes in the romantic novel.
FRANK SINATRA: (singing) In the wee small hours of the morning—
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: In the end, Frank Sinatra became famous and rich, but his genius, his art was to recognize the loser in the bar mirror, if only briefly and only for a few sad songs in those years when our parents were young, after America won the war and saw itself in bright Technicolor and vista vision.
FRANK SINATRA: (singing) When your lonely heart has learned its lesson—
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I'm Richard Rodriguez.
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