putnam

The stark realization that I’ve done nothing even remotely useful with my life hit me last week, when I met a 26-year old Congressman.

Adam Putnam was born on July 31, 1974. That’s 78 days before me, which means I would had to have been elected to Congress sometime last month in order to even tie him. At the moment, I have neither the intelligence nor the over one million dollars necessary to run for Congress. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to be in Congress based on the old Groucho Marx adage that I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Put another way, if I were elected, it would show how terribly ignorant some Americans are and consequently I wouldn’t want to represent them. But somehow, Adam Putnam, at age 26, did just that. Granted he’s a Rep from Florida, and we know Florida and elections go together about as well as Wile E. Coyote and Acme products. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling like a bit of a loser knowing he was constantly receiving all the inherent ass-kissing, both figuratively and literally, that come with being a Congressman, while I was toiling away my better years doing grunt work for a bunch of Nazis. Not that I’m bitter.

In fact I’m constantly reading and seeing people who are younger than me do much more. All hockey players make a minimum six-figure salary, and more and more of them join the NHL when they’re younger than twenty. Baseball players make even more. A recent CNN story noted the rise of underage kids attending college; one girl graduated from Mary Baldwin College at 17 with degrees in Art, French, and International Relations. My knowledge of all three is Van Gogh, jem appelle Justin, and don’t crash a spy plane in China, respectively.

On the plus side, those of us who aren’t child prodigies can take comfort in the fact those who are will go nuts, most likely by the time they’re my age. They’ll turn into those wacky old professors we had in college that can’t find their way out of a room. I had a history professor who could have given you a day-by-day account of absolutely every tactical maneuver of the Franco-Prussian war, but couldn’t operate the same overhead projector he had been using for thirty years. Couldn’t turn it on, couldn’t make it focus, couldn’t point it at the screen. Every day he’d spend ten minutes just trying to figure it out. I suppose we students could have helped him, but then he’d just start talking about the Franco-Prussian war, which we really didn’t give a crap about; we just took the class to watch him fool with the projector.

Granted, some of these kids are missing out on major portions of life. Stealing your first beer, stealing your first car, pretending your parents are monstrously uncool people who are out solely for the purpose of ruining your life, and putting on false airs of alienation and solitude – these are what make up adolescence. A 14-year old at Union College said frat parties would be "an anthropological exhibition where one is as Jane Goodall among the apes." That may be true, provided the apes repeatedly asked Dr. Goodall what her major was, if she lived around here, and if her father was a thief because he stole the stars and put them in her eyes. Frankly, I give the apes more credit than that. I’ll bet the kid would change his tune about frat parties pretty quick after a couple of keg stands and two or three co-eds.

I’m not too unhappy about not being a child prodigy, but I’m still bummed about the 26-year-old Congressman. Putnam was elected to the Florida House of Representatives when he was 22. When I was 22 I was in my fifth year of college and guzzling warm Narragansett through a funnel. Perhaps that’s why I’m not a Congressman today (though it didn’t seem to hurt Dick Armey).

But there are downsides, of course. Putnam stands about 5’4” and weighs about as much as a bottle of Evian. He definitely strikes me as the type of kid that either got picked last for everything or didn’t get picked at all. More than likely they used his bruised and battered carcass for home plate, or other such psychological tortures that lead one to become introverted and freaky, then eventually a Republican. I’m sure he doesn’t leave work at 4:45 like I do, take two-hour lunches and “relaxation breaks” like I do, or steal office supplies with the alarming rapidity that I do. And I’m sure other Congressmen can’t take him too seriously -- most Congressional offices have interns older than him. When he says things like “Passage of this Budget Conference Committee Report will be another step in my efforts to put taxpayers first,” other Congressmen want to tell him to suck his pacifier and shut the hell up. That’s what I told him, and he sure didn’t react like it was the first time he’d heard it.

So I guess I’ll have to resign myself to the fact that I’m going to live a normal life of quiet desperation, one with neither the dizzying highs of being a junior Congressman, or the dizzying lows of being the fall guy for some S & L scandal perpetrated by those on my Committee. But dammit, I’ll have my dignity, or something very similar to it.