More lessons from The Roadrunner

Larry Little

As a veteran grandfather, I have learned a few tricks and had many more pulled on me. Basically, it seems I am too often destined to follow the perverse lesson of Wile E. Coyote in the The Roadrunner cartoon: if you don’t succeed, keep trying the same thing over and over.

For those uninitiated in The Roadrunner, it’s the old cartoon shors where the poor coyote tries in vain to capture the roadrunner, who invariable escapes. The coyote falls off countless cliffs and gets crushed by large boulders over and over. My young granddaughters love cheering for the coyote, but they know who always wins — it’s both the roadrunner and the Acme Company that supplies the various armaments and gadgets that the coyote purchases and which explode in his face or lead him into a prickly cactus. However, the granddaughters have figured out how to be sure to get the mac and cheese they want for dinner, encourage grandpa to watch The Roadrunner with them.

I confess to having mixed feeling about the fact that one of my youngest granddaughters really likes the episode where the coyote is training his son in the art of roadrunner capturing — to both of their demise. Despite my also being a secret fan of that episode (don’t let her know!), it does seem that the not-so-virtuous lesson of repetitive futility does have a tendency to be passed along.

Can we think of a couple of current illustrations?

How about bank failures? Thanks to the website for the American Deposit Management Co. I can pass along some of our history — briefly augmented by some family history. Perhaps in 1837 we had forgotten the bank failures of 1819. Then again in the panic of 1873, railroad speculation led to our first great depression, which in turn was followed by the attempt to corner copper stock causing the panic of 1907. Then came our infamous Great Depression starting in the summer of 1929. In the 1980s and 1990s we had a major failure in the savings and loan crisis, followed by the crisis of 2008, where between 2008 and 2015 over 500 banks failed.

We can speculate at this moment as to the cause of our recent bank failures. Is it merely easy money, woke politics, or both? However, history is replete with stories of larger banks swallowing the smaller ones in the name of saving them. It does seem they are the Acme Co. right there when you seem to need them.

What about our wars? I have often referred to the point-counterpoint of failing to recognize the threat of Hitler at the Munich Conference just before the start of World War II, in contrast to the lesson of gradualism sucking us into our ill-fated involvement in the ostensibly regional war in Vietnam.

Focusing on Ukraine with those conflicting lessons in mind, is it a non-vital regional conflict as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently described it, or is it a do-or-die existential threat as most of our senior policy makers describe it? While I side, at the moment, with that struggle as existential to us, I view the likely armed struggle over Taiwan as even more vital for us, with Ukraine more vital to our NATO allies. What’s really in our vital interest is getting Germany and France to take the lead in helping Ukraine; as we are trying to do with even less opportunity for success with Australia, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines regarding the deterring of Chinese aggression towards Taiwan.

However, potentially lurking in both areas of conflict is another perhaps even more vivid Acme Co. example. Let’s remember the famous address by President Dwight Eisenhower as he was about to leave office in 1959. He knew about what he was speaking, as he was the general who led the World War II effort for the Allies:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should never take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty can prosper together."

I suspect he was biting his lip when he sat there about a year later and heard his successor, President John F. Kennedy, acclaim in his inaugural address that we would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

I was in the TV audience at that moment cheering Kennedy. Perhaps the coyote was sitting next to me.

Contact Larry Little at larrylittle46@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: More lessons from The Roadrunner