When they're down

The only way to get noticed is to mess up.

I first noticed this at church with organ music.

Organ music is just there, like light fixtures and carpeting, until something goes wrong. Hit a sour note and everybody looks up to see who's playing. Even if you've played 239,647 notes right, the one's that's wrong gets the attention.

This, I would tell a friend organist commiserating over a goof, is why it's OK to mess up on the organ now and then: To get noticed.

But there's messing up and there's messing up. There's accidentally messing up and there's stupidly messing up and there's intentionally messing up.

And the news has been full of all manner of messing up lately.

Take the local quarterback, whose post-game tirade has sucked all the glory out of hard-won victory. It was stupidly messing up and it's what people are talking about and remembering more than his game-winning touchdown.

Take the party-going interlopers who thought it would be a lark to crash a White House dinner. Their intentional mess-up is probably not bringing in the kind of attention they'd sought.

Take Tiger Woods, who messed up in all three ways, and do with him what you will. I can't look anymore.

The rhetoric is tiring. The ugliness depressing.

It's a kick-em-when-they're-down culture we've become.

If everybody could just all go through life and not mess up....

But since we can't apparently, maybe we should just let people fix their own messes without our nosy interventions and maybe we should just admit that sometimes we mess up too and maybe we should try and remember where possible, those other 239,647 notes.

I hear the White House dinner really was quite nice.