rant · moment 16 of 17
Quitting Honor at 80: The Bile Metaphor
from The War At Home | The Tim Dillon Show #367 · #367
5 min
Tim compares suddenly discovering honor at the end of a life (or empire) to quitting smoking at 80 — the bile it forces up might kill you — before returning to advising people to just repeat empty phrases like 'cooler heads prevail.'
- Tim explains why doctors tell people in their 70s and 80s not to quit smoking — the bile your body coughs up after years of smoking will kill you if you suddenly stop.
- Discovering honor late in life is dangerous because it forces you to cough up bile and poison that might actually kill you, so approach it carefully.
- How to respond to crisis: sign a letter, have coffee, nod at someone, express sadness, and hope cooler heads prevail — that's the extent of your actual job.
- Tell your kids everything's fine and don't run around trying to start some sectarian revolution — that's not your role.
- Your actual assignment is to come up with five to ten phrases you repeat constantly while drinking flavored coffee like hazelnut or Italian holiday cookie creamer.
- Nobody's going to show up at your door asking you to make the great sacrifice because the American experiment was never engineered around selflessness.
- When something "hits close to home" — like a friend's mother knowing someone over there — you repeat that phrase and move on.
- Don't panic about terrorism; statistically you probably won't die from it. Your government has engineered plenty of booby traps at home instead, like Home Alone.
- Tim doubts that people he knows will get killed by foreign terrorists, though he acknowledges it's technically possible.