My Dad's Desk Monkeys

The totem that's become my tonic in the era of Epstein Awful

My father had only one memorable desk ornament during his entire 42-year corporate life. It was a weird, Tiki-style chunk of wood crudely hand carved into figures representing the three wise monkeys from Japanese culture, Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru. Westerners recognize them as representing three ideals of personal conduct — See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil.

I have no clue about its history, or why Dad chose it to communicate his general approach to life. I suspect he knew nothing about its Japanese origins. Those are questions I’ll forever wish I’d asked while he was still alive.

But I do know he tried his best to live those ideals. He grew up as a deep-South Methodist, in a home where drinking and dancing were discouraged, and profanity was unthinkable. He was kind to all animals and most people, and raised to be unerringly polite. He was the guy who always offered his bus seat to others, and pointed out undercharges on restaurant bills.

Along with my mother, he also taught me to pepper my conversations with “Please” and “Thank you,” and to throw in “ma’am” or “sir” to telegraph respect, which I sometimes do, absurdly, even as a seventy year old. I still recall with searing clarity the first time I heard my father swear. It was a chaste “Aw, hell” muttered in frustration, but to me it was the sound of God himself stepping on a Lego.

Common decency was simply embedded in his DNA. That’s not to say Dad was perfect. He could be short-tempered and narrow-minded, and he was an unapologetic social conformist who encouraged social conformity in his children. But for the most part Dad walked the walk of those three wise monkeys right up until the day he died.

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Dad’s decency, civility, and morality seem impossibly quaint these days. The vulgarians have triumphed. It’s as if the three wise monkeys were frog-marched off to Alligator Alcatraz, then replaced by their naked ids, or maybe Jeffrey Epstein and two of his besties from the contemptible men in his orbit. (Just pick your favorites.)

“We’re in the midst of a veritable Renaissance of Vulgarity,” wrote my late friend Patrick J. Kiger, in a cover story in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, where at the time I was a senior editor. (Atop a story I headlined: “Snorkeling in the Cesspool.”) “The culture is becoming ruder and cruder at an astonishing, almost exponential, rate. Some find this alarming — ‘the coarsening of our culture’ has become a mantra for politicians, to the tune of nearly 400 citations in the Nexis electronic news database in the past two years.”

Here’s the really bad news: Pat wrote that twenty-five years ago, in August 2000. Since then the vulgarians have moved from the fringe to front and center, and those pious political leaders whining about the coarsening of our culture have become the loudest sludge-spewers of them all.

Look, I’m no prude. I enjoy the occasional televised F-bomb or cable-channel titillators such as “Cheaters” or “Dating Naked.” But what’s really dragging us down are the amoral, epithet-spewing hate peddlers who have loudly elbowed their way into everyone’s consciousness during the past decade. Along with their rage-baiting media co-conspirators, they’ve led the weakest-minded among us into an ever-deepening cesspool.

Entire television networks and pretend “news” organizations now are built around seeing, hearing, and speaking evil, rather than exposing it. Facts no longer matter. Lying is reflexive. The worst of them use AI and conspiracy theories to distort inconvenient realities into vicious propaganda. Demonstrably terrible human beings are spotlighted, celebrated, elevated. Those not elected to public office often get their own shows or podcasts, where complicit advertisers support their inane, often fact-free rants because their audience numbers are good. Algorithms amplify it all.

Where’s the bottom? I thought political assassinations, public executions, and kidnappings might be close, but the search apparently continues. And the volcanic sewage erupting at the top clearly flows downhill, seeping into the lives of otherwise reasonable people. As evidence, I’ll cite a recent post by a church-going mother of three who recommended some hot headgear to her friends in Facebook’s recreational watercraft community. The slogan on the hat read: “If you’ve got the boat, I’ve got the throat.”

It all underscores the prescient conclusion of Kiger’s story a quarter-century ago, which ended with him interviewing Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt among the sex toys and rubbery bric-a-brac of his Hustler Hollywood porn-kink emporium.

“Compared to the world he helped pioneer, Larry Flynt no longer really qualifies as vulgar,” Kiger wrote. “It’s as sure a sign as any that we’ve gone careening right off the edge of the table.” He quoted Erik Nelson, creator of such trashy reality TV classics as “World’s Most Dangerous Animals I & II” and “Busted on the Job,” who slightly rephrased the poet T.S. Eliot: “Until you go too far, you don’t know how far you can go.”

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How did we get this far? I’ll leave that to the sociologists. But we’re here, and it makes me cherish my father’s desk monkeys all the more.

I realize I sound like a prissy old nun, shaking my gnarled finger at the dismal state of the world. (And yes, I grasp the irony of posting this on a Substack called “The Shitshow Observed.” I’m not perfect either.) But we’re chin deep in bile these days, so I’ll speak while I still can.

Not too long ago, someone gave me another little totem featuring the three monkeys.

It’s not nearly as cool as Dad’s, which I store behind glass among other favorite keepsakes. I placed the new one on my desk to remind me of him, and to reassure myself that the vast majority of the people I know still lead decent and civil lives.

The rest will no doubt keep snorkeling. I’m just not sure they’ll ever find the bottom.

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Journalist Martin J. Smith is the author of five novels and five nonfiction books. Open Road Media will publish his sixth novel, “27 Knots,” in Fall 2026.