A brilliant, thoughtful piece. I, too, am sickened at this attitude that
trying and failing is always better than not trying at all. That line of
reasoning can be used to justify anything and dismiss the negative
consequences. "A man has got to know his limitations" was a catch phrase of
the actor Clint Eastwood. Trying, failing and receiving praise is in the
province of children or a feminized society. Real men try until they
succeed. Failure is failure and the failure is even greater when they don't
try again.

Success rarely comes from luck, it comes from planning, knowledge, creating
contingencies and fortitude. "At least he tried" is the consolation prize
for girly men.

General Patton once said:

"When you were kids you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest
runner, big league ball player, the toughest boxer. Americans love a winner
and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I
wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why
Americans have never lost and will never lose a war, because the very
thought of losing is hateful to Americans. "

Do we admire the sailor who scuttles his own ship? No, we make a comedy show
out of it, something along the lines of Gilligan's Island. But even
Gilligan's Island is true to natural law. It is not the blundering idiot
Gilligan who elevates the lives of the shipwrecked, no, it is a learned
man - the Professor, a man who tries until he succeeds.

If trying is good enough then we should all pay tribute to the doctor who
removes only 1/2 of the cancerous growth, to the cops who almost caught the
serial murderer, to the teacher whose students may learn to read in the next
grade, to the airplane pilot who got a wheel onto the runway, to the
politician who will negotiate peace with barbarians (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_TD3mgGJoY ).

There is a mountain of corpses as a result of those who tried and failed.
What tribute do we pay them?





"Wilbur Hubbard" wrote in message
anews.com...
Bruce in Bangkok tried to justify his failure at circumnavigating by
writing the following load of self-serving crap:

"As I once told you, "I'm half way round the world and you are sittingin a
Florida swamp", so who's the sailor. Peter is half way round the world,
and you are still sitting in the swamp, so who's the sailor.

"You can talk all you want but until you actually do sail your comments
have about the same value as a dog baying at the moon.

"But you were talking about "Real Sailors", right? How about you tell us
why a Real Sailor is afraid to use his real name or real address. It
sounds to me as though you are afraid of the whole world, Wilbur Hubard,
he of the tiny testicles......"

Gratuitous insults to deflect the most valid assertion that Bruce is a
failure.

Look at it this way. NASA says they are going to land a man on Mars by
2015. 2015 rolls around and they haven't managed to land a man on Mars. So
they come out with a press release that states: "NASA succeeds in it's
mission! NASA is happy to announce that we have landed a man on the Moon.
Never mind that our original goal was to land a man on Mars. We consider
that we are a total success because we at least got about halfway to Mars.
So we're stuck on the Moon, that's better than France has done. They
haven't even got to the Moon. Yes, we at NASA are proud of our
accomplishments and anybody who says we failed is just plain wrong."

Ridiculous? You bet. Yet this is the very same rationale that Bruce in
Bangkok uses. He started out attempting a circumnavigation but failed and
ended up only doing a semi-circumnavigation. But he thinks his failed
effort should be applauded because it went further than somebody else's
who never even aspired to go 'round again. (three times is enough)

After the failure and after the fact, Bruce attempts to justify the
failure by couching it in terms of success. But halfway to a goal is not
success. We all know that. It is failure any way you look at it.

The hapless skipper of the scuttled motor sailer, "Red Cloud" is another
example of this bankrupt thinking and finger pointing in a failed attempt
to minimize his own failure to reach his stated goal. He claims at least
he started towards his goal. This is pathetic and illogical reasoning
inspired by the inability to admit failure.

It is better to plan a trip down to the local grocery store in your SUV
and succeed in your shopping excursion than to plan a circumnavigation or
a coffee run and fail utterly at it, or fail half way at it. In the same
manner, even that fool Bobsprit who used to brag about his little day
sails on Long Island Sound is a more accomplished sailor because at least
he finished what he started out to do. The same cannot be said about Bruce
stuck at the Bangkok dock and the "Red Cloud" coon ass.

I have spoken.

Wilbur Hubbard