Life & Wisdom Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash takes the mundane act of “getting the news” and turns it into a moral allergy. The line isn’t anti-information so much as anti-justice: what repels him is the recurring spectacle of reward landing on the undeserving. That “never been an era” hyperbole is doing double duty. It’s funny because it’s inflated; it’s bleak because it feels plausible in any decade you name. Nash’s comic gift is to smuggle indictment inside a shrug.

The phrase “going so right” is pointedly bland, the language of happy accidents and smooth systems. He pairs it with “wrong persons,” a deliberately vague category that forces the reader to supply their own villains: corrupt politicians, war profiteers, oily celebrities, mediocre bosses. That openness is strategic. It widens the target without pinning the joke to a single headline that would date it. Nash is writing in a 20th-century America buffeted by depression, war, propaganda, and the rise of mass media; “the news” is the daily conveyor belt turning catastrophe into routine and success into a kind of PR.

The subtext is a critique of modern attention itself. News promises reality, but what it often delivers is a scoreboard, and Nash can’t stand the winners. His refusal to “get” the news reads like self-protection, yet it’s also a quiet accusation: if the world keeps congratulating the wrong people, maybe the problem isn’t just them. It’s the system that keeps mistaking luck, cruelty, and publicity for merit.