According to news reports, Congress will ask the Justice Department to investigate whether Roger Clemens committed perjury when he testified before Congress a few days ago.  For those of you who may have missed my post on some basic human resources and employment law suggestions for people in Clemens’ situation to avoid this fate, click here.

When I wrote the post titled “Rocket Man,” I used lyrics from Elton John’s Rocket Man.  This time, I’m inclined to go with the appropriately crazier lyrics from Def Leppard’s Rocket:

“White lights, strange city, mad music all around, Midnight street magic (ah) crazy people crazy sound, Jack Flash, rocket man, Sergeant Pepper and the band, Ziggy, Benny and the Jets, take a rocket, We just gotta fly, Jet Black, Johnny B, Gene Jeanie, Killer Queen, Dizzy Lizzy Major Tom so c’mon, Countdown commencing, Five, four, three, two, one, zero . . . we have liftoff.”

We’d rather turn our eyes to DiMaggio’s steadfast grace than the Rocket’s sad liftoff, because we’d like to see baseball’s glory days rather than the sport’s modern days of disgrace.  But just as Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away, so have the glory days.

Before I get too carried away, however, I should remember that Mrs. Robinson is a song from  The Graduate, a movie in 1967 about a dysfunctional group of people who also longed for the glory days of Joe DiMaggio 35 years after his baseball career had ended and 21 years before Clemens’ testimony.  I should also remember the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and the disgrace of the separate Negro Leagues that lasted for over 60 years, coinciding with part of the glory days.

Then there are the glory days of the workplace–when employees worked for the same employer for an entire career, when employees and employers were loyal to each other, and when the stability of the long view trumped the quick money of the short view.  Gen Xers and Millennials have a hard time seeing any glory in those days.  And part of those glory days coincided with no child labor laws, no minimum wage and overtime, and no equal employment opportunity.

So, what are we to conclude?  The more things change, the more they stay the same?  People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?  What goes around comes around?  Sure, all of those things.

And maybe, in order to deal with these hackneyed, yet trustworthy, conclusions, we fall back on the reliable humor of Mark Twain:  “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”