On Human Frailty
THE BEST OF FRAILTY
The biblical basis for Abercrombie & Fitch’s disinterest in clothing the naked.
The Truth of Life: Original Recipe
The bravery of chicken.
I want a nanny state that does windows!
13 Ways of Looking at Goldilocks or The Uses of Disenchantment
A simple story? Not if you are pushing for tenure.
All OF FRAILTY
July 2009
Gibbon Take
Frailty Mail BagJune 2009
Some Johnny Come Lately
A Wax Man Gonna Bust a Cap on Your GasMay 2009
The Emperor of New Clothes
Statue of LimitationsApril 2009
The Truth of Life: Original Recipe
A Lenten Fast is No Diet of WormsMarch 2009
All Saints’ Day!
You Might Be A Liberal if…February 2009
A Government Clean-Up
What Right Do You Have?January 2008
A Scandal and An Addiction: Gate-aholics UbiquitousDecember 2008
Placing Blame is Everyone’s Responsibility
Happy “Holiday”?November 2008
OHF gives thanks for ThanksgivingOctober 2008
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People: Part II
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People: Part ISeptember 2008
Reflections on Reflection: A Reflection
Going to School on The Silly BusAugust 2008
What’s Your Problem?
Midsummer Night’s IntermezzoJuly 2008
Think Ignorance Is Expensive? Try Education
13 Ways of Looking at Goldilocks or The Uses of DisenchantmentJune 2008
Father Knows
Jerkus Maximus: Emperor Erroneous AugustusMay 2008
The Most Industrious Industrialist: J.W.P Cobb
Wit and Wisdom of Jean-Paul Imbecile
Since summer is now upon us, I thought I might suggest some “beach reading” for y’all. (And yes, I do mean y’all of you.) Last summer I took it upon myself to finally read all of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To anyone familiar with the sheer volume of those volumes it should be no surprise that this summer I have the exact same goal. Not only would Decline and Fall be the one “book” that I would take to a desert island, it is the one book that would probably require such seclusion to finish.
Now I suspect that some of my more devout (and perhaps, devoted) readers might be surprised that I didn’t choose the Bible as my one “desert island book.” Now, I do not believe that tropical isolation make Scripture irrelevant by removing the possibility of further sin – after all, in the history of sin, a sparsely populated paradise was the location of “the Big One.” Being stuck in a faux-Eden, not only would I still be subject to Original Sin, but I would probably have the time to apply myself, and finally come up with and commit a truly original sin. To wit, that’s no lobster, that’s my wife, and/or the world is not my oyster, but that oyster is my world. That one, over there. The cute one. Her name is “Pearl.” It is an inter-phylum love story for the ages. And so on…
Putting seafood and my sinful nature to the side, my problem with the Bible is that it was not written in English. I think that William Tyndale is the perhaps most under-celebrated writers in the English language, but none of these translations is perfect. Even the most devout spend a lot of time checking the original Greek and Hebrew “videotape” as it were. Since I am just as pedantic alone as I am in company, I am sure that if I were left alone with only a single English translation of the Bible that I would eventually end up wanting nothing more than a lexicon and an original text in order to prove that there is an undeniable Old Testament prohibition against the use of Twitter. (But is it supplanted by the New Testament “Blessed are the tweet-makers?)
Almost the opposite of a translation, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is not only written in English, it is virtually a book about English. There are some authors that teach the reader a language through the self-same language, and in English Edward Gibbon is most of them. What do I mean by that? Gibbon will explain for me. Writing in 1776 England, he describes beer as:
a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, [that] was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery.
Seriously, how can you not love this guy?
Soon after his above description of beer, Gibbon continues his discussion of the Northern Barbarians thusly:
the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
With a prose-stylist like Gibbon around, almost any morally questionable behavior can, at least, sound “salutary” (a favorite Gibbon-word meaning, basically, “good”). I am not sure if at this stage in the decline and fall of the American Empire indolence needs an apologist, but if it is going to have one I personally want him to sound like ole’ Ed Gibbon. Let us all defend our questionable life choices thusly:
That year I spent living rent-free on various people’s couches, I wasn’t being slothful. Rather, I was freeing myself from the strongest fetters of despotism. (And drinking a fair amount of a corrupted semblance of wine.)
Since I am willing to pay almost any interpersonal cost for beating every drop of amusement out of a joke that only I find funny, I decided to use Gibbonesque verbiage in my own life. Why just yesterday at breakfast I commented:
A chalice of bovine lactation would prove a most salutary accompaniment to this cereal confection bearing the appellation of that most exalted practitioner of maritime rapine.
Translation: I would love some milk on my Cap’n Crunch.
Needless to say, I had to fetch my own two-percent.
Since a joke is never truly played out until it has been used to alienate a woman one only wished to endear, I decided to integrate Gibbonese locutions into my communications with the fairer sex. Here for the almost certain bewilderment of the community is play-by-play of how I (actually) explained to a young lady that, contrary to her belief at the time, I had not just used her as the butt of a joke.
I began simply enough:
In your misunderstanding of my comment you attribute to me a puerile genius that I am innocent of.
(Translation: I didn’t do it.)
This gal had made it clear to me previously that she didn’t like the particular brand of humor she was accusing me of perpetrating. So with the most complicated language I could devise, I clarified the situation:
This issue arose before, and I did, with equal parts charity, trepidation, and shame, lay down those well-worn and time-sharpened tools I had used to employ in such trickery.
(Translation: You told me to quit it out and I quit it out. I wouldn’t lie to you…well, not about that, anyway.)
Since Gibbon was an historian, I thought it proper to add an historical perspective to my apology:
It is an interesting footnote of historical fact that while I am disposed to be indulgent to feminine delicacy, I was domesticated in a virile rustication.
(Translation: I try to tone it down with dames, but I was raised by wolves. Male wolves. In the sticks.)
Just as my role-model for all things verbally obscure often moves from the specific into the general, I decided to provide a larger context:
It is well established that those in fraternity test the assumption of mutual benevolence by the provocation of trifling but intentional injuries that are equal in apparent obnoxiousness and obscured, if palpable, affection.
(Translation: Guys rip on each other. If you can’t push each other around, you can’t be friends.)
And since there is always room for a totally fabricated quotation, I concluded with:
To quote a famous man of arms “if you had loved me, sir, you would have parried with the hope that I possessed the strength to defend myself and if not, with the assumption that you yourself possessed the mercy to yield.”
(Translation: If you treat a guy like a chick, you’re saying that that dude’s a chick, and that is not cool ‘cuz a dude’s a dude and not a chick. Like chicks are soft and smell good and stuff, but a dude, or at least a guy, is supposedda be able to hang, and, usually, ain’t so salutary on the olfactory front.)
As we can see from my example, a little learning maybe a dangerous thing, but too much learning is completely and utterly annoying.
Well, I hope I both piqued your interest in reading Gibbon’s awe inspiring masterpiece and brought you a little closer to your dictionary.
Until next time, I will be dumbing it down a just notch.
Emily Dickinson supposedly said “My friends are my estate.” She was kinda cool like that. The way she said stuff that was cool. But what does it mean? The world may never know. Unless… Unless we figure out what this odd little lady might have meant by the word “estate.”
“Estate” can certainly mean wealth, and that is a nice sentiment. When we think of the word meaning a vast country home with stables and gardens and lakes, that is pretty nice too. “I live in a hovel but when Steven and Betty come around it is like having a koi pond. Bill is a bit of a drunk, but to me he is a gazebo.” I think we can all relate to that.
I, however, am most pleased to think that the Belle of Amherst was using the word in the way it is meant in phrase “trusts and estates.” I like the idea that when asked what I am bequeathing to the world, I can point to a few people and say “them.” The only thing of value I can leave to the world is the hearts, minds and souls of the people that I have loved.
But wait, can one really make account of a life solely based an appraisal of the people that we, by definition, wanted to like us?
Potentially spurious Dickinson quotes aside, let’s be honest, anyone can make a friend. Children make them all the time. It is pretty easy to do: smile, share your snack, refrain from overt acts of bodily harm and you have someone to play blocks with. Invoking murderous hatred in another human being for the right reasons is slightly more difficult.
The key here being “the right reasons.” In a simpler time this might have been phrased as “to be hatred for your virtue is no vice, and to be loved for your vice is no virtue.”
So it is with a sense of shame that I must report that I have received so little hate mail in the last year. I am clearly doing something wrong.
Rather than attempt to rectify the paltry hatred I have managed to stir up, here for the mild amusement of the community I present a few responses to letters that I may or may not have received over the past year.
Dear Kenan,
Last week in order to settle a protracted legal dispute I was ordered by a federal judge to look at your photography. Now that I know what you look like, I am even more confused by you. Most men I know who are so stunningly attractive you can barely read, and yet you seem to have attained functional literacy. I respect you for not yielding to the temptation to advance in life based solely on the awesome transcendent power of your physical beauty. If we were to meet and were to reject my romantic advances I would see no reasonable course of action than to immediately to set myself on fire. Those poor Arizona State co-eds.
Sincerely
S. Johansson, Hollywood , CA
Dear Miss Johansson,
While most of your letter is the product of cool reason and strong grasp of objective reality, you made one mistake: I am not nor have ever been an employee of Arizona State University . That was a joke. Or to be more precise my title was a joke. My bio used say that I was the “Marshal Petain Scholar of Historical Inaccuracy” at ASU. In order to get the joke you have to know who Marshal Petain was. That is the high brow part of the joke. The low-brow part of the joke is the idea that Arizona State University is not a very good university. Although at this point how you tell a good University from a bad one is anyone’s guess.
Dear Mr. Frailty,
You use big words. Me no like. Stop.
P. Krugman
New York , NY
Dear Mr. Krugman,
On the matter of my word choices, you are not the first person to comment that my abstruse locutions evidence an inchoate pusillanimity and an obstreperous ostentation. How often I am told that my writing is replete with jejune oxymoronic counterpoint that is no more salutary to the reader than any other highfalutin obfuscation of rhetorical intent. Well, I think it is obvious to pretty much everyone how true that is.
Mr. Minkoff,
We noticed a sharp spike in your energy usage last month. Have you recently installed a ferris wheel? If so you may qualify for “Amusement Park” energy rates.
Much Love,
The Electric Company
Dear Miss Company,
I did install a ferris wheel. I, however, do not want to feed at trough of the special tax-payer funded utility rates that you reserve for the fat-cat amusement park types. I try to create a safe, nurturing environment where people can ride a ferris wheel without the crash commercialism that so many of our family fun parks have fallen victim of.
Energetically Yours,
Kenan Minkoff
Dear Mr. Minkoff,
I noticed that you have used the honorific “Miss” in two of your last three responses. I find that most people are very uncomfortable with the use of that charming little word. As a young unmarried woman who is happy and attractive, I don’t like being called “Ms.” What can we do to save this beloved honorific?
Sincerely,
Miss Sally Appropriate
Dear Miss Appropriate,
I am so glad you wrote me about this matter. I am a huge fan of the honorific in question. My sense of the problem is that there is no equivalent term for an unmarried man. I, of course, I have solved this problem. I offer to our culture the honorific “Msr.” It is like “Miss,” but is reserved for then unmarried of the indelicate sex. It is pronounced “Miss-ister,” and should be considered a mark of shame. Feel free to propagate the usage of my novel honorific, and once you have altered your own by the customary rites, I hope you will again feel free to propagate.
Singly Yours,
Msr. Minkoff
And finally, this week…
Msr. Minkoff,
I notice you made a reference to the electric company without throwing in a comment about the devistatating economic impact of Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade. Have you given up the struggle against the destructive power of big government and junk science? Are you ready to join us? All you have to do is admit that 2 plus 2 equals 5.
I await your reply,
N. Pelosi aka Ms. Appropriation
Sent via US Airforce airborne telex
To this missive I have no reply. I know basic math, and so will every recipient of a utilities bill after Waxman-Markey become law. For those of you less numerically inclined, the formula to figure out what your electricity bill will be after Cap and Trade simply multiply your current monthly bill by 2.
Until next time, I will be conserving energy.
If the history of our age is ever written, it will be noted that the greatest fault of the year 2009 is that its numerical awkwardness will never sufficiently communicate its undeniable demarcation of epical transition. A year such as this would best have been an even-numbered, or divisible by five. It might, with only the slightest hubris, demand that time itself reset, and we begin our calendars a new.
Few times in the memory of our civilization have the reins of supreme power been passed between two so different personages with such clear presages of irrevocable effect. We had been numbed by the exalted presence of a man of average wit who failed both to be worthy of his supporters’ adulation or his detractors’ wrath. But the aura of inevitability that reflected off his polished manner and luminous sense of entitlement has been dimmed by the ascendance of his untutored and radical replacement.
Now we can only wait to be shocked awake by he whose only proof of merit is the rapturous excitement of an overly-expectant few that will in time devolve, inevitably, into the disappointment of the many. We have been left in the hands of a man whose precocious gifts and exceptional fortune have lifted him far above the station in which he might rightly excel into the eminence of an office he will in time irrevocably diminish.
But such peaceful transition of power is part of American culture, and the finiteness of the lofty tenure engenders in the People the love that can only be bestowed on that which we know will leave us. And so, like the others who has occupied the most exalted seat, Jay Leno stepped down from the Tonight Show and handed over the mantle of power to the puerile Conan O’Brian.
Don’t let my partisan rhetoric fool you, I was no Leno accolade. In order to assume the imperial television throne he wisely neutered himself. The vicious brilliance that raised him into the highest ranks of the comedy world he gladly cast aside in order to be a ruler that could comfort such a large dominion. From a young rebel who shocked people into laugher he became a man whose almost unparalleled fortune was won by dependably putting people to sleep.
It is in these most historic moments that we much teach the newer generations about the past. The young of today will grow old bereft the knowledge of Johnny Carson just as my generation grew to adulthood conscious of Leno’s failings without the clear the understanding of Steve Allen and Jack Paar that could have put Leno’s limitations in context.
So at this turning point of history let us look back at one of Carson’s most beloved bits,
Carnac The Magnificent. For those of too young to have seen or now too old to remember Carnac was a great mystic who could divine the answers to yet unrevealed questions. He would merely hold a sealed envelope up to his oversized turban and speak the answer to the yet unknown query held within. He then would open the envelope and discover the question he had just correctly answered. To ensure the integrity of Carnac’s powers we were assured that these envelopes themselves had been sealed and kept in a mayonnaise jar on the Funk and Wagnall’s’ porch since noon of that day.
Without going too far into pedantic comic explanation, here are two authentic Carnac jokes from Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show with the trusty sidekick Ed, as always, playing along:
Carnac: Sis boom bah
Ed: Sis boom bah
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes.Carnac: Mine Sweepers
Ed: Mine Sweepers
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: Name the book Hitler wrote about his cleaning ladies.
As you can see from the second example the bit gains a homophonic advantage by being spoken – for if one were to transcribe Carnac’s answer in the second example as “Mein Sweepers” part of the joke is already exposed. With little care for the limits of the printed medium and here for the mild amusement of the community I present a few modern additions to the “Carnac” joke tradition presented in transcript form.
(Carnac raises a sealed envelope to his forehead)
Carnac: (divining) Salad Days
Ed: Salad Days. When I was green in judgment.
Carnac: Just do the bit, Ed.
Ed: Yesss! Salad Days
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: What do single gals call the six weeks before bikini season.
Ed: They don’t want to be fat! Oh no!Carnac: Naval Battles
Ed: Naval Battles
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: Name the perpetual source of mother-daughter conflict when buying fashionable t-shirts.
Ed: They like to show their tummies. Yessss!Carnac: Naval Treaty
Ed: Naval Treaty.
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: What do you young men call the sight of the victorious daughters of Naval battles.
Ed: That is what they usually say, Yess!
Carnac: It is a privilege, not a right.
Ed: The belly shirt, you are correct, not a right! No sir.Carnac: A U.N. Treaty
Ed: United Nations Treaty
Carnac: Just “U.N.”
Ed: U.N.
Carnac: Treaty
Ed: U.N. Treaty
Carnac: U.N. Treaty
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: What do the Peacekeepers offer the little children before violating their human rights.
(audience groans with discomfort)
Carnac: (to audience) may all your daughters be renamed Boutros!Carnac: Air Purifier
Ed: Air Purifier
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: What does Paris Hilton’s dad call The Betty Ford Center.
Ed: Yes… She is a repugnant little girl.Carnac: We’ll Always have Paris
Ed: We’ll Always have Paris
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: What is the mantra of every slow news day at Access HollywoodCarnac: Heir Apparent
Ed: Heir Apparent
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: What makes a beach bunny go get a touch up waxing!
Ed: ohhh, ohhh, ohhh!Carnac: True Love Waits
Ed: True love waits
Carnac: it certainly does
Ed: Yessss!
Carnac: True love waits.
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: In 2008, what was the number one selling “adult” exercise product.Carnac: The Peace Corps
Ed: The Peace Corps
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: What do you call the remains of an overly committed pacifist hunger-striker.
Ed: The joke is dependant on the spelling of the words. We could not have made this joke on television! Oh no!Carnac: The Conservation of Mass
Ed: The Conservation…of Mass
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: Name one of the proximal causes of the Thirty Years
Ed: Holy Romin’ Emperor!
Carnac: Ed. Seriously. Ed.
Ed: I know.
And finally…
Carnac: In Order to form a more perfect Union
Ed: In Order to form a more perfect Union
(Carnac opens envelope and reads)
Carnac: Why did Obama take over General Motors.
Until next time I will be pondering my own salad days, and perhaps reviewing some naval treaties.
A Wax Man Gonna Bust a Cap on Your Gas
In a sane Republic (let me know if you find one) the Waxman-Markey “Carbon” Cap and Trade legislation would be horrible idea, but these days any new federal legislation that’s only going to cost me a mere $1500 extra per year is a bargain. Let them pass this poison pill for civilization before they come up with something even more expensive. (I guess that is why Congress calls ‘em “Bills”). Cap and trade simply is this week’s scheme to allow all Americans to eventually aspire to being middle class.
But what do we “get” for that extra $1500 a year? The exact same energy we are getting now. A citizen disposed to noticing the obvious might say that we will be paying over twice as much for exactly the same energy. This person is not wrong, but they are ignoring an immutable truth of government. When the government increases the amount of money they take from us and does not recompenses us with even less than before, then, by government logic (and practice), we are getting more than we paid for. Government is a machine that take the labor-of-the-productive and transforms it into the indolence-of-the-useless and vice-versa.
But all this reality is making me sad. So let’s get away from reality for a while and talk “Environmentalism” (‘cause you can’t spell environmentalist with out “mental”).
Now for those of you who are already determined and vocal advocates of Cap and Trade I will explain how it works. It is a simple two-step process: Cap and Trade.
Step One, Cap: Pass a law arbitrarily limiting something that cannot be eliminated (e.g. scientific ignorance, or, let’s say, “carbon”). This limit is the “cap”. In the case of the bill put forward by the-curiously-ugly-even-for-a-politician Waxman what is capped is CO2 emissions. CO2 is a by-product of human breathing and many other venial practices that separates us from the animals. (If only we could have separated Waxman’s father from the animals maybe humans could gaze directly at his “face” without fear of turning to stone – if they are lucky their eyes would go first. Seriously, dude’s face needs a bailout. It should be controlled by the FDA as an ugly delivery mechanism. And so on…)
Step Two, Trade: Once you make a law setting a “cap” you then create a system where entities can “trade” their shortfall from the capped limit to an entity that has exceeded its “cap” in the process of doing something reprehensible (like keeping an American city from plunging into total darkness.) Then the industrious guys working overtime will have to “trade” “credits” with the half-arsed company in order to be allowed to keep the nations lights on. (Like most things with the government by doing less you are given “credit.”) But what is being “traded”? What are the productive “trading” with the underachievers in this “trade” system of “trade”? Money. The entity producing something will have to “trade” money in order to buy the “credits” that other company hasn’t used. They are trading money for, well, nothing. I thought that mankind had evolved past a barter economy, but apparently this whole time we have been “trading” money for goods and services. Sweet. Next year I am paying my taxes in chickens.
Step Three: Like all government two-step processes Cap and Trade’s most important feature is its third step. If a company can’t find any one to “trade” their “credits” you can “trade” money “to” the government regulatory agencies “for” these “credits” which “are” “traded”. So the government is passing a law whereby a productive entity has to pay the government money in order to be productive. Isn’t that kind of “protection” money usually called a “tax”? This is why it is partisan to use the term “Cap and Tax” for Waxman’s baby (imagine what that thing looks like – I am laying a c-note that that little bundle of ugly would have gills.) Also it is partisan to notice that in this bi-partisan bill which is part of the bi-partisan spirit of Washington sponsored by two bi-partisan Democrats.
At this point anyone with a clue might say “well why not invest in a factory that would do nothing but receive and trade credits?” After all you don’t produce much carbon by-product if you don’t produce any product product. My guess is that there are no such useless factories available for purchase. They are most likely all wholly-owned by The Gore-Waxman “Save the Earth” Foundation. Anyway, it’s not like you can build a factory without exhaustive government approvals, and they are adding new limits to new factory building everyday. Don’t you wish you could make the rules like this?
I think it is also clear why cap and trade is considered a “free-market” solution. See the government is “freeing” corporations to pay the government trillions of dollars. This will “free” people who are dependent on the corporation’s products from having money to spend in the “market.” It will also “free” all American employers to set their employees “free” into the job “market”. Corporation can then “free” themselves from the United States “market” and move to the “market” of a different country. Of course, they will continue to sell to the US which is how we get our trade imbalance which requires the government to collect tariffs… and so on…
But as always the government isn’t going far enough. So here for the betterment of the community I present several other random things that should be “capped” so they can be “traded.”
Cap’n Trade-
What is “Capped”: Sugar consumption of school-children.Named for the great maritime hero, non-Somali Pirate, and American Dental Association benefactor Cap’n Crunch. This legislation would be co-administered with the Teachers unions. Children who eat less than their capped amount of sugar on school days could trade “sugar” offsets with their less healthy peers.
If there are no available credits to be traded within any given playground, homeroom, or underground “snack-house,” children can buy “sugar offsets” from the government. The money raised by these offsets would be used to subsidize Ritalin purchases by the school districts. These Ritalin subsidies are needed because of the onerous taxes placed on the pharmaceutical companies in order to limit their production of anti-hyperactivity drugs.
Remember that children are the future. That is why they don’t need to know anything about history.
Slap and Trade
What is “Capped”: minor, necessary and often hilarious acts of physical violence.Every now and then a woman becomes hysterical or a fellow become “fresh” and a light slap to the face can be the best way of restoring order and/or making me laugh. It is clearly in the public interest for people to occasionally be “slapped silly” since pervasive silliness is essential to domestic tranquility under the current administration. It is not in the public interest, however, for people to become “slap-happy” since happiness can lead to people realizing that the sky isn’t falling and that tyranny and serfdom suck.
Less violent people could trade there slap credits to their more violent and rational peers. The meek will inherit some extra cash, and solvent will be the peacemakers. Everyone benefits. Katie Couric is less likely to appear in public and C-Span 2 will become an all-out brawl!
Cap and Gown
What is “Capped”: wasteful tertiary “educational” spendingSince it is the interest of Western Civilization to have a more educated citizenry we must limit amount of time people spend in college. Hedonistic self-destruction can be enjoyed at much more reasonable prices. People of college-age would be granted a certain number of “college credits” that the productive could sell to their perpetually useless, matriculated peers who have exceeded their college “cap” and therefore are often found sans “gown” in various locales and file formats.
Cap and Traitor
What is “Capped”: the publishing of vital, top-secret, military information by media outlets.Also know as the “Daniel Ellsberg Memorial, New York Times – CIA Reimbursement Act”. [NB: he is not dead.] First off, the CIA deserves some legal kickback for all the New York Times front-page articles they have written. Second, I would love to see the Washington Times celebrating the windfall they would receive from selling “treason credits” to the NYT the next time there is Republican in the White House.
And Finally…
Cap and Lemonade
What is “Capped”: Financial Responsibility and Entrepreneurship among children.As far as this government is concerned children are the future and the model of perfect citizens. Their mindless dependence on an absolute authority for all their needs is a model we should all (and soon will) emulate. But there are some bad apples among our nations children. They want to mow lawns, rake leaves, sell lemonade and engage in simple credit default swap trading so they can “make money” so that they can “have” money. First of all money is not “made” any more: it is “printed” and then it is given to you by someone whose hem you are not worthy to kiss. These evil like industrious children want to feel pride in their accomplishments!
Pride! Pride is a sin! Envy, however, is righteous indignation at un-redistributed wealth. Sloth is engaging in European lifestyle. And lust is guiding force in all our other choices. Right? Right?
Seriously, check out Waxman’s grill. It is so busted.
Until next time, I will be purchasing massive amounts of “slap credits” and a bus ticket to D.C.
A few columns ago some of my less aware readers may have learned something – to whit, Colonel Sanders while not an “actual” colonel did exist. [His military rank was a Kentucky State honor and was not related to his actual military service.] This quality of having actually existed is a distinction he shares with some, but not all of Americas greatest commercial icons.
In the world of business there are a lot of names and personalities, icons and mascots. It can be quite difficult to know who actually existed and who is fictional, and it is utterly impossible to define what appreciable difference it makes.
Everybody loves Betty Crocker because she, like most women, is more or less imaginary. At the same time Duncan Hines is rightly looked at with a good deal of suspicion because he, like far too many men, actually existed. The McDonald Brothers were real even if it was milkshake-mixer salesman Ray Kroc who brought their culinary ingenuity to the world.
Most scholars agree that there never was a reign of a “Burger King” although Dave Thomas did apparently have a daughter named “Wendy”. Did she look like a carrot-top Swiss Miss? No one really knows.
Swiss Miss herself is an interesting case. While there is no assertion that she ever actually existed, this vague archetypical mountain dweller who supplied weary travelers with curiously sub-par hot cocoa does bear a disturbing resemblance to the St. Pauli Girl. Apparently the little miss grew to womanhood, came down from the Chalet and morphed from Alpine sweetheart to a lowland German strumpet. The only upside is that now her guests didn’t seem to mind so much that creating a palatable beverage was never her strong suit. As the old maxim goes, sell the bodice not the beer.
Back here on American soil there are two names in the commercial pantheon that recently stirred my curiosity. For those of you who are lucky enough not to know much about the clothing merchants Abercrombie and Fitch the key piece of information is that A & F seem to sell clothes but don’t seem very interested in their models actually wearing them. They seem to believe that the best way to sell clothes is to photograph people who are not wearing any. I walked passed an A & F store recently and saw a picture of a fine looking young man not wearing a shirt. The photo was cropped at his waist, so if the intent was to sell pants, I am not sure what they looked like. To me this is curious.
Since I attempt to save my curiosity for the great questions, I resolved to uncover the story of the two men who created this odd clothing company. Here for the betterment of the community I present the history of Misters Abercrombie and Fitch and their curious clothing philosophy.
Isaiah Obadiah Malachi Abercrombie was born in 1820 in the Indian Territories that would eventually be known as Greenwich, Connecticut. Even for his day his tripartite Christian name was a little excessive. As he would later tell his shareholders “I was born to be a prophet, not to make a profit.”
After a rather serious bout of brain fever as a teenager Abercrombie laid down some of the theological suppositions that would guide the rest of his life. Abercrombie realized that in story of Adam and Eve God’s only evidence of Man’s first sin was the fact that they acquired shame at their own nakedness. Abercrombie reasoned that if people could overcome this primal shame of being naked they were well on their way to reversing the effect of the Adam’s Sin. “To stand before God wearing only the britches of righteousness is be clothed in the glory of salvation,” became Abercrombie’s theological rallying cry.
When Abercrombie attempted to secure his own salvation in his small town he was on multiple occasions “forcibly manacled in the pants of damnation” by his neighbors. Eventually he was tarred and feather by the townspeople who by all accounts did not wish to hurt Abercrombie, but could think of no other way to insure that their annual church picnic would not be spoiled by him for the third year in a row.
Abercrombie then moved to a small town in Maine where he started to gather followers in a “salvation colony.” In the summer of 1845 he established the nudist town of “New Eden” near Portland, Maine. The next spring the town reestablished itself in Hot Springs, Georgia. Of his experiences in Maine, Abercrombie wrote “The Church misunderstands damnation. Hell is not a place of fire. It is a cold, cold place, and there are lobsters. Don’t get me started on the lobsters.”
Georgia was not accommodating to the young religion. Abercrombie was arrested on charges of “corrupting the young.” This charge was later reduced to “confusing the young” and he was sentenced to 15 days in jail.
During his incarceration, Abercrombie began to write political pamphlets claming that his legal troubles were part of a larger nationwide conspiracy. He claimed that he was being targeted the by the “waistcoat lobby” and “Big Britches.”
Also while in jail he met a young insurance salesman named Samuel Fitch who had been found guilty of selling fraudulent “marital insurance” to the townsfolk. Fitch claimed that this insurance would cover all the costs of exchanging one’s spouse should the desire to do so arise. (Clearly he was a man before his time.)
Fitch and Abercrombie became fast friends. Fitch himself did not share Abercrombie theological vision, but he liked the idea of people walking around “in the all-together.” Fitch suggested that they needed a better strategy for undermining social convention. He suggested they should start a clothing store committed to making clothes that people would want to take off. At first Abercrombie was hesitant since this seemed counter-intuitive and Brooks Brothers already existed.
In their last night in jail Abercrombie had dream. He saw a great statue with a body of gold, a head of silver and clothes made of clay. He saw Fitch blow a great trumpet and the clay was shattered. He awoke the next day, and agreed to Fitch’s idea. The rest is history.
I hope this example shows that with a little historical perspective the most curious human institutions can be laid bare… umm… metaphorically, that is.
Until next time, I am wearing my Levi’s. (A nice Jewish boy Levi Strauss. Seriously.)
Question: Who is the first American poet to have a public monument erected in his honor? Oliver Wendell Holmes’s eulogic poem to the poet in question christened the simple granite obelisk. Eight years later before a crowd of at least 10,000 people President Rutherford Hayes dedicated a bronze image of this man, the first public statue of an American poet. John Greenleaf Whittier supplied the poem that day and other luminaries such William Cullen Bryant spoke the poet’s praises.
He was Dickens’s favorite American poet (after his “dear Irving” died). Thackeray rudely broke social engagements in order to meet him. Edgar Allen Poe said of one of his poems “I would be at a loss to discover its parallel in all American Poetry”. At the time of its publishing his longest work created such demand that the 50 cent book was selling for $10 before the release of a second printing quelled the storm. This was not antiquarian book speculation; this was his ravenous, contemporary audience.
He was not just for the denizens of high culture. His most famous poem was so commonly memorized and recited by school children that Lorenzo Sears, a Brown University professor, commented in 1902 that “the genuine worth of [this poem] has been somewhat cheapened by countless repetitions in numberless schoolrooms”.
To discover this poet’s identity you must go to New York’s Central Park. South of the Mall on the “Literary Walk” four writers are enshrined: Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns and one American, the answer to this riddle: Fitz-Greene Halleck.
Fitz-Greene Halleck?!
“Who?” you say?
Exactly.
Whether or not Halleck deserved such a singular honor is debatable, but one thing is not – in the Nineteenth Century one could not speak of preeminent American poets without discussing Fitz-Greene Halleck. But now, exactly 140 years after his statue was dedicated in Central Park, nobody remembers him. He is gone from the schoolrooms, gone from the anthologies, gone even from the last bastion of obscurity: academia. Only one book length study of his work has been published since 1930, and it was written by one of his descendants.
The specifics of Halleck fall in to obscurity are less important than the meaning of his statue’s prominence. He sits in Central Park like a cultural typo. People pass by and if they bother to read the inscription assume that their ignorance of Halleck is a product of their cultural illiteracy. The truth is much more interesting.
On one level Halleck is a literary Ozymadios: look upon my books ye mighty and despair! Personally, I celebrate Halleck both tongue-in-cheek and hat-in-hand. Tongue-in-cheek (with a slight taste of bile) because Halleck is an object-lesson about the vanity of fame. He is the anti-Melville; for while Halleck was being enshrined in Central Park, Melville was toiling at the Custom House, misunderstood and forgotten.
I find myself hat-in-hand before Halleck as I dig deeper into who he was. He refused to be a professional poet, and his opinion of his own work was far from conceited. Of his first great success, “The Croaker Papers” (written with Joseph Rodman Drake), Halleck quipped, “They were harmless pleasantries, luckily suited to the hour of their appearance.”
Halleck while not a voice for the ages is the voice one of our cultural forefathers (or at least foreuncles). There is something very rich in finding a jewel in the works of so forgotten a man. The fame subsides and only the poet is left. I was stunned by this stanza from Halleck’s poem “Woman”:
For thou art Woman – with that word
Life’s dearest hopes and memories come,
Truth, Beauty, Love – in her adored,
And earth’s lost Paradise restored
In the green bower of home.
I invite all artists (and poets in particular) to make a pilgrimage to the statue of this patron saint of the unjustly ignored and undeservedly famous. Leave him a token or scatter the ashes of your last rejection letter. As people kiss the Blarney Stone for the gift of persuasive speech we should go to Halleck for the determination to keep working even if no one is rewarding us, yet.
The Truth of Life: Original Recipe
I can’t tell you how often it is that someone comes up to me on the street and says “Kenan, you seem to have life all figured out. Can you give me a list of rules which I can use to live a happy life?” I cannot tell you how often this happens. Actually, I can tell you how often this happens. Never. This never happens.
If this were to happen I would reply that I cannot provide anyone with a list of rules that would lead to a happy life. This is not because I don’t have all the answers, I think it is clear that I do. This is not because everyone is an individual; I think it is clear that we are not. The first problem is that good rules don’t exist to make you happy; they exist to make you do the right thing. And we all should realize by now that the only thing more unpleasant than doing the right thing is not doing the right thing. The second problem is I don’t say things that I don’t believe to be true. While we have it on pretty go authority that the truth will set us free, whoever believes that freedom and happiness are inexorably linked has probably never experienced either of these abstractions in an undiluted manifestation.
So what good is truth? The obvious answer is that it is the fastest way to make most people angry, but there is less obvious answer that is almost as useful at parties and on the floor of the Senate. There is an old saying that if you are playing poker and you look around the table and don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you. That is what the truth can offer, insight into “who the sucker is”. It won’t free you from falling into the situation in which you are the sucker, but when those situations inevitably arise, you, at least, will know. They say “knowing is half the battle,” to which I say “knowing what?” and “which half?”
The half the battle that “knowing is” is the awareness when we should and when we should not to fight the aforementioned battle. The “half” is the important half. Unfortunately, if we live by good rules we fight when we should, and not when it is clear that we can win. When you are about to be vanquished it is important to know that the destruction your enemy will cause is preferable to the self-destruction that non-involvement will make inevitable. That is what makes tragic heroes tragic.
In case you are concerned by the martial turn this line of reasoning has taken, be at peace. The battles I speak of don’t involve literal warfare, except in the cases that they do. I firmly believe that a life well lived is similar to a war except with better food and a slightly lower chance of dieing during the work day. Life requires strategy, tactics, logistical planning, and a clear sense of what you are fighting for.
If you have ever read about the life of Colonel Sanders you learn that this was a man who fought very hard in the war of life. He fought to bring fabulous fried chicken to customers and greater prosperity to the small restaurant owners who sold his chicken. When running a simple service station wasn’t keeping his family afloat, he started to cook fried chicken. When pan-frying chicken was taking too long, he invented pressure-cooking frying to speed the process. When the US highway system destroyed his business, he started franchising his chicken to small restaurant owners. When the buyer of this American franchise pushed him out, he moved to Canada where he still had control. When the same American franchises corrupted his food, he said so.
Is it silly to spend a life fighting to bring delicious fried chicken to the people? Maybe, but Mr. Sanders made a lot of people happy, and he made a lot of people more prosperous. So fried chicken might be silly, but a really good dinner and money in the bank sure ain’t.
So here for the betterment of the community I present some silly rules and/or truths that I have cooked up in the pressure-cooker of my brain. I hope that will hit your linguistic pallet with the same delightful crunch and aroma that I image those first Kentucky travelers must have experienced all those many years ago in the Harlan’s little service station.
- “Follow your bliss”. We listened and like ships lost in the night we eschewed the stars and navigated by clouds.
- Why do people believe that aesthetic brilliance equals wisdom? It’s like taking investment advice from someone because they’re a good cook.
- People desire fame in order to gain love and escape intimacy. In this way, fame shares much with promiscuity.
- The primary concern of nature is how to make a seed survive. From this truth comes all behavior and fruit.
- The reality of these events is so horrible. These representations make us believe, falsely, that we know what horror is.
- The value of harmony is the potential for discord
- On Listening to “That Guy” Talk: There is nothing worse than autobiography masquerading as insight.
- On Thinking About What “That Guy” Said: The accidents of his upbringing have become the universal laws of nature.
- Things are what they are. They are not trying to be something else and failing.
- On The Value of the Delicate: Wheat is less valuable as a food because it keeps.
- When you see the color of an object, remember, that is the one color the object is rejecting.
- On Personal Affinity: In order to have magnetism you must have polarity.
- The lesson of string: The most delicate fibers if spun tightly could move the Earth, but for the lack of a fulcrum and place to stand.
- American Fear: “the fault dear Brutus lies not in the stars but in ourselves that we are not always happy.”
- Counter-factual thinking is the Adversary’s playground.
- On Introspection: In matters of the heart, the mind is always the last to know.
And lastly, one of the great truths of life, that Harlan Sanders knew, but only the rascally Alisa Malinovich could crystallize into words:
- The key to success in America is to find something really really stupid and take it really really seriously.
Until next time, I will be sticking to the Original Recipe.
A Lenten Fast is No Diet of Worms
If I have learned nothing on this Earth, and I haven’t, it is that abundance has it’s own ills. Last year was not a lean one for me. I was able to discovered firsthand the Immutable Law of Expense Accounts: he who never has to pay for dinner, experiences a sharp increase in his consumption of fine steaks and chops. For six months last year I never had to pay for dinner, or lunch, or brunch, or a few other meals that I got to name because I discovered them.
The result of all this fine dining is that there was more of me to go around. Now, I am not vain about my physical appearance. This is because I am so nauseatingly smug about everything else even tangentially related to my person. That said, I did realize that I needed to reverse the ill effects of my all-you-can eat lifestyle. I wasn’t so much concerned with the shape of body. I was concerned with the shape of my soul. My relationship with food had grown as joyless as it was promiscuous. I needed to regain gratitude and humility for my daily bread. I need a more spiritual solution… like a religious fast…
While most religions have periods of fasting, our secular society provides us with little in the way of any dietary restrictions. American secular dietary laws seem be limited to: eat turkey on thanksgiving, eat a hot dog al fresco on the 4th, and when on a date with a gal who’s gone to college don’t order veal.
There are state food laws. New Yorkers have the high priest Bloomberg’s fatwa against trans-fats. Lawmakers have also wisely protected us from hamburgers that are not over-cooked. But until the food police get their way (I’d give them another month) there is no secular American tradition proscribing a restriction of eating for any protracted period of time – with the possible exception of “Bikini Season”.
So what to do? Being the man I am, I looked to the Western Tradition for an answer. Why? Because it invariable has one, and, of course, it did: the underutilized Christian tradition of the Lenten Fast. Before you call the Vatican on me for advocating fasting for Lent, realize that the English word “Lent” etymologically mean “spring”. (The ecclesiastical terms for pre-Easter fast translates as “the Forty Days”.) Lenten fast? No. No. Think of it as “Spring Cleaning”.
The other reason not to call the Vatican is that, to my mind, Lent is not Catholicism strong suit. Fish on Fridays and abstaining from one vice for 40 days. That’s it? Really? Give up smoking or drinking for a month, and then start again? That isn’t religion, that’s rehab. Been there, done that, Lindsey Lohan got the t-shirt. (It look soooo much better on her.)
On the other side of the Christian coin and the Adriatic Sea, we have The Greek Orthodox Church. The Church of Byzantium provides the prospective Lenten faster with Byzantine prohibitions on meats, cheeses, loaves, and fishes. The simple result of these complex rules is that by the time you sit your Hellenic butt down to eat your Paschal Lamb you are really really grateful. Really really grateful because you are really really hungry. Funny how scarcity leads to gratitude.
Since I wanted to experience the gratitude that scarcity mid-wifes so well, I took the Greek fast as my model. I simplified the rules a little to the pithy: no animal products for Lent. In modern parlance that made me a vegan. Veganism, for those of you lucky enough not to know what it is, is the refusal to eat any food that comes from an animal in any way. Before you think that makes sense, realize – vegans won’t eat honey. Yes, they are that stupid. Vegans fervently protect the property rights of bees to keep their honey! (If only they were so kind to human beings and their money.)
So to distinguish myself from these stinky hippie morons and to add some Hebrew flavor I added milk and honey to my list of permissible foods. (Theologically how can you ever forbid milk and honey?) No milk products, though, just fluid milk. After all, the Israel is not the land of Cheddar and honey, that’s Vermont, and that is all I am saying about that until Howard Dean is off CNBC.
I had one last rule for my fast, no tofu! I like tofu well enough, but tofu and its ilk just can’t be themselves. They invariably starts pretending to be something they’re not: a hamburger-like patty, quasi-bacon, tofurky®. To quote food writer Al Sicherman “If meat is murder, tofu is suicide.” I don’t think he thought he was making a spiritual statement, but I think he is. I hardly think it puts one in balance with nature to sate your lust for a hamburger with a faux-hamburger made of aged tofu and fair-trade plankton. To alter the old saw about marital fidelity: why go out for fake burgers when I have real kidney beans at home?
On the other side of Paschal aisle, I have the same problem with Passover recipes that intend to make matzo “yummy”. Matzo is the “bread of affliction”. It is unappealing by design. If matzo weren’t unpleasant it would not make you thankful for the gift of a home (and a homeland) where your daily bread can be give the time to become leavened.
Passover and Lent share this idea: through the experience of deprivation we regain the wonder of abundance. You have to suffer in the desert for 40 days or 40 years, but with grace you will emerge. This year since Western Easter and Passover fall in the same week, we have a true Paschal week. (Paschal can relate to either Easter or Passover.)
As I write this my Lenten fast almost through, and I am a little embarrassed how easy it has been. A few rough afternoons aside, my fast has been… joyous. I have learned that while masochism is no virtue; the denial of excess is no deprivation. I have learned something merchants have always known: if you don’t know how scarce a thing is, you can’t know it’s value.
But for the betterment of the community, I will leave you with the greatest truth I have learned from my simple lenten diet, which is: sesame seeds rock! Seriously. Sesame…seeds…rock!
Until next time I wish you all a meaningful and joyous Paschal Week!
Say what you will about the Protestant Reformation it undeniably led to a much less interesting calendar. People joke about the Jews skipping work for all sorts of questionable holidays, but no one takes time to exploit the fact that our Christian heritage as enshrined by The Catholic Church honors at least one Saint on every day not reserved for another religious purpose. Rachel’s Children can’t hold a votive candle to the wasted potential for dubious days off even when you throw in Shavuot, Lag BaOmer and Woody Allen’s Birthday.
In the United States we generally recognize only two Saint’s Days: Saint Patrick’s Day and Saint Valentine’s Day. Ironically, these days are associated in modern practice with less than saintly behavior (married couples excepted in the case of the latter), but there are deeper problems with the traditions. St. Patrick was not only not Irish, but was first brought to Ireland as a slave. After escaping back to Britain he returned to Hibernia to convert the pagans. This decision by Patrick to bring Christianity to the land in which he had been a slave is considered an astounding act of Christian charity by some and a fantastically subtle revenge by others who like sleeping late on Sunday and moving their arms when they dance.
Very little is known about the Saint (or perhaps Saints) named Valentine. He has nothing especially to do with Romantic love or even letter writing. Our winter celebration of romantic love shares nothing with the Feast Day of Saint Valentine except for the date. The British had the myth (attested to in Chaucer among other places) that half-way through February (i.e. February 14) birds would choose their mate for the year. The British felt that if the birds do it on that day, the people should too.
So, I know you are asking yourself, how can we recover this great tradition of veneration of the Saints? How can we recapture the moral and spiritual power of honoring exceptional individuals, and at the same time get more paid holidays?
We do have American political saints and we have days where work is stopped for the purpose of venerating these saints. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and George Washington are all American Saints. They are all venerated, and all three cause (at least some) governments offices, and business to close their doors. [It is important to note that while the 3rd Monday in February is commonly known as “President’s Day” the official Federal holiday is “Washington’s Birthday”]
But this just won’t do. Even when you throw in Columbus, we have hardly a weeks worth of American Saint’s Days. For those of you keeping score that puts us over 300 Saint’s days behind the Catholic Church.
You can attempt to use the Catholic Calendar of Saints if you are creative. Say you work at a tax preparation firm and played college basketball: Skip work September 21 for the Feast Day of Saint Mathew, Patron Saint of Accountants, and then call in the next day for the Feast of Saint Thomas of Villanova. But for those of us with known Hebrew or Reformationist affiliations the whole Catholic thing might be a tough sell in the modern workplace.
What we need to do as a culture is look deeply at our history and recognize our other secular saints for what they are, grant them feast days and create appropriate celebrations for them. So here for the betterment of the community are a few suggestions for secular American Saints that we might venerate so as to uplift our souls and get more three day weekends.
Saint Freud of Vienna
Patron Saint of: Pointless rumination, High-brow character assassination, “Too much information”
Miracles: Used talk (in German, no less) to heal the sick, including the reversal physical paralysis. Shortened the hour to 45 minutes and proved that talk is not cheap, at least not in the offices of his devotees.Saint Jack of The Road (aka Kerouac)
Replaced St. Huckleberry Finn as the Patron of Americans of running away from home in order to seek wisdom and experience and thereby avoiding having to get a summer job.
Patron Saint of: Road trips, Hanging out with weirdoes, Dudes who you lent money to who are just never gonna pay it back
Miracles: Although he only had enough wood for one night, he made a camp fire burn for eight whole days. Much to the consternation of William Burroughs, managed to look good in the most wrinkled clothing.St. George (Lucas),
Patron Saint of: Hurting the people that love you, Fixing what ain’t broke, People who have officially run out of ideas
Miracles: Managed to create one of the most beloved stories of the 20th century and then expand it into a strange and confusing disaster. Able to transform mediocre actors into plastic figurines and bring forth plastic performances from brilliant actors.St. Lauren (Ralph)
Patron Saint of: Seamless assimilation, Most of Connecticut, Ugly plaid
Miracles: Ability to dramatically increase the price of a garment via a square centimeter of embroidery.
St. Lauren is in the long line of Jewish Saints who used artistic brilliance to define distinctively Christian style and culture. (See also St. Irving Berlin, author of White Christmas.) Lauren’s sainthood is rejected by the Calvinist Tradition who attest that St. Klein deserves this veneration. Laurenian hagiography denies St. Klein’s claim to this honor saying that there is nothing essentially WASPy about sexy underwear. Most scholars of upper-class Connecticut underclothing agree with the this assertion.St. Norma (Jeane) and St. James (Dean)
Patron Saint of: Well-timed exits, Sexy self-destruction (Historically similar to St. Keats and St. Mozart)
Miracles: Able to make people marvel at creative work that they never had the chance to produce. Used death to cheat the Fate of St. George (see above)The Saints Rosenberg (Julius and Ethel)
Patron Saints of: Believed attestations of innocence by the patently guilty
Miracles: Able to be held up as innocent victims of injustice despite endless amounts of evidence as to their undeniable guilt. (See also St. Sacco and St.Vanzetti and St. Hiss)St. Betty (Crocker)
Patron Saint of: Mediocre but plentiful baked good, Imaginary women
Miracles: Gave school children the ability to finance seemingly endless band trips, and made a whole generation ignorant to the value of sifting flour.
This is just a small selection of the modern secular canon. The beatification process continues for legions of public figures all the time, and every decade or so a deserving life is held up as an exemplar.
Until next time I will be laying aside earthly concerns in veneration of St. Jack of Lynchburg, TN who performed the miracle of turning amber waves of grain into the best breakfast I know.
Over the past year I have attempted, if obliquely, to raise awareness of the wonders of human history. In that vein I wish honor the 20th anniversary of a publishing milestone. It may be hard to believe but 1989 was the year book buyers were first exposed to the cultural juggernaut that would forever change the world’s concept of American Identity. I am, of course, talking about Jeff Foxworthy’s “ You Might Be a Redneck If…”
It is not often that one man single-handedly creates the social equivalent of a “Your Momma” joke, but Mr. Foxworthy did it. The great appeal of the “You Might be a Redneck If…” is that Foxworthy not only created jokes that people can enjoy, and retell, but he also implicitly invites us to write our own “redneck” jokes.
Always looking to push the boundaries of my own humouro-linquist acuity, I decide to write a 20th Anniversary homage to Foxworthy with my own “redneck” jokes:
If you think “homage” refers too how old your trailer is … you might be a redneck.
If “diversifying your investment portfolio” involves adding shotglasses to your Dale Earnhardt Sr. commemorative plate collection…. You might be a redneck.
If you are biologically your own grandfather married to a woman who is technically her own uncle… you might be a redneck.
If you refer to the Whiskey Rebellion as “The Great War” and say that the Teapot Dome Scandal was worse than Watergate… you might be a redneck… with a really odd sense of history.
If you wrote your doctoral dissertation on “Appalachian Musical Influences in the Protest Songs of the Early Labor Movement” you just might be an ethnomusicologist who studies rednecks.
If you think that the Council of Trent addressed all the major complaints of Protestantism and restored the Catholic Church to its rightful place of moral supremacy in Western Civilization… you just might be a redneck apologist for 15th Century excesses in the Roman Church.
If you write Congressional political strategy memos than would make Machiavelli blush, but never seem to raise any concern in the mainstream media when they are leaked… you most certainly are Jay Rockefeller, a carpetbagger who is the Senator for rednecks.
… Despite the undeniably hilarity of the above examples, I have to acknowledge that I am in unfamiliar comic territory writing like Foxworthy. What do I really know about rednecks? The only backward, provincial, ignorant people I know are Liberals…
So here for the betterment of the community is a test to see if you are a Liberal:
If you think the government should limit the amount of money you can be paid to run a bank, but not the amount of money you can be awarded by a jury if you fall down in the lobby of one…
If you take the Anniversary of Woodstock as one of your floating holidays…
If your nuclear family has more last names than people in it…
If you think that moral principles undergirding Western Civilization should be disposable, but diapers should not…
If you consider attending a benefit concert as “doing your part”…
If you think marihuana should be legal, but cigarettes should not…
If when your child informs you that they are going to major in Gender Studies and you continue to pay their tuition…
If you sure that God does not exist, and that aliens do…
If you refer to your summer following the Grateful Dead as “ post-graduate studies ”…
If you see of the Bill of Rights and the Ten Commandments as jumping off points for negotiation…
If you think the “New Our Bodies, Our Selves” is a little too “heteronormative”…
If you have ever gone to a protest march on a date… [full disclosure, I have done this.]
If you have ever honked to support Unions while driving your undocumented nanny to the bus stop…
If after a break-up you have had to contact your ex because he has your copy of Das Kapital and you have his…
If you can’t judge the content of someone’s character until you know the color of their skin…
If you think students need to know more about human reproduction than human history…
If you think your indulgences are rights and my rights are indulgences…
If you think the Bible has been used to justify murder but Darwin has not…
If you think our borders should be open, but Wal-Mart should not…
If you have ever had your political consciousness raise by an Oscar acceptance speech…
If your idea of giving to charity is buying organic “fair-trade” coffee…
If you have more that 10 travel coffee mugs and 12 eco-friendly grocery bags sitting in your cabinets in order to “reduce waste”…
If your car costs 3 times more than a SUV that it could fit inside…
If you can name more members of the Chicago Seven than the Continental Congress…
In you ever called an American Elected official “worse than Hitler”…
If you think that anyone can be “worse than Hitler”…
If you have reduced your “carbon footprint” buy buying energy efficient appliances for your summer home…
If you think the “Establishment Clause” is a movie starring Tim Allen about St. Nick opening a restaurant at the North Pole…
If you think that by not espousing moral values you are freed from being judged in terms of them…
You gave money to Ralph Nader’s Florida Recount Fund…
If you think that Pol Pot was an agrarian reformer with some good ideas who has just gotten a “bad rap”…
If Gloria Steinem evokes any emotion in you other than pity…
If you think Bill Maher is hilarious, but Joe Biden is not…
If you think that George Bush was a dullard from Texas who got us into an unwinnable war, but LBJ was not…
If you think property is theft but taxation is not….
If you have more compassion for trees than people on life support…
If you think that history definitively proves that Capitalism doesn’t work, and that Communism would if “done right”…
If you think that the only way to elevate people is to lower standards…
If you felt more moral indignation at the actions of James Frye than Bill Clinton…
And Lastly, and most importantly, if you don’t have a sense of humor about yourself… you might just be…
Until next time I will doing “my part” with some “post-graduate studies” (even though Jerry Berry has passed on to the great jam session in the sky)
It is the beginning of a new day in America. Unfortunately, like a Jewish holiday, we are starting our day with the onset of darkness. While it might be naïve to advocate the workers controlling the means of production, it is suicidal to advocate that control be given to Government workers. The logic seems to be that if there is a problem in the land why not surrender complete control to the people who possess the efficiency to run the post-office and the clarity to write the tax code (but not the honesty to follow it).
When Mayor Bloomberg decided to take on Big (cooking) Oil and make “trans-fats” illegal, I considered marketing a line of fashionable t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Keep Your Laws Off My Snack Food!” Before you dismiss my culinary outrage as the ravings of a lipid addled man with a six-figure blood cholesterol level, consider: once upon a time a great war began because a certain British Monarch would not keep its hands off Colonists’ snack food. Then the snack food was tea, but the principle is the same. Just like those heroic Bostonians of old, I want the government out of my face, and out of what ever I want to put into my face.
Or, if government wants to be the nanny and tell me what to eat, and what car I can drive and who I can and cannot assault with deadly force, then I think that government should take up other household duties. I want a government that will “do windows”, synecdochically speaking.
Yes my friends, here for the betterment of the community is my multi-step plan for the implementation of nationalized housekeeping.
First, we will need to vote into office a bunch of politicians who are impervious to shame, willing to make outrageous (and verifiably false) statements publicly and will respond to any attempt at correction with vituperative (and verifiably false) accusations against the corrector. Hmm… OK. We got that one covered.
Second, we will need a news media whose ignorance and laziness is only surpassed by their pandering bias in favor of leftist government… I guess we are two for two.
Last, we will need a scientific community that is more interested in advancing doctrine that secures their funding and prominence than in actually doing scientific research. I mean, these folks will have to be willing to betray every tenant of scientific method and assume the position of Stalinist thought-police willing to destroy the career of any who question their dogma….
Well that all seems to be in order. So this is my plan for “Universal Housekeeping”:
Step One: Create the Problem! (aka Blather, Wince, Repeat)
A prime time news show does a scare piece about “toxic” household cleansers that are “destroying the Earth”. Many pictures of cuddly animals dying, and plenty of “experts” advocating the use of “green” substitute cleansers. (Accuracy is, of course, optional, and if any actually occurred that would be news worthy as far as environmental reportage goes.)
The media picks up on the cleanser scare. Elected officials start talking about the safety of “our” water. The market is flooded with “Green Clean” products: a tenth as effective and only ten times more expensive! (Of course, “Green Clean” cleansers turn out to be several times more toxic than their “non-green” equivalents, but this information is treated like the toxic mercury levels in compact florescent bulbs and is never mentioned.)
Step Two: A Tax is the Best Defense!
Media magnates and Congressmen invest heavily in “Green Clean” products, but sales are sluggish. So in the name of “environmentalism” (aka the last refuge of a scoundrel), a hefty tax is put on “non-green” household cleaning products.
The revenue from this tax is used to subsidize private “Green Clean” manufacturers who then get huge tax-payer funded bonuses, remodel their corporate bathrooms, and enjoy new corporate jets without fear of being called greedy – since they are “saving” the “planet”.
The new taxes on traditional household cleansers (i.e. those that work) become so prohibitively expensive that housecleaning services gain popularity to defray the high costs of individual detergent ownership. People join HMOs (Housekeeping Management Organizations) to keep costs of housecleaning down.
The increase of use of housecleaning services invites more taxation and regulation of the “dangerous” and “irresponsible” housecleaning industry. Cost to be a member of an HMO increases accordingly. Soon lower income households can neither afford effective cleansers or HMO memberships.
Step Three: Find a Victim!
To “help” those suffering from the “cleanser gap” the government unloads excess supply of “Green Clean” products on lower income individuals at further taxpayer expense. These cleansers are so ineffective that people buy grey market industrial cleansers illegally from HMO workers. These chemicals are sold in inferior packaging and are handled irresponsibly by a handful of the millions of people buying them. 3 children drink the pretty colored liquids and die.
Step Four: Now accepting bids for “Housekeeping Czar”!
The story of the 3 innocent children who were killed by “Big Clean” is picked up by every news outlet. A high-profile Senator with Presidential aspirations declares that the only way to save lives and provide affordable housecleaning is to create a National Housecleaning Service (NHS). Anyone who points out the misguided “science” and policy decisions that have led to this ridiculous situation is accused of wanting to kill children and destroy the Earth.
So in order to create jobs, save the Earth and the Children, government housekeepers become the only people who can legally possess or use any type of household cleansers. Each person is scheduled to have their house cleaned once a month by a Federal housekeeper at no costs (except for the $1000 an hour net cost paid for by “patriotic” taxpayers.)
So once every few months your house gets cleaned and a few DVD’s go missing… And everybody’s happy, right?
I think this could work… I will have Stephanopoulos or Carville mention it to Rahm Emanuel on their daily conference call, tomorrow.
Until next time I will be cleaning my house myself…it may take that long.
History is a process of profanation. There is no idea so transcendent that it can’t end up on t-shirt nor any monument so monumental it won’t eventually be represented inside a snowglobe. That said, the success of certain revolutions can be measured by the well-deserved awe that its fruits eventually fail to evoke.
In technological advancement, for instance, habituation to the wondrous is useful. If we showed appropriate amazement every time we called forth light in the darkness by flipping a plastic switch we would be too dumbfounded to do much else in the evening. The novelty of hearing a human voice across hundreds of miles would preclude effective communication on the telephone, and attempting to determine how humanity lost the capacity for shame might seriously interfere with the full utilization of the internet.
In contrast, the vulgarization of revolutionary philosophical ideas has fewer positive effects. Unlike telephones and electric light, words and ideas are altered by their daily use and misuse. The more central the idea is to a culture the more often the idea will be spuriously invoked and thereby corrupted.
In American Culture no concept is more central than the idea of “Rights”. When the Founding Fathers signed the greatest political “Dear John Letter” in human history on July 4th, 1776 this concept of “Rights” was the very heart of their reason for the unilateral break-up with England. Whatever “Rights” are (or were) it was from these Rights that sprang the justification, the power and, most shockingly, the duty to cast off tyranny. This Declaration was so revolutionary that its signing is considered the birthday of The Republic. The explosions we hear on July 4th do not represent ordnance, but the power of an idea, the idea of Human Rights.
Fast forward 200 years, and every inhabitant of the Republic uses the concept of Rights with the same reverance and care as they do their telephone and electric lights. Each day hundreds of people are told that they have the “Right to Remain Silent…”, and that is just on basic cable. More unfortunately millions more choose to reliquish this 5th Amendment protection, and assert their “right” to something that no Creator ever endowed to anyone.
Americans will say “I have a right to be heard!” In truth, you have the right to speak, there is a difference. They will say “I have a right to protest!” In truth you have the right to peaceably assembly and petition redress of grievances – neither of which should involve throwing things at the Chicago Police and then attaining secular saint status for doing so. To quote the Bard “The Lady doth protest too much me thinks”, and to quote another bard “that’s no lady, that’s Tim Robbins’ wife – and the father of his children.”
So here for the betterment of the community I present a few dubious Rights that you might not have complained about lately:
The Right to Remain Violent : An essential part of the specious “Right to Protest”. This provides that one may stay furiously angry with political opponents in the face of clear evidence of their overwhelming benignity. No matter how non-threatening your political opponents reasons for taking the contrary position to yours, you have the right ascribe to them the most vile motivation. Best to enlist a creative psychologist or two – even if that profession has been denying people their right to “free” speech since Freud. (I think the current rate is $200 for 45 minutes of speech.)
Right to Strife: see “Right to Remain Violent” NB: Not to confused with “Right to Fife” which purports to protect ridiculous hobbies, in general, and Civil War recreationist societies, in particular .
Right to Shirk: This is the right of every individual to expect a certain standard of living irrespective of their employment status, the value of their performed labor and/ or the objective or subject demands there of. From this right is derived the idea that someone who manages a multi-billion dollar company, secures jobs and prosperity for tens of thousands of people does not “deserve” their salary, but that someone who hands other people coffee for 16 hours a week is being wronged by not being offered subsidized health insurance by there employer.
Freedom to Want: Closely related to the “Right to Shirk”. This is the right of all people regardless of resources or economic productivity to have access to non-essential consumer goods. At issue is the protection of the consumerist experience of desiring material goods and being able to satisfy that desire before being distracted by another shiny object or ball of string. From this right we derive moral outrage that some people must practice fiscal restraint before buying things that they do not “need”. NB: In this right there is no distinguishable difference between the English words “want”, “need”, “desire”, “whim”, and “basic human necessity”.
Right to Bare Arms: The basis for the social prohibition against admonishing other people for ridiculously lascivious or revealing attire – applicable to either sex. This author has spoken against this belief in the past by commenting that a belly shirt is a privilege and not a right. [On a legal note: last summer in a CA court the perpetually dieting Barbie™ and conspiciously under-clothed Bratz™ dolls sued each other over “intellectual property”. Observers opined that this case would settle a burning cultural question: “will our daughters be anorexics or sluts?” Barbie™ won, as, by extension, did men (excepting fathers, of course). This victory is in keeping with the outcomes of every other gender skirmish since the sexual revolution began all those many clinic visits ago.]
Right to Dye: The extension of “The Right to Bare Arms” into later life. In political and aesthetic conflict with the “Gray Rights” Movement.
Right to Primacy: A negative right, meaning a prohibition, against suggesting that any and every individual is not exceptional. This right does not cover people who are actually uniquely skilled, talented, or valuable to society.
The Pursuit of Sappiness: Not a right in itself, but rather a representation of domestic happiness as constructed by the moral aberrants in Hollywood. Unable to understand a human relationship that isn’t also a business transaction, a hedonistic gratification or narcissistic glorification, the poets of the American dream resolve their adolescent fantasies of adventure and polymorphous adversity with vision of sentimental family life that would make the sugar plum fairies reach for insulin. Images are taken seriously by people who need to get out more. Tends to lead to high standards in romantic partners which leads to an essential “Right to Privacy” that is found by people living alone.
Until next time, I will enjoying my right to primacy and other people’s bare arms. I might also have to fight the Grey Rights movement in my facial hair. We’ll have to see about that.
A Scandal and An Addiction: Gate-aholics Ubiquitous
There is a terrible scandal in the land. An addiction to scandal? A scandal of addiction? Both and neither, I am sure. I mean the linguistic scandal of, and addiction to two awful suffixes: -gate and -aholism. This gate-aholism is just part of aholism-gate that has been infecting the America political press corp and psychological community since 1972.
If one applies the linguistic logic of “-gate” or “-aholism” to their source words, Watergate becomes a scandal related to water and alcoholics have a destructive addiction to “alc” or “alco” depending on your attitudes toward English elision.
Elision aside, it is time for the public to become aware of the many gates that have disrupted society worldwide since the beginning of time.
We all know of the nannygates, travelgates, and Monicagates, but what about Vice-President Quayle’s spelling-bee embarrassment or “tater-gate”. Long before1972, in 323 BC a crisis of succession rocked the Hellenistic world with “Alexander-The-Great-gate”. Beyond America, Catholics worldwide had to scuttle the fall out from the Vatican II decree against the Latin Mass or “Vulgate-gate”
So here for the betterment of the community I present a selection of scandals and misadventures to add to our lexicon of “gates”:
Blotter-gate: Cause of Professor Leary departure from Harvard
Sedate-gate : Led to creation of the Betty Ford Center, see also Kitty Dukakis.
Kuwait-gate: Gulf War Syndrome.
Locate-gate : American high-school geography testing results.
Waiter-gate : Bad press from Hillary’s lack of gratuity.
Slave-state-gate : Missouri Compromise and Subject of Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Checkmate -gate : Bobby Fischer’s anti-Semitism.
Donate-gate : The Constitutionality of McCain-Feingold.
Weight-gate : Evidence of Al Gore’s depression after the 2000 election.
Carter-gate : Just about everything Jimmy does.
Estate-gate : John McCain’s uncertainty about all his addresses.
Real-Estate-gate : The Community Reinvestment Act.
Clean-Plate-Gate : Parental mealtime admonitions determined as factor in juvenile obesity.
Primate-gate : Falsified Darwinian evidence
Gater-gate : University of Florida football scandal, originally the unsightliness of T.S. Eliot’s droopy socks.
Seder-gate :Judas’s appearance at The Last Supper, or, more recently, when little Moishe got drunk during the Four Questions and ate the afikomen.
Satyr-gate : Why the nymphs have been moping around lately.
Mandate-gate :The cause of Jim McGreevy political down-fall.
Prostate-gate : Rumors of Jack Nicholson’s medical problems suppressed.
Racebate-gate : Bill Clinton’s comments after the 2008 South Carolina primary.
Straight-gate : Elton John’s secret romantic experimentation, see also Anne Heche.
Truncate-gate : Michael Moore’s editing.
Pre-date-gate : Circa 1950’s, brassiere stuffing.
Nitrate-gate : “Organic” hot dogs secret ingredient revealed.
In-state-gate : College tuition discounts to illegal aliens.
Innate-gate : Nature, not nurtune.
Fate-gate : Nurture, not nature; alternately, the Oedipus-Jocasta wedding.
Cheapskate-gate : Why your brother-in-law can’t get a second date.
Dictate-gate : Reason for advertising executive’s divorce on adultery grounds circa 1950’s.
Heavyweight-gate : Mike Tyson, perennially.
Jailbait-gate : Miley Cyrus’ Vanity Fair shoot, alternately, Polanski’s Oscar.
Deadweight-gate : The fact that I have not been fired from ever job I have held since 2003.
Ingrate-gate : That time your good-for-nothing brother-in-law got fired from the job you got him.
Gyrate-gate : Unspecified politician caught in strip club.
Lactate-gate : Developmental deficiencies caused by baby formula.
Birthrate-gate : The greatest threat to Europe.
Breastplate-gate : The unfair advantage caused by technological advantages in defensive armaments during the Hundred Years War.
And lastly,
The real watergate : Evian costs $8 a gallon.
Placing Blame is Everyone’s Responsibility
We are fast approaching New Years Day, and we all know what that means: Resolutions! That’s right, up to and including three whole weeks of Nicorette, Stairmaster and not drinking before noon. If The Almighty laughs when we humans make a plan, then the collective sincerity in all our New Year’s resolutions combined should barely register an audible yawn from the Creator.
One reason resolutions fail is that we focus too much on the future and not enough on the past. In order to change how we live, must we not cast a critical eye on how we have lived? Must we not ask what is it that makes our breakfasts of half a dozen eggs, beers, and Marlboros so hard to give up?
Luckily, we are passing out of an election year and we can take some lessons from it. A good election, like a bad marriage, is about placing people in roles based on criteria that have absolutely nothing to do with the substantive requirements of the position. This hallowed process allows us to blame the wrong people for our problems until we can make another disastrous decision using the exact same method.
After Presidential elections Americans take their heads out of the clouds (and gutters) and put them back into the sand – where they belong. But before we do that let us not forget the great lesson of an election year – there is nothing on Earth that is so apparent that it cannot be denied or, conversely, nothing so implausible that it cannot be believed. As Bill Clinton taught us lo, those many years ago, there is no situation so incriminating that guilt cannot be deflected on to another party.
So using this election year logic I will resolve to not use my New Year’s energy to resolve to find solutions to my ills, but rather to deflect blame. So for the betterment of the community I here present several mainstream media-ready excuses for my burgeoning corporeal mass – in other words – how did I gain so much weight in 2008 and more importantly who is really to blame?
Blame: Fast Food Inequality
Reasoning: Because my income by most accounts places me only slightly about the median I do not have “equal access” to healthy foods which are apparently very expensive. There are less organic juice bars in the neighborhood that I have been forced to live in, and the mesclun field greens there are sold without a balsamic shallot vinaigrette. This is why obesity and wealth are inversely proportional in America of FDA-A-A. The chickens that are coming home to roost are not free-range organic. The middle class cannot afford a proper salad course! Obama, we need a redistribution of health!!
Blame: The Male Gaze
Note: For those of you lucky enough to be spared having to attend college since the 1980’s, “The Male Gaze” is a “term” for the nefarious habit that men have of looking at women. Moreover, it is the destructive practice of men looking at “pretty” women more often and then attempting to get high paying jobs so that these “pretty” women will spend “time” with them. Conversely, it is soul-destroying practice of women attempting to “look pretty” so that men will “look” at them, go to business school, and grant them favorable terms in the pre-nup.
Reasoning: Being raised as a male in a culture where female beauty has been objectified and commoditized, I have been taught that male physical beauty is less important. Traditionally women have been taught to select mates based on meaningless qualities like goodness of heart, uprightness of character and the ability provide material support to the raising of a family, so what does it matter if I can make extra money as Brian Dennehy’s stand in? If only I had be subjected to impossible to emulate images of hunky men outside a classroom setting maybe I could have developed an eating habits wherein bacon was not its own food group, but, alas, it was not to be.
Blame: Christmas
Reasoning: There is one member of the secular Christian Pantheon who has done irreparable harm to the body image of countless men in our society: Santa Clause. What does he tell young people about the world? That being fat mean being jolly! At Christmas time that “Bowlful of Jelly” look is not a sign of looming heart disease but a sign of being loved by children and cuddly animals. While Michael Moore has done great work dispelling this notion of the lovability of the rotund, the cult of Santa continues. Worst of all in the Santa myth is the way that each year millions of children lay out cookies and milk for him, enabling Santa’s suicidal eating disorder.
Blame: Buddhism
Reasoning: Just as St. Nick makes an unhealthy Body Mass Index score seem jolly, Buddha seems to say there is no conflict between being one with the universe and, at the same time, being one with the unlimited soup and pasta bar.
Lastly, I received this suggestion from a girl who was canvassing for Obama:
Blame: George Bush
Reasoning: It is always George Bush’s fault.
(Note: I asked if she meant George Bush 41 or 43. She said that she is not good with dates. This makes sense since no one has ever had to take her on one.)
So remember: just because it is your fault doesn’t mean that you’re to blame!
It is December and you know what that means: everyone’s favorite holiday: “Holiday”. So many “Holiday” parties, “Holiday” cards, and “Holiday” related fatalities. Not many people know why we celebrate “Holiday” each year, but it is a great tradition dating back almost two decades! Granted this means that it was created after the 1960’s, when everything good in the world began. You see, my friends, in the 1960’s a very brave and honorable bunch of middle-class, white kids saved Western Civilization by not bathing, not going to classes, and not being monogamous. They did all this for the bravest reason of all: to avoid fighting in a war!
Before the great and glorious 60’s, in the 1950 when women wore chains and men hunted each other for sport, there was no such thing as the ACLU (actually there was, but would you have know that without this parenthetical?) Because the ACLU was not here to protect us in the ‘50s people celebrated a nefarious holiday called “Christmas”. On this “Christmas” people celebrated a woman giving birth to a child, which is the worst thing that can happen to any woman. You see there was a womyn named Mary and she was punished with a baby by an imaginary old man named “God” who had lots of power but never redistributed wealth.
During this “Christmas” people delighted in that which they adored: the children they had been punished with, the families that abused them, Peace on Earth and the gifts of Providence (not the one in Rhode Island). Around “Christmas Time” people also gave pointless crap to people they didn’t really like but couldn’t just ignore, like business associates, neighbors with yappy dogs, and The Sierra Club. These “Christmas” people were not environmentally conscious and therefore did not spend all their money constantly buying new “green” things in order to reduce the amount of things they bought. (umm…)
But then the ACLU and bunch of party pooping jerks who were still pissy about not being able to sleep in on Sundays during there formative years decided that the Constitution provision against the United States government establishing a national religion (e.g. the Church of England, Sharia, and Global Warming) meant that nobody could mention anything religious in public except the militant proselytizing of Atheism and Big Government… because that is free speech and if you don’t agree, we will pass a law making it illegal for you to say so.
As so to mollify the screechy people who hate life but are too lazy to put the rest of us out of their misery, the sensible just gave up trying to openly celebrate the one day a year that might keep their hearts warm for the all the days of the next. America accepted the Newspeak “Holiday” as a way of quieting the violently intolerant army of “tolerance”.
So that my friends is the heartwarming story of why we celebrate “Holiday”.
And Now…
One Jew’s Heartfelt Thoughts on Why We All Should Celebrate Christmas
[Honestly]
I would like to end on a serious note. While I am not running for Bishop and Fulton Sheen is not my co-pilot, I would like to share what I believe to be the purpose of Christmas for Christians and non-Christians alike. The religious meaning of the word “adore” has been lost in the past few decades, but this word, the activity of adoring and the feeling of adoration is, to me the heart of Christmas or, rather, the heart on Christmas.
(This is your heart. This is your heart on Christmas. Any questions?)
The central image of Christmas is Joseph and Mary (with or without Three Kings/Magi) adoring the newborn Jesus. In this image the grace of Jesus need be no different than the grace of any newborn. The baby in Mary’s arm, arguably, needs no additional aspect of the divine to elicit the awe of purest adoration. Adoring children is a gift. It is a good thing; good, even if only good for goodness sake.
On Christmas, irrespective of the theological, we celebrate that which we adore. This is why Christmas is essentially a holiday of family and children. Christmas is pure joy, and it is the joy that the world (created or evolved) gives us in children, in family, in friends, in the Human Community – all off which we cannot help but adore if we would merely open our hearts. We give gifts to delight those who delight us. For one day our labor is not for survival but delight.
So Merry Christmas to All, and to all a Happy Holiday!
Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving
I give thanks that American English has rejected the universal application of the word “Holiday” for any time one doesn’t go to work on a weekday. In distinction to much of the Anglosphere, Americans distinguish between “vacations”, which we each take according to our own schedules, from our shared calendar of “holidays”. This not a minor trick of language, for a holiday is not a vacation. A holiday is a holy day, a day set apart. We do not labor on holidays because we have more important work to do.
Of the American secular (or at least nominally secular) holidays, I believe the holiest is Thanksgiving Day. Many believe that more sanctified are the two great winter feast days: Super Bowl and Oscar Night. To these people I say – if wanted to see fat men hurting each other and thin women hating America I’d watch C-SPAN.
The problem with modern Thanksgiving is that we don’t know how good we have it. And I don’t mean “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”, I mean, “Are you better off now than you would have been 400 or 4000 years ago?” You think a correction in the financial markets is bad, try bubonic plague. You think gas prices are high, try walking from Jerusalem to Rome.
Even the bounty of the land that the first Thanksgiving commemorates would fall short by modern standards. If the agrarian bounty of Eastern Massachusetts merits its own national holiday, imagine what the Pilgrims would have done if they had landed in Iowa, the San Joaquin Valley, or a Super Stop-n-Shop for that matter.
This in mind, I would humbly entreat everyone to take one whole minute this Thanksgiving and actually count our blessings. That’s right, count ‘em!
If you are having trouble getting started I suggest a historical perspective. You can start by remembering what life was like during the Carter Administration and work backwards. I know that for some that is too far back and the rest of us have blacked it out, so here, for the betterment of the community, I present a little historical perspective about what we should be thankful for.
Be thankful for…
Mirrors: Shakespeare’s Cassius begins his seduction of Brutus with a strange question: “Brutus, can you see your face?” Cassius is being all poetic and what not, but put yourself at almost any other time in human history and your only image of your face that you would have ever seen was a reflection in water. Reflective metal, if available, was precious and rare. The superabundance of reflective surfaces in our world, the availability if not ubiquity of mirrors, photographs and video images allow us moderns to know our own faces all too well.
In pre-mirror times, the only way to judge your physical beauty (besides still water) was by how people treated you. So if you were a young cavewoman and who never had to pay for her clay cups of mead at the local watering cave, you were probably kinda hot. If you were a young man in 5th century Athens and you couldn’t get any of the old philosophers to talk to you about the meaning of life at the gymnasium, you were probably kinda homely.
On the other hand, in the pre-mirror age one had to find another use for all the pointless physical self-evaluation time that mirrors allow, so maybe mirrors are a mixed-blessing, at best.
Be thankful for…
The Worldwide Food-For-Money Exchange Program: There was a time before money. While this meant one never had to worry about marginal tax rates, it did make getting lunch a hassle. The jaw-dropping material wealth of the modern West makes us take for granted the ability to acquire almost any variety of food at a moment’s notice by merely surrendering the paper that we acquired during the week playing computer solitaire under fluorescent lights.
Can you imagine what would happen if everyone were required to feed themselves i.e. had to produce their own food using the machinery of nature? Want a potato? Plant one. How about some lake trout? Lake’s over there. Want some soup? Don’t even ask. The next time you have a hankerin’ for a Waldorf salad realize it takes ten years for a walnut tree to bear fruit. An apple tree is a little faster, so you will have a couple years worth of pies before you get your salad – if you can get the flour and butter for a crust.
Be thankful for…
Amber Waves of Grain: Speaking of food, let’s talk about wheat. As Americans we are rolling in wheat. So let’s have a little historical perspective on the power of an abundance of grain. Take for instance, the Pyramids and the marathon. The former is a product of a surplus of grain; the later is a product of its scarcity.When people talk of the wonders of the Pyramids they tend to leave to most the vital material in their construction: Wheat. How could the Pharoses build the pyramids? Because they had slaves. How could they have slaves? Because they had food, namely, wheat. Remember Joseph’s brothers? Remember what they came to Egypt for? Food! And for you Genesis deniers out there, the Athenians also depended upon Egyptian grain imports; the Spartan disruption of the Athens-Egyptian “money-for-food” program was one of their more effective wartime stratagems.
The Athenians had no good land for grain cultivation or large animal grazing. So when you ask yourself why do people run 26 miles around New York City in the fall, know that the answer is: because the Greeks didn’t have the food resources to feed horses. If the Greeks had had one single horse at the battle of Marathon don’t you think they would have given it to Pheidippides for his 26 miles journey from the Marathon Plain to Athens to announce “Victory” before he dropped dead? You’d think someone would have ponied up a pony, but they didn’t. Because? Not enough wheat.
So what American wonders have we constructed thanks to our surplus of wheat?
What wonderful fruits of American prosperity do you take for granted everyday of your life?
What simple wonders of American life have you missed by not wondering at them?
Well, bow your head for one minute and think about it…
And then give thanks for Thanksgiving.
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People – Part II
In my last column I attempted to reverse some of the irresponsibly helpful work of Stephen Covey by propagating first three of The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People.
To recap – the habits are:
Defective response to Covey’s “Be Proactive”: Be Provocative – because offénse is the best defense.
Defective response to Covey’s “Begin with the End in Mind”: Beg ‘Til What’s Yours is Mine – because providing people the opportunity to expiate some of their guilt is a great way to keep your weekdays free.
Defective response to Covey’s “Put First Things First”: Put Things First – because bankruptcy is so much easier than divorce.
While I am not sure if anything can beat the pure comic value of this years Nobel Prize for Economics, here for the betterment of the community I here present the last four of The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People.
Covey’s Effective Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Defective Habit 4: Think ‘When’s Lunch’
Of all Covey’s repugnant concepts none is less understood than “win/win”. You cannot win twice; the world is not run like the Chicago Board of Elections. “Win/win” is in distinction to “win/lose”. The idea is that two people with different interests can come to an arrangement in which both parties “win”. Mr. Covey clearly would not have wanted to date me in college.
The defective habit is also misunderstood. The directive to Think “When’s Lunch” springs from the great truth that it is never too soon after the completion of one meal to start devoting all your mental powers towards the expectation of the next. Unfortunately, the habit is often interpreted too literally. Lunch is not the midday meal but any physical experience that is pleasurable and within the power of the individual to grant himself. You may dream of the exalted feeling of true accomplishment, but you can’t control your acquisition of this feeling. Reality intervenes and therefore best not to think about it. The pleasures of food, intoxication, and exploiting the romantic notions of the students in your Freshman Lit Crit Seminar are anemic, yes, but they are more or less within your power to control. As a British friend of mine reminded me, a bird in the hand is worth two pressing charges.
Which leads us to one of the great defective gifts that Man gives himself: tobacco. Some people think tobacco is bad because it supposedly makes you die or something. They miss the point: Tobacco is a vice that creates its own desire. The hedonistic perversion of hunger or thirst is still rooted in the legitimate needs of the body; carnality is the misuse of human mission to procreation, but tobacco is a self-renewing desire related to nothing but itself. An endless spiral of irrational desire, weak pleasure and petty harm – much like dating me in college.
Effective Habit 5: Seek First to Understand. Then to be Understood.
Defective Habit 5: Assert First, Ask Questions Never
I think it was either Walter Cronkite or Stalin who said “All opinions are equally valid; Some are just more valid than others.” The truly defective person knows that his opinions are just so much more valid than others – even though when challenged, a definite moral opinion becomes an oppressive and ignorant concept that is responsible for slavery, and a lowered capital gains tax.
The key is to remember that you understand everyone better than they understand themselves. After all, you went to an expensive college, and you think about “those people” occasionally for periods up to and including 15 seconds. “They” just walk around inside their own skins in constant ignorance… but you have the ability to imagine what you would do if you were they. It is important to remember not to imagine what you would do if you were in their situation – because understanding that would require empathy and occasionally accessing reality. No, just plop your little old self inside their heads for 5 seconds and imagine the worst. Remember no one is as enlightened as you – because you went to college and studied English and whatnot.
The truly defective person walks through life like the intoxicated teenager at a party who unwisely believes that everyone is inebriated as he. Project and you shall find. Perspective is for chumps.
Covey’s Effective Habit 6: Synergize
Defective Habit 6: Ruminate
I always thought Covey’s directive to “synergize” was a euphemism the reason the internet is so popular, but apparently in means working together or something. What. Ever.
Thought done properly can be amazingly productive, and therefore this type of thought must be avoided. Deep thought is every defective person’s greatest asset. When all other appetites that can be perverted for hedonistic exploitation have run dry, the desire to dig the sickness out of your heart with ineffectual rumination on that which you cannot change is always a great way to avoid actual amelioration of the spirit. While some scholars advocate European political philosophy as the greatest waste of time, I shy away from this because it too often can lead to some young woman thinking you are smart and then you get sucked in to ruining her life rather than your own.
Our ability to control outcomes in the world is limited and any good life means pouring energy into influencing that we cannot ultimately control – like our work, our children, our families and our communities. Rather than setting ourselves up for the type of frustration and involvement that this brings, it is much better to just think about that which we cannot change. For men it is good to start with by replaying failed romantic conquests. Women can usually find a good jumping off point in desire to correct some minor physical “flaw”.
Covey’s Effective Habit 7: Sharpen the saw.
Defective Habit 7: Sharpen the saw.
I actually agree with Covey on the seventh habit. Originally I thought this was just another euphemism for “synergizing”. I am not sure if he is using the phrase in the same colloquial sense that I am, but we used that phrase in boarding school and it is without a doubt the most defective habit and greatest waste of time every devised.
I can only hope that people can now see that defectiveness not only leads to a life that is much easier, but it is more in harmony with the greater values of our culture. If some of you fool-hearty souls out there want to live a difficult “effective” life – not only will you find your pleasures contingent on long periods of unrewarded action but you will find yourselves bewildered by the actions of people on television (especially if you are watching C-SPAN 2). We all want to live the good life, but not at the cost of being bewildered and sickened by Gossip Girl, right?
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People – Part I
When Steven Covey published his juggernaut best-seller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People he shook the American “self-help” tradition to its very core. Gone were the ingratiating tricks designed to bolster one’s affability and affluence. Gone too were the mental tricks purported to unblock immediate access to constant pleasure and/or the constant access to immediate pleasure. Covey broke the mold by prescribing rational techniques for discovering purpose and effecting positive change for that which is most meaningful to us.
This cannot stand.
In truth, Covey is just repackaging the traditional values that have made America great. If we learned nothing in college, and we didn’t, it is that everything traditional is wrong.
Covey challenges people to better themselves, but is it not great inalienable right of every American never to made to feel uncomfortable about our “failings”? In my work-life these “effective” types are always attacking my life-style choices because they find them questionable. I am minding my own business trying to enjoy a few breakfast beers and they give me the stink eye. I tell them what I tell everyone, if you don’t like me coming to work drunk hire someone else to drive the school bus.
So to combat all these “effective” do-gooders I have rewritten Covey’s 7 Habits to better conform to a life that we all have access to. There are many “moral failings” or “bad habits” that are amazingly effective in building a life every bit as pleasurable as anything the “hard-working” or “honest” could dream of. And the best life is the one with the most pleasure in it, right?
After not much hard work and a life of highly-questionable moral choices, for the betterment of the community I here present The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People.
Covey’s Effective Habit 1: “Be Proactive”
Defective Habit 1: “Be Provocative”
Apparently Covey’s directive to “be proactive” means you are supposed to do stuff before someone tells you to. First off, how are we supposed to know what to do? Second, either you feel like doing something or you don’t, and it is very important to honor your feelings.
It is far easier and more immediately satisfying to be provocative. To employ this habit well we should look to endless fount of wisdom, the children, specifically the teenagers. Teenagers are natural provocateurs. They know nothing, but they have the keen observational power to figure out exactly what is going to piss you off.
In every productive life there will be small logical inconsistencies, unscrutinized preferences and questionable aesthetic choices that give hard-working people small but precious comfort. As a provocateur these are things you want to attack. This not only makes the people around you uncomfortable, but it draws everyone’s attention (including your own) away from the disaster that if your life. Remember the Gospels: how can your brother notice the speck in your eye when you are shoving a plank into his?
And if anyone does bring up the lumber content of the windows to your soul, the provocateur can always reclaim the moral high-ground by declaring that he is “raising awareness”. When asked “of what?” always say “the hypocrisy”. There is always some jejune hypocrisy.
Covey’s Effective Habit 2: “Begin with the End in Mind”
Defective Habit 2: “Beg ‘Til What’s Yours is Mine”
We live in a country of great affluence and plenty. There is simply no need for everyone to have to work all the time. Plenty of people are making more money than they need. Some of them feel guilty because of their hard won good fortune. Would you deny them the opportunity to be charitable?
Think of America as a great buffalo – strong and sure. That buffalo is going to be teaming with parasites; This is the natural way of things. In a country as rich as ours someone is going to get by living off the hard work of others, why not you? Believe in yourself and you can do it! Believe that you deserve it!
And remember charity begins at home, so be sure to milk your family for all you can. Never forget that you did not ask to be born – you can probably keep a good cash flow going for a couple years after college with that complaint alone.
Covey Effective Habit 3: “Put First Things First”
Defective Habit 3: “Put Things First”
Covey’s third habit suggests that we should value some things more than others. This makes sense until you realize that by “things” Covey is not talking about material possessions but stupid stuff like family, work, other golden cages of the “good” life.
We should value some things more. Take the example of buying a new car versus having another child. That car may make you feel better at first, but it will also have a significant resale value even after you are bored with it. That kid is full of nothing but hidden costs. People and ideals demand years of toil and commitment, but stuff and things give us all the immediate joy with none of the hassle (except in acquisition costs – for that see defective habit 2).
Garish conspicuous consumption is not only a great way to show people that you are better than they are, it is also a bang up way to get enmeshed in cycle of debt that guarantees you will do nothing of real value. It’s hard to cure cancer or provide a positive role model to the community when you have to work 100 hour weeks just to pay the interest on your debts. Yes, your life will be empty, but your living room will be totally tricked-out. Take comfort in knowing that it is hard to reflect too deeply on your moral failings when you are watching your 90 foot plasma screen television in baby harp-seal skin La-Z-Boy ® with a built-in ice-machine, heat and massage.
An intelligent person can see that defectiveness offers us so much more hope for the good life than effectiveness. But this is just the beginning… Be sure to check the next issue of Berkshire’s Best for The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People- Part II.
Reflections on Reflection: A Reflection
Over the past several months I have shared the wit and wisdom of several fictional characters, including my father. This week I wish to cast away the mask of historical and parental pseudepigraphy. I want share my own reflections, my deepest reflections on the art of reflection.
Reflection we are taught is the best thing that a person can do. After all, where does wisdom come from if not the self? The West has not yet cast off the Platonic ideal of perfect truth. Whereas silly Socrates looked for truth applying logic, humility and skepticism, we moderns only need to get in touch with how we feel. Out emotions will map the topography of our authentic selves, our whims will find the path to all the truth, morality and wisdom this self contains. Our quest for knowledge begins where it must end, and the object of study can be our only tutor.
We can gather some guidance from the wise men of culture, those who write novels, television shows, and 3 and half minute songs about deep meaningful love affairs that never seem to last beyond the initial infatuation phase. Why can’t love last? Not because our culture is trapped in adolescent assumptions of life as an unending string of immediate rewards, but because we have not found our true selves. Once we find the Holy Grail within us love, money, and other manifestations of corrupt salvation will flow to us. Let’s call it the priesthood of all believers and justification by faith alone without all those pesky Calvinist “standards”.
But how does one study the self? We know from Freud and other unindicted corruptors of youth that the self comes into focus only when studied day and night under the microscope of unrelenting introspection. The resulting near-sightedness is the badge of a person who knows himself i.e. he is no longer limited to “objective reality” because he can no longer perceive it.
The substance of this “self” may seem unclear to the critical observer. (That observer needs to get in touch with himself!) We know not to confuse the “self” with the “soul” as that term is vague, not nearly as scientific as “self”. Soul is an ignorant term. We all know there is no soul because of science tells us so. It is simple undeniable logic that if DNA exists there can be no higher wisdom that the solipsistic individual. So the concept of the soul must be discredited in favor of the cold, hard, scientifically proven fact of the self. This is proven science! And if you don’t believe me ask people that sell real estate to therapists.
Still, if I am to indict anyone for the crime of reflection I must turn the glass on myself and see through it but darkly. Confusing popular assumptions with truth I spent years fixed on my own image, an image corrupted only by ripples in the water and limits of my own eye. The greatest cost of this obsession was never realizing that Echo had the serious hots for me, but she had her own masochistic co-dependency thing going on. So I guess I dodged a bullet there.
As part of my self-imposed penance for this crime, and for the good of the community I here present some of the pearls I found while snouting through the pigs breakfast that I made of my Earthly tenure.
1. Apropos of the Above Mythological Metaphor: Whatever happened to the guy that was in love with Echo?
2. Don Juan in Hell: Dante is correct. The lowest level of hell is for the betrayers of trust – and as such it is chock-a-block full of men who made a craft of exploiting the sanguine treasure maps that manifest in a maiden’s blush.
3. The Epicurean and the Libertine Lament: As with food so with love – the first bite is bliss, the rest mostly eating.
4. On Social Progressives: Why do they distrust the social behaviors that order emotional life?
5. Since We Are On The Subject of Teenage Wasteland: Where are the poets of uxorial adoration?
6. On Uxorial Adoration: The most romantic poem is composed of quotidian words.
7. The Real Meaning of a Flower: All the blooms, all the nectar are for the pollen.
8. On A City Street: She says she wants a child. I wonder if she wants to be a mother.
9. Epitaph for Western Civilization: They read novels and thought they were educated.
10. The Most Important Question Facing Mankind circa 2000: When are they gonna realize that a belly shirt is a privilege, not a right?
Going to School on the Silly Bus
There is a slight chill in the morning air. The siren song of summer’s green echoes back in autumnal rust and fire. Soon school bells will be ringing. All those juvenile minds full of garbled thoughts, deluded with innocent fantasies about the way the world should be – but enough about college professors, let’s talk ‘bout book learnin’!
Some have claimed that until the 18th Century an educated man could have at his command all collected human knowledge. These’a days an educated man is one who can flippantly tell you why all collected human knowledge is inaccurate, irrelevant, or (all together now) not sufficiently inclusive! There are unconfirmed reports that earlier in this century some American citizens would actually leave university knowing more than when they arrived, luckily for most of our elected officials and the producers of America’s Top Model this is clearly no longer the case.
Here for the betterment of the community I present an overview of what our children will find on their syllabi this fall.
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Required Subjects
It’ll be called: English
What they won’t learn: How to speak, write or understand English.
What they will learn: Self-esteem and sociological propaganda that would make Tokyo Rose blush.
What they should be learning: How to use the semi-colon. How to use the words “were” and “whom” to make everyone think you are super-smart. How to interpret a story through something other than the myopic lens of your own adolescent narcissism (once again I am stuck on the professors!).
Lessons from the Elementary Grades: How the ridiculous orthodoxies of progressive education prove that if you throw enough academics at a problem the acquisition of even most basic skills (e.g. reading) can be made unbearably convoluted.
Lessons from High School: That literature is a bottomless well of knowledge – in that it always presents a reflective surface on which one can fall in love with one’s own image.
It’ll be called: Science
What they won’t learn: Scientific method, analytical thinking
What they will learn: Dogma wrapped in jargon. Infinite self-satisfaction for having the skepticism and insight to see the truth that is presented as the only possible explanation. Open distain for anyone not sufficiently independent to accept orthodox dogma without question.
What they should learn: Hypothesis testing, data analysis, keen observation, the limits of Man’s knowledge and healthy skepticism.
Lessons of the Elementary grades: Global warming.
Lessons of High School: Global warming. Atheism.
The real inconvenient truths: An “environmentalist” is usually neither a climatologist nor a scientist. An evolutionary biologist, no matter how pithy, is not a theologian.
It’ll be called: History
What they won’t learn: His story (when the antecedent of “his” is anyone of either sex actually instrumental in forming Western Civilization.)
What they will learn: Her story, their story, and the other story of tertiary characters as proscribed by state laws mandating “inclusion”.
Lessons from the Elementary grades: Everything you learned about history before exposure to the state mandated curriculum was a simplistic, jingoist, phallocentric lie.
Lessons from High School: More of the same, possibly what “jingoistic” means.
Lessons from College: What “phallocentric” means, and that people who live under tyrannies in below-subsistence conditions are super happy as long as they never see a Starbucks.
Lessons from graduate school: There is only one lesson from graduate school: how to avoid productive work.
It’ll be called: Math
What they will learn: Math, possibly.
What they won’t learn: Why they are learning math.
What they should know: If you think you deserve to know “why” all the time you are on the wrong planet.
What everyone should know: An informed citizen needs to be able to perform basic mathematical functions and manipulate percentages in his head.
Forbidden Subjects:
Economics
Why Forbidden: Leads to financial literacy and the ability to understand basic public policy. Tends to make people look up Jack Kevorkian’s phone number when watching C-SPAN. Tends to make people by-pass that step when reading Paul Krugman.The Bible
Why Forbidden: Can lead to understanding of Western Civilization. If taken to heart can cause humility which leads one to wonder what college professors are high on (the answer: the Stockholm Syndrome adoration of eighteen-year olds.)Basic Engineering
Why forbidden: Like scientific method, can lead to a basic understanding of cause and effect. It’s hard to keep them down on the farm when they have the mental tools to figure out how a toilet works or that without fossil fuels we can’t get fancy, organic, environmentally-friendly foods from New Zealand to the walk-in refrigerators at our summer homes.
And one final note on music and art: there is a lot of whining about cut backs in arts education especially music. This is energy well-spent, for if there is one thing that America’s youth have scant interest in and little access to it is music. If only we could dislodge all those dreams of electrical engineering and get America’s youth fixated on the narcissistic hedonism of the artistic life. Oh well.
Once upon a time in America a child who ate candy for breakfast and couldn’t sit still in math class was advised to lay off the Zagnut bars and perhaps run around the block. Now the little fructose junkie is diagnosed with ADHD and given a pharmaceutical grade stimulant (e.g. Ritalin) which has the wonderfully ironic effect of calming him down so he can watch his 8 hours of daily television without having once to do anything that might contribute to his long-term welfare.
In these enlightened days we know that the chronically annoying are suffering from “psychological disorders”, and that treatments are available. These treatments have been scientifically shown to greatly reduce the suffering of both therapists and those of us who had the wisdom to go long on Big Pharm about the time the phrase “forgot to take his Prozac” replaced more direct Anglo-Saxon phrases of behavioral disapprobation.
The specificity and scope of the pathological alphabet soup grows every day (eg. ADD, ADHD, PTSD, DNC, RNC, CNN, NYT) but the psychiatric community is falling behind. The mental health professionals who invent (I, umm, mean, document) these disorders are not keeping pace with societies galloping credulity. We have reached a state where people honestly believe that they are “supposed” to be happy. There are even wide-spread outbreaks of the utterly insupportable but rather robust delusion wherein people believe that they “deserve” to be happy. Taking these believes into account, the mental health community owes it to their shareholders, their domestics, and to the communities in which they have country homes to take the American people for all there worth.
Let us face this one fact as a culture: there are vast new areas of human annoyance just waiting to be mined for unfathomable psychiatric riches. You think that there is a gusher ready to be tapped off-shore and in ANWR? You should check out the psychological black gold bubbling under the surface of the personalities I meet in my daily life.
As a service to the community, I here present a few of the newest maladies the modern psychological industry has yet to cash in on, umm… diagnose.
From Disorders of Identity, Cultural:
Demographically Inappropriate Gestures, Intonation and Terminology (aka DIG-IT)
Indications: The conscious or unconscious co-option and use of modes of physical and verbal expression clearly incongruous with the subjects’ obvious or actual cultural affiliations. In European and Asian-Americans this is most often typified by a consistent and pervasive desire to “raise the roof” or “get their (blank) on”. In the most severe cases patients will evidence the overpowering need to “get jiggy” with “it”. (The scientific community is divided on what exactly the antecedent of “it” is in this particular case.) [Also see. Hysterical, Indecipherable, Parent-Hating Oratory Pathology (aka HIP-HOP)]
From Disorders of Adornment:
Indications: Traditionally the relationship between ones personal wealth, status and the fine and ornamental nature of one’s clothing has been a direct one i.e. the richer you were he more splendid your vestments. In modernity this relationship has become inverse. The resultant class of disorders, known as, Reactive Inverted Clothing Hierarchies(RICH) have affected all levels of society. Those born without wealth are shocked realize that there is nothing more gauche than exposing the fact that you probably have no money by attempting to dress like you might.
The oldest type of Reactive Inverted Clothing Hierarchies has effected (and affected) the wealthy. This disorder, clinically know as Sartorial Laxity Obfuscating Brahmanism (aka SLOB) was seen as early as post-WWI Europe but spread to America to reach epidemic proportions in the 1960’s. The malady is so endemic that well-to-do adults are now routinely seen wearing flip-flops on city streets and other public areas as a sign of high status.
RICH-SLOB should not be confused with or considered a side-effect of Historically-Ignorant, Pusillanimous Pacificism of Youth (aka HIPPY). Not all with symptoms of RICH-SLOB share the inability to comprehend basic reality and the irrational fear of growing up that are the central symptoms of HIPPY.
From Disorders of Celebrity
Fanarexia
Indications: Usually caused by an increasing lack of adoring well-wishers and supplicants and the extreme compensatory behaviors that emerge as the individual attempts to remedy this growing sense of being ignored e.g. Celebrity Boxing, Skating with the Stars, and running for elected office in Southern California. These behaviors usually lead to wide spread mockery which the afflicted will usually misinterpret as appreciation (e.g. “The Honorable Sonny Bono”.)
I don’t have the medical knowledge to say how these maladies should be cured, but I think that each should have a different colored pill.
So until next time, remember the first rule of modern psychology: just because you are at fault – it doesn’t mean that you’re to blame.
A lot of people have been talking about the recent Supreme Court decision about the Second Amendment. Some people say guns are bad, but I still say that they are the best way to make your feelings known without having to walk across the room.
But none of that substantive stuff for now. Some times it is too hot to mock the things that matter. So here for the transitory amusement of the community I present 3 top ten lists in the style and voice of a late night talk show host who remain nameless.
So sit back. Grab a nice tall glass of ice tea (or, if you will, lemonade) and enjoy!
Top Ten Signs That Your Company’s CEO Isn’t Taking His Job Seriously
10. Instead of shareholders’ meetings and executive retreats: keggers and pig pickin’s.
9. Changes name of company from “Amalgamated Semiconductor” to “Pooters ‘n Such”
8. Sponsors “bring a thermos of whiskey sours to work day”.
7. New policy at board meetings, “no shirt, no shoes, no problem”.
6. Instead of finding corporate synergies in a cash-poor environment, sits around watching So You Think You Can Dance.
5. Suspends all corporate expense accounts, talks up “unlimited soup and salad bar”.
4. Annual shareholders’ report nothing but shameless plug for brother-in-law’s water park in the Poconos.
3. Promotes Chaz in the mailroom to “Vice-President in Charge of Keepin’ It Real”.
2. Suggests that you lower legal fees by marrying Alison in Accounting off to Jacoby.
1. Stops hiring hot interns.
Top Ten Least Popular Breakfast Cereal Mascots
10. The Trix Rabbi
9. Snap, Scrapple, Pop
8. Tony the Tire Iron
7. Count Chalk-ula
6. Barbara Boxer (D- California)
5. Edward Nougat Hands
4. Raspberry Rat
3. Clifford the Big Red Drunk Guy
2. Cap’n Crack
1. Uncle Samwich
Top Ten Signs Your Holistic Health Practitioner Is Significantly Sub-Par.
10. Instead of healing oils and aromatherapy candles – Wesson and road flares.
9. Refers to Buddha as the “chubster”.
8. Instead of carefully stimulating pressure points with acupuncture, he hucks darts at you.
7. Contextualizes yoga not as an ancient Hindu spiritual practice but as an awesome way to see a vice-president in charge of marketing at Conde Nast in the “more or less all-together”.
6. Dietary advice: keep the hot-side hot and cool-side cool.
5. Keeps implying that extra crispy is a food group.
4. Puts you on an exercise regiment of orange push-ups and cheez curls.
3. Tries to get you in touch with your inner sumbitch.
2. Is surprised to discover that the Dalai Lama is neither a Dolly nor a Lama.
1. New miracle cure: Smoke away the pounds!
Think Ignorance Is Expensive? Try Education.
A great American thinker once opined that nothing is more expensive than ignorance. On the contrary, nothing is more valuable to domestic harmony. Ignorance is the glue that holds the train of society on the tracks. Remove the glue and we might have to decide on a destination, or, worse, figure out how to drive a train.
For as the prophets said, “ignorance is bliss”, and Joseph Campbell, the modern prophet of cross-cultural dilettantism, said “follow your bliss”- which is pretty easy to say when you have a job that you can’t get fired from teaching 20 year-old rich girls to listen to their hearts. A profession similar to exhorting people trapped in a famine to “save room for dessert”.
There are some things that everyone should know, but there is no reason for that knowledge to get in the way of our ignorance. In the late 80’s “Cultural Literacy” came to the fore until people realized that this meant actually learning something, so wisely this idea was dropped in favor of college education. Here for the edification of the community I present a handy guide to some key cultural concepts that you might have missed while getting a college education that cost as much as a three bedroom house in Ohio.
History- Repeats itself.
Say: “Is written by the winners”
Ignore: Actually written by historians who at this point are very rarely “winners”
If you want to be clever: Thucydides, the Athenian Father of History, not only wrote the history of a war that his side lost, but was exiled from Athens for his misdeeds as a general in a battle that he won.
The Truth – What we tell the people to hurt them.
Say: “It’s relative” and “it will set you free”
Ignore: It’s not and it won’t
If you want to be clever: Realize that when you say “the truth will set you free”, on some level you are quoting Jesus. So don’t say it in a public school.
Communism – What you learn in college. Ignores all immutable laws of human nature and is therefore loved by highfalutin academics and others who never have to think about how things actually work.
Say: “works in theory”.
Ignore: The only theory that it works in is the theory of communism
Also Ignore: It doesn’t even work in that.
The Roman Empire – Imperialists who stole all their good ideas from the Greeks. Bathed a lot. This gave the barbarians low-self-esteem because they were considered stinky by comparison.
Say: “Proof that all great powers fall”.
Ignore: That it also proves that great powers can last for 1000 years (Western Empire) or 2000 years (Eastern Empire).
Also Ignore: If you include the influence of the Roman culture, language, technical innovation, government, law and the Catholic Church, Rome has yet to fall.
Definitely Ignore: “yet”.
The Constitution – At around 4500 words is far too long for anyone to actually read. Gives us the freedom to do whatever we want and the freedom to stop anyone from doing anything that makes us uncomfortable. Can be re-written at will by Anthony Kennedy.
Say: It is a living document that justified slavery.
Ignore: Its principles ensured the destruction of slavery and the elevation of the dignity of all Mankind.
If you want to sound clever: Talk about the 3rd Amendment… It prohibits the quartering of soldiers in private houses… for now.
McCarthy, Joseph – Swiftboated commies. Invented lying. At long last he had no sense of decency.
Say: “Lied when he said there were communists in the State Department.”
Ignore: There were Communists in the State Department and there is so much proof that even PBS has copped to it…
Definitely Ignore: Those lovable Reds gave nuclear weapons technology to the Russians, who gave it to the Chinese, who gave it to the Pakistanis, the North Koreans, the Iranians…
If you want to sound clever: Confuse McCarthy with HUAC and blame him for the greatest crime against humanity in the mid-20th Century: making Dalton Trumbo, author of the source material for Always with Holly Hunter, write under a pseudonym.
Shakespeare –No Dalton Trumbo (and Lloyd Bentson knew Dalton Trumbo).
Say: “Didn’t write any of his plays”
Ignore the fact: That even if that were true, how does it matter?
If you want to (actually) sound clever: Quote him (and don’t split your infinitives).
James Joyce – Never read, completely unintelligible, and, therefore, a genius.
Say: “I read Ulysses in college. It changed my life.”
Ignore: You didn’t, and it didn’t.
If you don’t want to sound completely unclever: Don’t get greedy and claim to have finished Finnegan’s Wake. No one has ever read the whole of Finnegan’s Wake – including Joyce. That’s why it’s full of typos.
This is of course just a few of the many things that you can learn about at your local library. (You know, that place were you can check-out videos.)
13 Ways of Looking at Goldilocks
or The Uses of Disenchantment
As a child I loved the Goldilocks story. Above and beyond my well-documented soft-spot for petty theft, I love the moral of the story – the moral being that one should never nap inside the house one was has just robbed.
Imagine my surprise at a folktale symposium at the Harvard Institute for Unchallenging Subject Matter where I discovered that very few academics shared my view of the story’s deeper meaning. Rejected were my comments about the valuable lessons for children who aspire to breakfast theft and clandestine napping. Ignored were my incisive comments about the stern anti-vegetarian themes of the tale. Derided was my thesis that if the bears had been eating meat instead of porridge maybe they would have the strength to catch Miss Locks and go Ursa Major on the thieving little toe-head.
The other “scholars” had there own “views” on the “story”. Here for the moral betterment of petty felons everywhere I present some of the lesser-known interpretations of the story that were suggested by the Center for the Over Interpretation of the Painfully Obvious.
American Psychiatric Association
Goldilocks is rebelling against overly restrictive or overly permissive parenting (take your pick). She is compelled to test boundaries by engaging in high-risk eating, sitting and sleeping behaviors. Her immediate nap after such a stimulating disregard of law and order is a sign of a bipolar disorder.
Moral: Children need less/more moral guidance from parents and caretakers. Start patient G. Locks on 500mg Lithium, if this does not help, up the dose or put her on something more expensive.
Womyns’s Studies:
Goldie is unable to self-actualize inside a patriarchy that denies a young girl agency or empowerment. She escapes the town (which was built by men) where eurocentric visiodominant attitudes have fetishized her blonde hair. In the woods she hopes to find personhood in a gender neutral society. M. Locks exposes the latent sexism of the animal kingdom as a world where the subjugated “Momma” Bear is given the coldest food, and is locked in the “Golden Cage” of heteronormative femininity by a bed and chair that are uncomfortably soft.
Moral: Concepts of right and wrong are constructed by male hegemony in order to impose phallocracy on the gynosphere.
Note: Any suggestion that Papa Bear sacrificed some of his own chair or bed stuffing that his wife might be more comfortable will result in a lower grade.
Scientific American:
The variation of the porridge temperature is an example of heat retention as a function of mass. The father’s portion retains the most heat because of its larger size. The mother’s portion being the smallest cools fastest. [The mother is clearly on a low-carb diet.]
Moral: Put father’s porridge in low flat bowl to increase surface area and exposure to cooling air.
Communist:
Goldilocks is a metaphorical representation of the international bankers and factory owners with their “gold” that “locks” the workers in perpetual servitude. The capitalists intrude into the Workers’ house, defiles and consumes the food of their labor, destroys the chair of their child’s repose and eventually steals their very sleep by co-opting their beds. The workers, who live a “bear” existence can no longer “bear” the un”bear”able oppression and cast Goldie into the forest of the Worker’s Revolution.
Moral: Action must be taken! Re-educate blonde girls, redistribute porridge, and make all beds and chairs equally uncomfortable.
Conservative:
Goldilocks represents the wayward youth created by out of control government entitlement programs. The “gold” that is redistributed by confiscatory progressive income tax “locks” the productive bears into a world where they can no longer protect their homes, furniture and breakfasts from liberal lay-abouts like Miss Locks. Miss Locks in turn, who has been on the dole all her life, and has no understanding private property rights. She uses the precedent of the Kelo Supreme Court decision to co-opt the house of the hardworking bears who have been outcast to the woods for their refusal to stop wearing fur.
Moral: Make Goldie get a job. The free-market and lack of government intervention will challenge Miss Locks. She will be forced to struggle until her natural talents blossom and she makes a fortune designing a quick-cooling porridge that is always “just right”!
Liberal:
Goldie is pushed to steal food because she is hungry due to Bush’s cruel government school lunch program cut-backs (“cut-backs” in that a smaller than expected increase in funding was granted).
Moral: No Blood for Porridge!
Is that only 6 ways to look at Goldilocks? Well maybe the moral of this story is that the reader must wrest away from the author the creative process of interpretation and create his own meaning from the cultural buffet of modern life. Or maybe the moral is that life, like my column space, is limited – best to make the most of it, and if you don’t reach your goal then it must a lousy goal that you didn’t want in the first place. Wait, isn’t that the moral of the fox and grapes?
Father Knows.
One Sunday each June we honor our fathers with gifts of ties, Ultimate Fighting DVD box sets, and long speeches about how they ruined our lives by forcing on us moral values that would have proved a sure roadmap to fulfillment had we only bothered to listen. Since we reap what we sew, all Americans can expect that their children will ignore the useful advice that the more virtuous gain in the form of yearly dividends of observation and mistakes. Of course, parental advice rarely provides prophylaxis against the travail of life’s journey, but rather provides the ironic twist that in the light of hindsight we see the great insight in our parent’s foresight
But in defense of ill-advised life choices, fathers are not usually forthcoming with great amounts of advice. The American father is laconic. He is always away working, hunting, or shooting bad guys (or at least that is how mother explained my father’s long absences and the unusually large amount of gun fire when he was around.) The American Father speaks only when it is absolutely necessary, when it clear that his son can go no longer without this one great truth to light his way. He passes down this bitter-sweet harvest of wisdom as if it were the only thing of value left that he can give. He crystallizes with workaday poetics the values that for years he has been trying – with scant commentary – to beat into you.
My grandfather was a stoic man who gave the impression that he held many secrets that you did not want, under any circumstance, to know. From him my father was given two rules to live by: 1) always be honest and 2) never do anything for tax purposes. It was from this simple creed that our patriarch had built a great reputation in business, and bored the pants off several accountants.
As masculine reserve is occasionally congenital, my father too is a man of few words. He is, however, a man of a curiously large number of sentences. As I look back at the four or five conversations that I have had with him outside of a courtroom setting one day stands out. I was eight. I came to my fathers study for my daily drilling in Greek, Latin and inhuman self-denial. I was reciting my new translation of Virgil when I garbled a rather pedestrian use of the hortatory subjunctive. I cringed, expecting the customary bucket of ice- water to be thrown on me for my error, but the punishment was not forthcoming. I looked up from my wax tablet and saw my father staring out the window (as he was wont to do when there the Democrats were in power). Lost in thought he disgorged the wisdom of his years. I dutifully recorded his words which I here present.
On Happiness: Every day can’t be ice-cream Sunday
On Gardening (and possibly covetousness): Whoever says the grass is greener doesn’t have to mow it.
On Decisions: Never buy a plan on the attractiveness of the first step.
On Career Choices: The key to life is being able to distinguish your talents from your pleasures.
On The Fairer Sex: With most of ‘em the nut ain’t worth the shell.
On Character and Adversity: People are like crystals, you can tell their structure by how they break.
The Irony of Ignorance: The most transparent people are opaque to themselves.
On the Emotions: You are the ringmaster of your heart. You like to think you have control, but really it is just a whip and a whistle – and if you are lucky a good working relationship with the lions.
On Enduring the Cost of Doing Good: You can’t refuse to join the Nazi party on moral grounds and then complain that you don’t get to wear such nice uniforms.
On Self-Disclosure: The unexamined life is not worth talking about.
Being able to secure these little pieces of wisdom from my father without a subpoena was truly the highlight of a lifetime of curiously awkward father’s days. So as we obey the biblical injunction towards our forbearers remember that in Hebrew “honor” is not a synonym of “imitate”.
Jerkus Maximus: Emperor Erroneous Augustus
Not to be confused with Octavius Augustus, the first Emperor, Erroneous Augustus is known to history as “Augustus” because he usurped the Roman Throne and was subsequently assassinated on the same afternoon in the late summer of 70 AD. In total, this unfortunate patrician’s reign lasted about 78 minutes – which was mostly consumed by his spectacularly inefficient murder. On the subject of his own death he is reported to have said “All of Gaul is divided into three parts and at the moment, apparently so am I.”
Know as a man of few words and not all that many actions, his great claim to fame was a raucous and lewd party that in many ways defined the disregard for morality that eventually caused the fall of the empire. Contemporary police reports state that after three weeks of continuous bacchanalia Erroneous decided to invite some people to join him in the revelry. Once guests arrived the debauchery continued until a group of early animal rights activist burnt Erroneous’ house down. 57 species of exotic animals were eventually rescued, along with about 17 different species of people.
Erroneous’ ascent to the emperorship has often be characterized as an act of theft, mainly because he attained the position by stealing Vespasian’s purple toga in order to win a drunken bet with Cicero. By the time Vespasian’s guards caught and dispatched Erroneous, the false Emperor had declared Christianity the official religion of Rome, mostly because he wanted a religion where he could drink wine in church without all the dirty looks.
Recently Italian workmen digging the foundation for a hospital for victims of scooter accidents uncovered Julian’s tomb. Within the crypt were several maxims carved into the stone sides of the oversized chamber-pot in which he was born, lived and eventually buried. Here, published for the first time, are the few of his saying suitable for publication under current obscenity laws.
On Virtue: The Thracians are the best people. They haven’t lost their taste for burnt meat.
On “The People”: The Ancients say “Give the people bread and circuses”! But now they are demanding cold cuts and more elephants. Where does it end?
On the Barbarian: These Germans make the Scottish look like the Swiss.
On Christianity: They say that this Jesus died for Man’s sins. About 15,000 men have died for my sins, and that is just since breakfast. And I got up pretty late this morning.
On the Problems of Roman Government: The Persians believe their King can control the sun and moon, meanwhile the Roman Emperor has to take a sack of oranges to half the Senate to get an emergency spending bill passed.
On the Gods: Of all the gods the one the Greeks call Athena is my favorite. I know she’s a virgin, but I just have a thing for well-armed chicks.
On Pleasure: It is the poor hedonist that seeks satisfaction. There are some parts of yourself that you want to torment.
On the Duplicity of Cicero: If he told me I was on fire, I would check – twice.
To the Philosophers: Complexity that does not yield clarity is scarcely superior to ignorance.
On Piety: Men should be humble as a sex; for every man is of woman born, and you know how women are always screwing stuff up.
The Most Industrious Industrialist: J.W.P Cobb
We all know the names of the great industrialists: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Iacocca. But what of the unsung industrialists? What of the man of whom Will Rogers once said “This guy makes lunch with Calvin Coolidge feel like a weekend in the Sultan’s harem”
Jonas Wannamaker Phineas Cobb (or JWP as his friends would have called him if he had any) was for 65 years the hardest working man in America. He was by all accounts an unrepentant workaholic, although no one knows the exact rate of his consumption of workahol. Einstein cracked the Special Relativity problem while attempting to explain how Cobb had worked 26.4 hours in one 24 hour day. Eventually, Steven Hawking posited that Cobb had disrupted the space-time continuum by actually giving 110%.
JWP Cobb is celebrated not so much for his work ethic, but for the fact that no matter how many hours he spent in the office he never let it get in the way of his being totally unproductive. Cobb’s biographer, who quite fittingly has never published a biography of Cobb or anyone else, puts it best “When you consider the amount of time he spent working compared to his actual accomplishments it is startling to think that he lived in an age before computer solitaire”. Gerald Gershbach of The Center for Irresponsible Government at Harvard posits that Cobb’s amazing ratio of time spent working to achievement predicts the workplace in the internet age. As Gershbach has said “Never has an invention [the internet] so simultaneously increased and decrease productivity with such ruthless efficiency.”
[Gershbach caused quite a stir when he presented data supporting the idea that the standard workday be changed from eight hours to two and half because if people worked the entire two and half hours this would actually lead to a sharp increase in productivity. Gershbach’s wife, a member on the Harvard Committee for the Perpetuation of Sub-Par Education used the same data to suggest reducing the school day at the high school and elementary level to 4 minutes and the granting of College Degrees on the basis of mail-in, multiple-choice questionnaires.]
Detractors say that Cobb was so demanding that he drove four of his secretaries to suicide (although historians did note that he hired exclusively from the local sanatorium for the treatment of Melancholia and Other Distemperments of the Humours. When another secretary failed in a suicide attempt Cobb declared to him “You never could do anything right.”
Acts such as these make emotions run high among the few that remember him. In their tireless work to preserve the best of American history the DAR raised over a million dollars to buy the Cobb ancestral home in Canton Ohio in order to have the house burned to the ground and the earth sewn with salt so nothing would ever grow upon it again.
While devotedly religious, Cobb was excommunicated by The Catholic Church even though he was born Methodist and had never converted. By the end of his life he had been excommunicated by seven protestant denominations and finally the Unitarians. When he attempted to join a Synagogue in Canton, the rabbi asked him to leave, simply stating “Don’t you think the Jews have enough problems?” Out of respect for the more vicious passages of Leviticus Cobb never returned.
All his life he cursed everything he saw as evil as “Canaanite”. While this was merely annoying when he lived in Ohio it became altogether excruciating to his neighbors when, in order to escape a Papal Bull demanding his imprisonment, he resettled in Canaan, CT. It was in Canaan that Cobb passed to the next world when he was stabbed to death by group of 4th grade girls. Local Canaanite legend has it that the children were joined by fuzzy bunnies and cuddly calico kittens who torn at JWP’s flesh in rage. There is no proof of this, but the story has been considered plausible by historians, theologians and zoologists.
The great irony of his murder was that Cobb spent his entire career making life safer for children. Upon misunderstanding an article in an Italian newspaper at age 14 he spent the remainder of his days producing a cupcake that would not explode. When he was finally given a correct translation of the article he responded simply “Just because no cupcake has yet exploded does not mean that one will not eventually and we cannot take this chance with Americas children.”
Jonas Wannamaker Phineas Cobb with his self-destructive work ethic, his unfathomable inefficiency, his misguided concern about the children and his utterly insufferable personality provide lessons for all Americans. What that lesson might be is anyone’s guess.
The Wit and Wisdom of Jean-Paul Imbecile
Jean-Paul Imbecile [NB: the accent is on the "B" - if only that were possible] was a French poet of little renown and less merit. When he died in 1923 all he left behind were the Collected Works of Racine with all the definite articles circled, some silverware he had stolen from Gertrude Stein, and half a dozen very relieved neighbors. Recently I went to Paris in order to be closer to the kind of people that sell nuclear material to Iran to make up for the economic destruction that socialism has wrecked on their country. I stayed in an old boarding house where one night while trying to bore a hole in the wall of my closet in order to watch my, hopefully female, neighbor walk around in her underwear I discovered what turned out to be Jean-Paul’s Imbecile’s collected papers.
Most of the papers he collected were old utility bills, political propaganda fliers, and about two hundred unmailed letters to La Monde declaring that he had invented the adverb and demanding royalties for its use. There were also several scraps of paper on which Jean-Paul had scribbled at least two hundred of the three hundred or so interesting thoughts he had in his life. He wrote in French. As a second language his use of French was skilled – unfortunately French was his first language. His utter inability to make any sense made him to toast of Paris for a short time. He hung out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and went to all the right parties. People began to suspect that his peculiarity might not be a brilliant post-Dadaist commentary on the workers control of the means of production and then everyone finally decided to shun him once they learned that he was actual poor.
But in these scraps of paper that I found we see a mind both lucid and possibly not that drunk. Since I do not understand French I had the writing translated by someone who doesn’t understand English. From there we had the writings translated from Hindi to English (amazing what you can outsource). I have been assured that the original meanings are presented with crystalline beauty. Of course, I gained this assurance from someone who speaks neither French nor Hindi but really wanted me to stop crying.
Here for the slight annoyance of the community are ten of the Aphorism of JPI:
1. On moral turpitude: Where there is a will, there is a way out.
2. Honest Advice: I am not saying you will be happy. I am saying you will get what you want.
3. Advice to the man of no great skill: Nothing you can do with your clothes on or without a weapon will get you what you want from life.
4. To the Atheist: The mystical credulity of the believer makes a better citizen than your fetish of doubt.
5. On a happy birthday: When you give someone the perfect gift, you call him by his secret name.
6. On that woman: She doesn’t have “an angle”. That’s what makes her so confusing.
7. The lesson of cheese: with care and effort and study a thing of supreme beauty can be made of spoilt milk.
8. The lesson of wine and women: with time something unbearably cloying can become something delightful and intoxicating.
9. My contribution to the venial lexicon of the sexual appeal of women: “No butter, no syrup” – that is “stacked but plain”. [Editors Note: This phrase has also been attributed to Teddy Roosevelt describing the young Margaret Sanger]
10. On an unnamed Romania poet: To call him dull as dishwater is to grossly underestimate how interesting dishwater can occasionally become.
© 2009 Kenan Minkoff
