It Is What It Is

URBAN DICTIONARY: TOP DEFINITION

PANGLOSS

“The philosopher in Voltaire's Candide. He believes ‘All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’ Even as he suffers horribly throughout the book [and winds up losing his nose to syphilis] he stands by this concept. By the end of the book, though, he admits ‘he asserted it still, but he no longer believed it.’”

IMO, Donald Trump is our modern Pangloss. His motto is “It is what it is”—a justification for accepting and even encouraging existing or potential evil. This is DJT’s Fake Optimism and the source of all his ludicrous hyperbole. In reality it is a cruel, brutish, pessimistic, and stupid ideology. 

I suspect that many Trump supporters are like poor old syphilitic  Pangloss: they still “assert” the MAGA doctrines, but they no longer truly “believe.” They will continue to vote for Trump, though not out of any real conviction, but merely in order to demonstrate what Emerson called “a foolish consistency.”

Work Is a Waste of Time

Now don’t misunderstand: I am not CATEGORICALLY opposed to work. Some people seem to enjoy creating and producing “useful” things, and if that is how they wish to spend their time and acquire spending money, I certainly must respect their choice. But it IS a choice, and to my mind, a quite unnatural one. You see, we are all born free and lazy. Leisure is our birthright, as aristocrats have always recognized. Wealth, upkeep, and booze should come from elsewhere, preferably the constitutional order of things—the government, inheritance, go-fund-me accounts, and other convenient sources with links on Facebook.

Take the Crawleys of Downton Abbey, for example. They would never even THINK of engaging in productive or utilitarian activity. Rather, they spend their days exercising their God-given right to be civilized human beings. They drink tea, eat salmon mousse, smoke cigars, attend flower shows, shoot grouse, pay visits to other idle people of refinement and conspire to either marry or deceive them. This is the way human life SHOULD be lived, don’t you agree—in total blissful uselessness? 

On the other hand, expecting or obliging people to WORK—unless they absolutely WANT to, of course—is clearly unfair and an egregious abuse of human rights. Work is, let’s face it, a frequent form of discrimination against gullible people. Shouldn’t we all strive, but without too much exertion, to Make Unemployment Fun Again? MUFA.

The Golden Bard



Have you noticed that Donald Trump, in his unmatched mastery of words, is particularly fond of “poetic” devices? Anaphora, internal rhyme, alliteration, hyperbole—and, of course, lots of good old repetition? Here’s his latest political “insight,” cast as a free-verse poem. Isn’t it awesome?

“Not Doing Too Well” (by Donald Trump)

“Biden is going

To do things

That nobody ever

Would ever

Think even possible.

He’s following the radical

Left Agenda

Take away

Your guns,

Destroy

Your Second Amendment.

No religion,

No anything.

Hurt the Bible.

Hurt God.

He’s against guns.

He’s against energy.

Our kind of energy.

I don’t think he’s going to do

Too well 

In Ohio.

He’s not going to

Do well.”

Laughter and the Law of the Third

Of all the creatures on this planet, only humans laugh, because only humans see patterns and thus anticipate or predict trends and outcomes. When their predictions are unexpectedly overthrown by something that doesn't fit a pattern they have perceived, they react to this out-of-jointness—sometimes, if the incongruity causes suffering, by weeping at the “tragedy,” but other times, when the interruption is merely ridiculous or embarrassing, by laughing at the “comedy.” 

This very human response is a kind of acknowledgement of our own failure, our own detachment from reality, our own separation from the universe--which would make no assumptions about either patterns or interruptions thereto. The universe cannot be surprised, since it cannot detach itself from itself in order to see what's going on. But humans are "out of it" and when "it" doesn't behave according to our expectation, we either weep—or, more frequently, I think, laugh. And we laugh—we cannot help it—at how inescapably preposterous something or someone is—and by extension, how absurd everything, including homo sapiens itself, is.

Masters of comedy have many tricks for provoking laughter—and this heightened awareness of the “nonsense of things.” In my reading and teaching, I have noted, though, that almost all comic writers have a particular fondness for what I call the “law of the third.” 

Such writers (let us take Jane Austen, for example) create, in all apparent innocence, a thematic pattern—by citing at least two elements belonging to a single category of human experience. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, Elizabeth Bennet blandly observes that Charlotte Collins seems content with “her home, her housekeeping, her parish”—all admirable concerns that lead the reader to expect a final element of approbation and esteem. But instead, Elizabeth ends her enumeration with “and her poultry.” This incongruous “third” (actually “fourth”) element—from a quite different and more trivial realm of experience—surprises us, and in making us laugh, overturns our assumption, formed by the pattern of the preceding elements, that Elizabeth approves unreservedly of her friend’s current status and occupations. 

This “law of the third” might also be termed the “absurd third.” It is my favorite device in comic writing, especially when I am doing the writing. Probably because it is so easy, so enjoyable —and so nasty.