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.

Assisted Play Care (Schools)

Dear Schools: stop fussing about EDUCATING the kids. Education is a nice auxiliary benefit to schooling—but the really essential thing is CHILD CARE. That is what you must focus on now, in what our esteemed and compassionate leaders call “these difficult times.” Child care is what both the president and many parents REALLY want. So just get busy and convert those classrooms to child-care isolation wards (plastic cubicles?) for about ten socially-distanced internees per room. Staff members formerly known as “teachers” will become fully PPE’d nurse/monitors who move about their wards checking to see that sanitation measures are respected and that “every child succeeds” in playing video games and watching cartoons on school-provided computers or i-pads. 

When necessary, a student internee may be excused to go to the restroom, accompanied by a junior teacher/nurse/ monitor to ensure that peeing and pooping and hand-washing are accomplished according to CDC guidelines. Other, more senior (i.e., old and at-risk) teacher/nurse/monitors will be equipped with walkie-talkies and will patrol halls and public areas to ensure that no one is using them and that absolutely nothing is going on anywhere. About twice a day, a KP teacher, fully PPE’d, of course, will push a little cart from ward to ward, offering internees water, jello cups and cellophane-sealed Velveeta sandwiches.

Interestingly, the sole testing procedure occurring in these new “assisted play centers” will be for Covid-19, but only if a teacher/monitor has observed that an internee has symptoms and only if prior permission has been obtained from a parent or guardian. Thus, the few remaining teachers who have not been assigned ward duties, bathroom duties, patrol duties, or KP duties will be occupied in plastic cubicles filling out necessary forms and shredding outdated legal documents. All teacher/nurse/babysitters will therefore be fully employed, though not in teaching, of course. Nevertheless, every teacher will be required to possess an official teaching credential, as will any substitute hired to replace a regular teacher who is sick, hospitalized or dying of Covid-19. Obviously, this is to ensure a continuity of competent care for our precious children “in these difficult times.”

 

I Can't Bare It Any Longer

Yesterday I bought some new pajamas.

FYI, pajamas are now called "sleep bottoms" and "sleep tops" by all the trendy fashionista salesladies at Target.

I bought only the bottoms, because that's the part of me that I can no longer bare in bed, let alone while making toast in the morning.

I used to be able to bare things better.

But those things are no longer bareable. Not at all.

Alas, my new jammies are hot and twisty and bindy and, pour comble de misère, ugly. I told the lady that I was too old for the Spiderman design, but she persuaded me that classic cars were "ageless." Maybe. But they are almost as dreary as my unbareable bottom.

Why do they say "age before beauty"? It's really beauty before age, isn't it? Until, finally, you can't bare it any longer?

And you have to cover it with tiny, dreary, blue Studebakers.

Didn't Studebaker go out of business?

I suppose that's next.

Osmosis and Walls: Why Deportation Will Fail

People who read history know that when outsiders want "in," they will, eventually, get in—fences, walls and military force notwithstanding. This is not a matter of right and wrong, nor is it preventable--at least in the long term.

Temporarily, of course, walls and police actions can impede and delay this ingress. When we feel threatened by outsiders, we quite understandably implement such measures--even as we subconsciously sense that they won't provide any lasting solution and that they really aren't even justified within our OWN system of American values.

Huh, Kirkeby? So you believe it is legitimate to break American laws and enter this country illegally?

Well, yes, I guess I do, since a natural law invariably trumps a national law. Each of us has only one life; and each of us legitimately, I believe (as Mr. Jefferson so eloquently stated), has the right—or, at least, the instinctive desire—to live that life with as much liberty and pursuit of happiness as he/she can obtain. This is a universal law of human nature, inscribed in the reptilian brains of homo sapiens (though not, I am sure, in any divine or karmic plan— Mr. Jefferson was either wrong or disingenuous in referring to “Nature’s God.”)

So I do not blame foreigners who, following their instincts, gather the courage to leave homelands that offer little and seek to improve their lot in the U.S. This movement of peoples appears to me as natural and as inevitable as osmosis. Furthermore, like osmosis, (and despite any hastily contrived interventions) it will not stop until an equilibrium is achieved--until the “shithole countries” (Trump’s elegant term) become as appealing as the US or until the US becomes as unappealing as those shitholes. 

Question is, then, once these courageous and often desperate migrants get in (whether by legal or extra-legal means), will they become "insiders" and help the existing culture survive and grow or will they remain hostile "outsiders," committed to resisting and/or dismantling the existing culture?  Surely, a lot depends on how the existing culture "welcomes" their unavoidable arrival.

Will we let them—indeed, encourage them—to become part of “us”? Our history suggests that sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. And that the deciding factor, alas, is most often race or skin color. Sobering, and the subject for a later post.

The Conscience Is a Crock

How to know the Good: age-old dilemma. I just had an online "discussion" with two very self-assured, very self-righteous, very "self-reliant" (in the Emersonian sense) anti-war zealots. They were signing and emailing petitions to world governments demanding that, because of the zealots' conscientious objection to taking human life, they be exempted from any taxes intended to "pay for war."

Of course, my two interlocutors knew only too well that these petitions, if they were ever read by any official of any government, would be dismissed out of hand as the frivolous ravings of crackpots.  But a positive response from governments was not the petitioners' real purpose.  Their purpose was consciousness-raising, rattling cages, attention-getting.

Well, they got my attention--mostly because I, too, (like that hypothetical government drudge assigned to read crackpot emails), found the petition ludicrous--on a par with the whinging of the right-wing "religious liberty" folks--you know, those self-designated guardians of morality who want a government dispensation to discriminate against people whom they, in their Bible-befogged consciences, condemn as "disordered."

But as the argument progressed, I began to reflect a bit more deeply--and I realized that my aversion to the deliberately provocative petition was not that I disagreed with the anti-war sentiment--I think that wars, in general, are more harmful than beneficial--but rather that I was deeply suspicious of what I must call "justification by conscience."

Because “conscience,” all too often, is an illusion—a dishonest (though often purely reflexive) attempt by our conscious brain to objectify and rationalize as “good” our subjective, prerational and hence, morally neutral, reactions to our environment. That transcendental notion--still so prominent in American thinking--that our inner selves will just somehow "naturally" vibrate in unison with the great Oversoul and the Ultimate Good--well, it's a crock. Self-reliance--if one is relying on nonsense or fantasy or knee-jerk emotion is less "good" than merely quixotic.

So let's talk about what we really mean when we talk about the "conscience." Dictionaries tend to define conscience as an "inner-voice" that defines "right and wrong" and directs our conscious mind to act accordingly. OK. But what interests me most is the question of a moral CRITERION. 

In other words, WHAT principle or yardstick does the conscience use to determine whether a certain behavior is right or wrong? Here, psychology's concept of the super-ego offers some enlightenment: apparently, for its judgments, the super-ego relies almost entirely upon the cultural norms prevalent in an individual's home society/environment. THESE NORMS ARE SUBJECTIVE AND VARIABLE (though I suppose there might be a few that are universal). In short, what our conscience tells us is right depends, for the most part, on the family we were born in, the religion of our parents, the political and economic conventions we have internalized, the education we have received. Conscience is NOT an objective guide to truth or the Good--it merely tells uswhat other people like us believe is good because they have been taught pretty much the same thing that we have been taught.

So conscience, really, just tells us what we already thought: it cannot legitimize or justify our beliefs in reference to any objective God or Natural Law or Great Oversoul. It is, in other words, a nice, cozy, feel-good crock.

Mammy’s Rule: It Ain’t Fittin’

Regardless of Gone With the Wind’s undeniable racial stereotyping, I think that Mammy is the most consistently reasonable and admirable character in that book/movie. And I also think that her famous “rule” is by far the best way to measure the acceptability of statues, place names, etc. Let’s simply ask ourselves: is the PURPOSE of this statue/name “fittin’” for the PLACE/TIME in which it is situated? Is it fittin’ to honor a vice president of the Confederacy in the U.S. Capitol in 2020? No. (Because this statue’s PURPOSE is to glorify and legitimize racism and rebellion—and such a message is not acceptable in this place, at this time.)

On the other hand, is it fittin’ to honor crusader king St. Louis with a statue in a city named for him? Yes, I think so. (Because this statue’s PURPOSE is to encourage a city to take pride in the saintly virtues of its eponymous patron—not to glorify or advocate Louis IX’s anti-semitism.) 

Mammy’s rule should also be applied to names. Was Austin, Texas, for example, given that name because Stephen Austin was an advocate and defender of slavery? Certainly not, though he was both—but rather, because he is regarded as the “Father of Texas” (as unlikable a showman as he probably was). 

Sometimes, a thing is fittin’ even if you don’t like it, people! And sometimes, as Mammy would say, a thing—like, for instance, Miss Scarlett showing her bosom before three o’clock—well, that just AIN’T fittin’ (at least, for a barbecue given for plantation gentry in 1861). Yes, I admit, there IS a measure of relativity—time and place—involved in Mammy’s rule. So be it. It’s still the most fittin’ rule I can think of for these unruly and iconoclastic times.