Forever Young

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Psychotherapist Carl Jung called him the puer aeternus.

The eternal youth.

The adolescent who never grows up.

Peter Pan.

Bro.

Jung warned against the puer aeternus.

Living the couch surfer's life, and without an inner senex (old man) to tell him to check his childish impulses, the puer aeternus soon becomes the slacker, the hooligan, the terrorist, and, eventually, the fascist destroyer of societies.

Jung had two pieces of advice for these neurotics: get a job and deal with your mommy issues.

Meantime—as the neurosis reaches epidemic proportions—what will we grownups do?

Pardon My French

When I see certain social science theories imported from the US, I say we must re-invest in the field of social science.

— Emmanuel Macron

Merde alors!

Something stinks. 

The French, believe it or not, are complaining about the "American" export they call wokisme.

 

President Macron complained last year that wokisme is undermining the whole nation. 

And now French grammarians are complaining that wokisme is corrupting the French language.

Putain!

The French rather conveniently forget that wokisme originated in—of all places—France!

French philosopher Michel Foucault concocted it. 

In the late 1970s, Foucault's radical beliefs vent viral, spreading in less than a decade from the cafes of Paris to the classrooms of America—doubtless making Foucault the single-most influential French export since Coco Chanel.

A disciple of the German Nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche and the French Marxist Louis Althusser, Foucault saw the world in the starkest of terms: as a endless warfare between the powerful and the powerless; between oppressors and the oppressed. 

Foucault interpreted culture—in the broadest sense of the word—to be the club the powerful wield to assure their power. 

And culture surrounds us. Turn over any rock, you'll find the same thing: the people in power subjugating everyone else.

Foucault's idea informs almost every aspect of the "American" woke movement.

And now the chickens have come home to roost.

Or, as we used to say in grammar school, he who smelt it, dealt it.

Combating Stupidity

I don’t like shaking hands with these disgusting people.

— Donald Trump

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by the Nazis for his participation in Operation Valkyrie, understood stupidity and the danger it poses to freedom.

In his essay "On Stupidity" (unpublished in his lifetime), Bonhoeffer offered his conclusions after a decade of witnessing the sorts of Germans who rallied behind der Führer.

They were all adamant.

Stupidity is dangerous because it is adamant, he said; unassailably so.

"Against stupidity we are defenseless: neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything," Bonhoeffer said. 

"Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed; and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as incidental. 

"In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous."

Stupidity isn't related to brains, education or economic class, according to Bonhoeffer. Stupidity is a voluntary defect. People "allow this to happen to them," he wrote.

And stupidity isn't a solitary pursuit. It flourishes within parties. Stupidity is a disease of the psyche wrought by historical forces that propel people, willingly, to surrender their autonomy to a leader and his wims. 

"Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere infects a large part of humankind with stupidity," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell."

Therein lies the danger in stupidity. 

"Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."

Diabolical leaders manipulate the mindless for their own ends, "expecting more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom."

Wise and responsible people can only respond to such manipulation through political acts, Bonhoeffer believed; god-fearing "acts of liberation" designed to unchain the stupid by undermining their leaders. 

We should forget trying to convince a stupid person he's being stupid: combating stupidity head on is "senseless." 

"Internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it," Bonhoeffer wrote.

That's why he joined the plot to remove Adolph Hitler—and why he was hanged.

Quite a Week for Wokeism

Virginians decided this month that wokeism is so offensive they want a governor who will eradicate it from schools.

Of course, these are citizens of the same state that hanged the rebel Nat Turner, then cut off his head, disemboweled him, flayed him, and sold souvenir purses made of his skin.

They don't cotton to upstarts.

Wokeism is certainly all about being an upstart.

Upstart is a 16th-century word denoting "one newly risen from a humble position to one of power, importance, or rank; a parvenu." It was borrowed from the Old Norse upp—meaning "to a higher place"—and the German stürzen—meaning "to hurl."

Wokeism is about being hurled to a higher place.

This has been quite a week for wokeism.

On Tuesday, during a guided tour of the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, I was informed by the docent that the home was "built on the backs of five slaves," an absurd claim given the owner was an extraordinarily enterprising merchant seaman. It was the seaman's wealth that built the lavish house—and that allowed him to own five slaves. The slaves were the seaman's house servants. He didn't involve slaves in his business.

On Wednesday, The Women’s March formally apologized for a fundraising email it sent donors. "We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today," the organizers said. "$14.92 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving." The apology comes so close to mockery, it defies explanation.

And today, the Tate Britain had to defend itself against critics who accused it of "cancelling Hogarth" and promoting "wokeish drivel." The museum's new exhibition, Hogarth and Europe, features wall labels which insist that Hogarth's art was only made possible by the slave trade. Hogarth in fact earned most of his keep selling political cartoons. He disdained slavery.

I'm all for hurling POC to higher places; but wokeism sometimes sounds just silly.

It's silly to attribute everything to slave labor, just as it would be silly to attribute everything to the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the domestication of horses, or the heroism of St. Paddy.

Shit's more complex than that.

Consider, for example, the steps our Founding Fathers took to end the slave trade:

• Northern states abolished slavery in the 18th century. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777; Pennsylvania, in 1780; New Hampshire and Massachusetts, in 1783; Connecticut and Rhode Island, in 1784. By 1860, free states outnumbered slave states.

• Washington enacted the world's first national anti-slavery law. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 prohibited the outfitting of ships for slave transit in any US port.

• Adams strengthened the law. By signing the Slave Trade Act of 1800, Adams prohibited the transit of slaves by US flagships and US citizens aboard foreign flag ships.

• Jefferson stopped the importation of slaves. By signing the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1808, Jefferson ended the trade altogether.

• Monroe criminalized the slave trade. By declaring the trans-Atlantic slave trade an act of piracy, Monroe sought to punish illegal slave-trafficking.

• Tyler pledged to use the Navy to stop slave traders. By signing the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, Tyler agreed to use US Navy ships to interdict slave traffickers.

These are only a few of the "inconvenient truths" wokeism can't abide.

There are a whole lot more.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to historian Glen Williams for citing, via email, the Founding Fathers' anti-slavery legislation.

Mary Had a Little Turkey

If I may talk turkey, let's give credit where credit is due. 

The author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was also the author of Thanksgiving.

Sarah Hale was an early feminist and the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the most widely circulated magazine in America before the Civil War.

The war, when it came, incensed Hale, who took it upon herself to write President Lincoln a letter in September 1862 stating that only he had the power to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday and “permanently an American custom and institution.”

Heeding Mrs. Hale, five days later Lincoln ordered that, henceforth, the fourth Thursday of November would be marked by the national observation of Thanksgiving.

Turkey Day had long obsessed Hale, who grew up observing it in New Hampshire. 

For more than a decade, she had written yearly editorials in Godey's about the holiday, imploring government officials to fix it forever on the country's calendar.

She believed the national holiday would smooth the bitter rift between the North and South.

It took a bloody war to make Hale's dream come true.

Thanksgiving has fallen ever since on the fourth Thursday of November, except in the years 1939 and '40, when, as a means of combating the Depression, FDR moved it up a week, to extend the Christmas-shopping period.

He caved to criticism two years later, and moved the holiday back to the fourth Thursday of November.

POSTSCRIPT: Did you know "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was based on actual events? As a young woman, Sarah Hale taught elementary school near her home in New Hampshire. A student named Mary brought her pet lamb to school one day, inspiring Hale to write and publish the poem. Forty-six years later, a Mary Elizabeth Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, emerged to claim she was the Mary of the poem, and that a local boy had written it. Sawyer was quickly proven a fraud, but not until Sterling had erected a statue of a lamb in the town center.

A Bathtub Full of Baloney

A wise man proportions his belief to his evidence.

— David Hume

"Minds do not create truth or falsehood," philosopher Bertrand Russell said. "They create beliefs."

The same might be said of social media platforms like TikTok.

A new belief making the rounds thanks to TikTok—one particularly appealing to anti-vaxxers—holds that, if you take a "detox bath" in borax after you're inoculated, you will remove all the radiation and government-implanted nanotechnologies the shot delivers.

Now, before you cue the theme music from The Twilight Zone, take a moment to consider that millions of your fellow Americans accept (or are disposed to accept) this baloney as fact.

The baloney-maker is the well-known crackpot Dr. Carrie Madej, who a year ago was called out by Reuters for erroneously claiming that an organism in the Covid vaccine was pointing its tenacles at her. (She was observing house dust on her dirty microscope.)

Where wackos like Madej once had to stand on a box in the park to reach an audience, TikTok gives her a pulpit that faces millions of viewers, many as gullible as two-year-olds.

As a self-described "child of God and believer in Jesus Christ," Madjef ought to remove herself from TikTok and, like her rabbi, find a mount in the desert somewhere from which to deliver her sermon.

A desert on Mars would be perfect. (I hear the radiation problem there is awful.) 

At least one platform provider, Twitter, has kicked Madej off this week for praising borax baths. Hallelujah!

But while TikTok removed Madej’s video last month, the platform permits it to be viewed through a sharing feature called "Duet."

Madej's baloney can also be consumed on Facebook and YouTube.

So where's the issue with baloney? It's a free country. Can't I believe anything I want? 

The issue is fraud.

Madej is defrauding her audience, either knowingly—and therefore recklessly—misrepresenting the facts; or unreasonably—and therefore negligently—misrepresenting the facts.

Either way, it's fraud, and makes Madej a fraudster. 

Trapped

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

— James Baldwin

My favorite line by my favorite writer, William Faulkner, goes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

But Americans are blind to the past.

White people, content with the now—consumption, recreation, and a middle-of-the-road lifestyle—believe the past is all folderol and "forgotten politics;" sound and fury signifying nothing.

People of color believe the past is unknowable and imponderable and—being little but a trail of injury and injustice—too maddening to reconstruct.

Neither group wishes to grant the past's deterministic nature; that it isn't dead—or even past.

To their way of thinking, they owe the past nothing.

Not everyone on the planet thinks that way. Europeans, for example.

Last evening I saw the movie Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's auteurish childhood memoir.

Like an Irish Tolstoy, Branagh makes clear that he owes his entire life's journey to the past; that the path he took through life was ordained not by personal decisions, but by history's forces.

In Branagh's case, those were "The Troubles"—even though his family members were neutral bystanders in that 30-year war between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists.

Even today, the grievances that rocked Northern Ireland in Branagh's youth echo in Irish politics, as the opening scene suggests.

"Forgetting a debt doesn't mean it's paid," an Irish proverb holds.

If only Americans were more like the Irish.

We'd remember our debt to the past.

Helluva Way to Run a Railroad

This is a helluva way to run a railroad.

— Leonor Loree

When civil engineer Leonor Loree took charge of the dilapidated Kansas City Southern Railroad in 1906, he stood before investors and described the railroad's broken-down operations in detail.

"This is a helluva way to run a railroad," he concluded.

I can now say the same of the online art-supply retailer Jerry's Artarama.

The company recently misdirected a $66 shipment of supplies I ordered.

The shipment was sent to my former address (by default), and when I phoned customer service—within two minutes of placing the online order—I was told Jerry's could do nothing to reroute the package. The package wouldn't ship for days, but, when it did, it would ship to my old address. Like it or not, that's they way the system works. Get over it.

I was on my own to recover the goods, too, I was told. Jerry's was officially out of the loop; and if I involved the company further in the matter, there would be hefty fees billed to me.

I have since located and the misdirected package and it has been returned to Jerry's; but no refund has been issued. I'm out my time and trouble and $66.

Every contact with the company's frontline employees suggests to me that Jerry's corporate culture is toxic.

At Jerry's:

• Everyone clearly is a helpless slave to internal systems, hidebound policies, and an iron-fisted supervisor;
  
  
• Problems must not be acknowledged;
  
  
• Customers—even so-called VIP ones—are annoying, not to be trusted, and always in the wrong.

In the past three years, I have spent several thousand dollars with Jerry's. You'd think someone would know that, in the era of CRM. Perhaps someone does, but doesn't care.

In any case, henceforth I'm a loyal customer of Jerry's competitor, Blick. 

Jerry's is on my s-list.

Forever. 

I plan, as well, to tell fellow artists about my lousy experience with Jerry's at every opportunity.

Helluva way to run a railroad.

POSTSCRIPT: Goodly subscribes to the fairness doctrine, and in that spirit will afford the president of Jerry's Artarama, Mr. Ira Goldstein, his two cents. 

He kindly wrote today in response to the above:

"I am very sorry for the events that occurred that have left you unhappy with Jerry’s handling of your recent order. I assure you that I take all of customers' concerns seriously. 

"I have reached out to our customer service director Steven Gilmore to look into your order and find out where the disconnect was that derailed your shopping experience with us. Steven will reach out after looking into the details.

"Jerry’s tries to set ourselves apart in artist product offerings, our prices and most importantly our service. Sometime things occur not by design and your email will help us to fix what occurred in the future and right this for you to the best of our ability. I would like to thank you, for contacting me will help us make sure this does not occur in the future."

POST POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Steven Gilmore phoned me to apologize for the customer-service failure and suggested that Jerry's computer system sent the package to my former address out of "overzealous fraud protection" and that Jerry's employees could not redirect the shipment once the system decided where it would go. He promised I would receive a refund of my $66.

UPDATE AS OF NOVEMBER 28: Jerry's has refused to refund me the $66. I contacted the company by email to tell them to keep it and buy the CEO a box of cigars.

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 14: I shared the post above with famed marketing guru David Meerman Scott, who reacted forthwith: "Customer service should be an opportunity to build fans. Clearly Jerry's is not doing a good job."

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 25: I received a full refund from Jerry's. Unsure why, but I have no complaint. Perhaps Mr. Scott's remark sped it along. Looks like there is a Santa Claus!

Boobarians

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought historians were like crabs, because they always "look backwards."

Most Americans never look backwards. Unless some grievance is concerned, they don't give a fig about the past—or know anything about it.

I've been devoting time recently as a volunteer to an historic preservation nonprofit, and so have been reading and thinking a lot about Americans' grand indifference to history. 

I've learned, among other things, that the American Association for State and Local History published a research paper recently that plumbs the depths of that indifference.

To inform themselves, the researchers interviewed 13 professional historians and 20 adult citizens. 

They found that, on the whole, Americans consider history merely the random concatenation of events—without significance.

(That history and its teaching have become headline news this week has nothing to do with Americans' passion for the subject, but only some people's hatred of others.)

Specifically, the researchers found that Americans share these eight beliefs:

1. History comprises the acts of a smattering of great figures. Martin Luther King, for example, solely crafted the civil rights Blacks now enjoy. (And the Freedom Riders were—who cares?) 
   
   
2. The great figures were nearly all White and male; the acts of lesser figures don't merit consideration. (Sorry, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.) 
   
   
3. Dredging up unpleasant parts of the past is a drag, and to be avoided. (Sorry, Crazy Horse.)
   
   
4. History is factual (transparent, indisputable); and historians are just news reporters. The news that most historians report is simply "old news." (The news that mavericks like Nikole Hannah-Jones and the late Howard Zinn report, on the other hand, is "fake news.")
   
   
5. Evidence-based history is just "historians' opinion," not the truth. (Sure, the truth is out there—but only Mulder and Scully will ever find it.)
   
   
6. History is useless; a dead-end hobby. (Sorry, Ken Burns.)
   
   
7. Learning history is all about memorization. (Why bother when you can Google it?)
   
   
8. Teachers of history get worse and worse all the time. (No surprise. Our schools suck, in general.)  

Odd though it may sound, the researchers concur with belief Number 8: teachers of history have let Americans down. "The K-12 education system fails to teach the skills necessary for students to engage critically with the past," they write.

And while they suggest ways for future historians to tackle these eight detrimental beliefs, the researchers are clear about the intractable nature of the problem educators have created.

As critics a century ago said of America, we're a nation of boobarians.

Smoke

Be sure where books are burned, people will also be burned.

— Heinrich Heine

This week I found a used copy of the famously-banned Stranger in a Strange Land on Thriftbooks and gave it to a sci-fi fan who's never read it.

Were it to grab his attention, that act would put me in the sights of right-wing ideologue Rabih Abuismail, the Virginia school board member who is calling for objectionable books to be burned.

Why book burning is the go-to act of the self-righteous is well understood.

Book burning (also known as libricide) fills the need to terrorize a mainstream culture and represents a baby step toward genocide.

Why Mr. Abuismail, a purported Christian, feels compelled to murder fellow Americans escapes me. 

But have no doubt that's where he and his mob of right-wing brothers and sisters are heading.

Where there's smoke...

Tom

Many a man has found his place in the world because of having been forced to struggle for existence early in life.

— Napoleon Hill

Joining the 9-to-5 workforce as a rookie, as I did in the 1970s, can be unnerving.

You immediately learn that it's filled with people like Tom.

I remember encountering numerous Toms in my first 9-to-5 job. 

Jovial, assured and smug, middle-aged Tom glides through his job, the very model of self-confidence. 

Without enemies, Tom gets all the rewards, all the perks, all the bonuses and the big trip to Mexico.

Tom's in control of his destiny.

But within five minutes of getting to know Tom, you realize he's unoriginal and vapid and completely complacent. 

He's pleased by his place in the organization; works minimally; and remains only truly passionate about golf and that new blonde in accounting.

We wonder today, what's wrong with our economy? Why won't Gen Y'ers and Z'ers accept all the plentiful jobs available—and stick with them for more than a year?

We look all over the place for answers, when the answer's obvious.

Gen Y and Z weren't raised, as Boomers were, to tolerate—even celebrate—the Toms of the world.

Boomers were raised to put up with chronic bullshit; to accept that the workplace by nature was discriminatory and that "both cream and scum rise to the top;" and—most importantly—that the Toms earn their comfortable stature in the workplace by dint of tenure, obedience, and affability—and nothing more.

Boomers' parents, children of the Depression who came of age during World War II, taught them those beliefs.

They taught Boomers that struggle at a young age was the law of success; that, in the words of self-help pioneer Napoleon Hill, "far from being a disadvantage, struggle is a decided advantage."

Gen X'ers and Z'ers, on the other hand, were taught Trophy Communism. Struggle is anathema to them. 

As a result, they want it all, and they want it now. 

Gen X'ers and Z'ers are contemptuous of the Toms of the world and content to "sit out the economy" until all the Toms retire.

The Committee on Lunacy

In 1883, Pennsylvania formed the Committee on Lunacy to supervise the state's treatment of the the mentally ill.

The Committee was particularly focused on the way asylum-keepers were handling the "criminally insane," who in the 19th century were housed with the general population of lunatics.

The Committee, which succeeded in building separate institutions for the criminally insane, was eventually disbanded, but the time has come to reconvene the group—and give it national oversight.

I'm calling on you to volunteer your time and join the Committee on Lunacy 2.0.

Our mission is simple: to find ways to isolate the criminally insane from the rest of the population.

Although dangerous lunatics abound, under our committee's immediate consideration are four persons of particular interest:

• Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, who posted a video to social media that depicts him killing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden with a sword.
  
  
• Teen vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, who pleaded not guilty to six charges of first-degree homicide in the shooting deaths of two protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse was armed with an AR-15.

• Rapper Travis Scott, who incited 50,000 fans to stampede the stage at a Houston concert last weekend, resulting in the deaths of eight people. The victims were trampled to death.
  
  
• Former President Donald Trump, who in the final year of his administration promoted his bellhop to run the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), deputizing the 29-year-old to ferret out political enemies. Trump aides compared the PPO under the bellhop's control to the Gestapo. (Before his promotion, the bellhop had been fired from the White House for concealing large gambling wins from the FBI, but Trump promoted him anyway.) 

I you wish to join our committee, please send me an email. 

Please note, you must be able to silly-walk.

The Whiniest Generation

 

During World War II, Winston Churchill imposed "double British summer time" on the UK, adding an hour to the clock in winter and two in summer. His edict stayed in place for more than five years.

Erik Larsen describes the effects in The Splendid and the Vile:

"Winter mornings always were dark at this latitude, but a change in how Britain kept time during the war made the mornings darker than ever. The previous fall the government had invoked 'double British summer time' to save fuel and give people more time to get to their homes before the blackout began each day. The clocks had not been turned back in the fall, as per custom, and yet would still be turned forward again in the spring. This created two extra hours of usable daylight during the summer, rather than just one, but also ensured winter mornings would be long, black, and depressing, a condition that drew frequent complaints in civilian diaries."

Britain's Greatest Generation may have whined in their diaries, but they were no match for today's Americans, who I will dub the Whiniest Generation.

Yesterday, 322 million Americans gained an extra hour of daylight every morning and complained about it.

USA Today in fact reported last week that millions of us complain about the ill effects of the time-change. 

It seems the time-change messes with us big time.

The paper cited one scientific study linking the time-change to heart attacks; another linking it to strokes; and a third linking it to cancer.

Besides affecting their physical health, the switch from Daylight Savings to Standard Time hampers Americans' abilities to concentrate, evaluate risk, problem-solve, make decisions, operate machinery, take tests, keep appointments, and control their emotions.

But it has no effect on Americans' ability to whine—incessantly.

No power on earth can stop that.

Are Museums Laughingstocks?

Every generation laughs at the old fashions,
but follows religiously the new.

― Thoreau

A new study by the American Association for State and Local History suggests public interest in museums might have hit a brick wall.

Museum attendance declined 70% last year, the study finds. 

Casual observers blame the pandemic, of course; but museum executives are worried. Last year's falloff caps 40 years of decline. (Museum-going had already fallen by 50% between 1980 and 2020.)

The pandemic simply could be the proverbial "last nail" in the coffin.

Just ask any teen: museums are out of fashion, laughingstocks among the new generations. (I'm not sure Boomers and their parents cared for them all that much, either.)

Museum is a 17th-century word borrowed directly from the Latin for "library." Latin borrowed museum from the Greek mouseion, literally a "temple of the Muses."

The decline in museum attendance might signal that the Muses have abandoned us; that today's Americans are content to be a stupid and sluggish herd—a mediocracy.

Or it could mean museums are simply no match for amusements (a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek amousos, meaning "Muse-less" or "uneducated").

That's more likely the case. 

In the words of media critic Neil Postman, we're "amusing ourselves to death."

Thank goodness at least some museum executives are responding to the crisis.

My wife and I recently visited The Concord Museum in Massachusetts, only two weeks after it had finished a $16 million renovation.

From beginning to end, the experience was a marvel—as engaging as any Disney destination, but with the content unsanitized (as it should be).

Brand-new galleries in the museum feature artifacts from the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; from hometown writer Louisa May Alcott; from local Abolitionists like Mary Brooks; from the African Americans who lived in Concord since its founding in 1635: and from the Nipmuc tribe that lived there long before.

Topping these rooms is the gallery devoted to the Battle of Concord, the dustup that ignited the American Revolution. In addition to militaria (including Paul Revere's lantern), it features a remarkable digital display—for narrative drive and subtle drama, far and away the best animation of its kind you'll ever see.

The Concord Museum's grip on innovation is firm, and, for that institution, could be the magic bullet needed to reverse audience decline.

But there's a roadblock to innovation like this: politics.

Politics—as they do many Americans—stymy museum executives, because politics dictate what gets displayed and what doesn't. They also define which museums get funding, and which are starved. Politics even define what a museum is—either a "permanent institution" (the right's definition) or a "democratizing space" (the left's).

Museum executive Thomas Hoving once said, "It's hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business."

He's right. 

It might be asking too much of hidebound museum executives to become revolutionaries, although that is what they need to be, if museums aren't to remain laughingstocks forever.

Above: Thoreau's Desk at The Concord Museum.

Monikers

Monikers have always fascinated me.

The Sultan of Swat. 

The Wizard of Menlo Park.

The Angel of the Battlefield. 

The Desert Fox. 

The Elephant Man.  

Moniker is a hobo's term meaning "nickname." It was borrowed directly from Shelta, the form of Gaelic spoken by Irish gypsies.

But not all monikers are alike.

Sobriquets are praiseworthy monikers. 

Epithets are derogatory ones.

A sobriquet—derived from the Old French word for jest—is bestowed out of fondness (the Old French word sobriquet literally meant a "chuck under the chin.") A sobriquet is also bestowed out of awe. The Man of Steel is an example.

An epithet—derived from the Greek word for added—is bestowed in order to disparage.* The Mutton-Eating Monarch is an example.

Grammarians would say sobriquets and epithets are adjectives (adjectival phrases). But onomasticians insist that, because they substitute for a person's proper name, sobriquets and epithets are in fact pronouns.

If that's the case, I might start insisting my pronoun of choice isn't he, she, or they, but "The Maven of Monikers."

Sadly, fanciful monikers are fast becoming extinct. But some are ageless. 

Among the hundreds of ageless sobriquets, my favorite include:

• The Bard (William Shakespeare)
• The Boss (Bruce Springsteen)
• The Duke (John Wayne)
• The Father of His Country (George Washington)
• The Godfather of Soul (James Brown)
• The Governator (Arnold Schwarzenneger) 
• The Great Emancipator (Abraham Lincoln)
• The King of Rock & Roll (Elvis Presley)
• The Lion of Round Top (Strong Vincent)
• The Man from Uncle (Napoleon Solo)
• The Prince of Peace (Jesus Christ)
• The Swamp Fox (Francis Marion)

Among the hundreds of ageless epithets, my favorite include:

• The Bastard of Bolton (Ramsay Bolton)
• The Boston Strangler (Albert DeSalvo)
• The Butcher of Lyon (Klaus Barbie)
• The Hick from French Lick (Larry Bird)
• The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher)
• The Kid (William Bonney)
• The Little Corporal (Napoleon Bonaparte)
• The Louisville Lip (Mohammed Ali)
• The Old Pretender (James Francis Edward Stuart)
• The Tangerine Tornado (Donald Trump)
• The Teflon Don (John Gotti)
• The Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski)

What are your favs?

*Nickname literally means "added name." The word derives from the Old English word ekename. Over time, English speakers garbled it. "Babe Ruth had an ekename" became "Babe Ruth had a nickname."