Pedestals

Someday maybe I'll remember to forget.

— Bob Dylan

Three historical figures were knocked from their pedestals this week: the mariner Christopher Columbus, the British slave trader Edward Colston, and the Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

Many historical figures are on unsure footing right now. They'd better watch out: when the mighty fall, they fall fast and hard.

The word pedestal, meaning a "base supporting a statue," was borrowed in the 16th century from the French piédestal. The French in turn borrowed their word from the Italian piedistallo. 

Pied is Italian for "foot;" stallo, for "seat;" so pedestal literally means a "seat for the feet." When someone is "knocked from his pedestal," he's not having his feet knocked out from under him, but his ego taken down a notch—likely because he's fallen from favor.

When a prominent figure fell from favor in Ancient Rome, he sometimes really fell. Disgraced emperors like Caligula, Domitian, Nero and Geta were doled out a punishment worse than death: oblivion, a brutal sentence that centuries later came to be called damnatio memoriae—the "condemnation of memory."

For their crimes, every memory, every trace of the condemned was obliterated; they were literally erased from history. Statues of the condemned were destroyed; pictures of them, buried; coins bearing their images, melted; homes where they lived, razed; possessions they once held, burned; and inscriptions of their names on buildings, defaced.

Lenin after the collapse of the USSR

Although Rome disappeared, the practice of damnatio memoriae didn't.

In modern times, Benedict Arnold suffered damnatio memoriae. So did Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Zhao Ziyang and Sassam Hussein.

Each of these figures lost not only his pedestal, but his pedigree, meaning an "individual's family history."

The word pedigree comes from the medieval French term pied de grue, meaning "foot of the crane." 

French genealogists of the day used a three-prong symbol on their charts to show the line of descent of a noble family. One day, a genealogist noticed the symbol resembled a crane's foot, so named it pied de grue. 

The English borrowed the term in the 15th century to mean "line of descent" or "family history," but soon corrupted it, and now we say pedigree.

Aggrieved

I saw my enemies, and they are worms.

— Adolph Hitler 

You have to wonder why a powerful world leader would waste his time settling grievances with celebrities.

Until you realize, it's déjà vu all over again.

Celebrity-obsessed, Adolph Hitler loved to pal with famous actors and filmmakers, often inviting them to the Old Chancellery to drink Cokes (his beverage of choice) and screen movies after dinner.

Even more than watching celebrities on the screen, Hitler loved watching Hitler, and after his appointment as chancellor in 1933 took quick steps to enshrine himself on celluloid, telling his minister of "public enlightenment," Josef Goebbels—an equally avid movie buff—to find him a qualified director.

Goebbels first invited "Metropolis" director Fritz Lang—Hitler's favorite filmmaker—to try his hand. "Give us great Nazi films," Goebbels told him; but Lang, raised by a Jewish mother, politely declined—and boarded the night train for Paris.

So Goebbels turned to Leni Riefenstahl, who, borrowing heavily from "Metropolis," made "Triumph of the Will" the following year. 

Riefenstahl's film purported to be an inexpensive newsreel covering a party rally in Nuremberg; it was anything but. Hitler gave her an unlimited budget that allowed the director to stage and shoot multiple takes of lavish sequences, using sixteen camera crews and banks of aerial searchlights loaned by the Luftwaffe. Although the movie's big star was real, the crowds and parades—and even the buildings—were not.

"Triumph of the Will" was a smash, turning Hitler into a hero throughout the fatherland. (Thank goodness the technology was lacking for "Der Lehrling.")

But, sadly, overnight stardom and the adoration of millions didn't dampen Hitler's resentment of celebrities who crossed him, and the thin-skinned autocrat began keeping a personal blacklist of the hundreds of cultural "undesirables" he planned to liquidate.

On Hitler's blacklist were names familiar from stage and screen: Jack Benny, Myrna Loyd, Jack Warner, Charlie Chaplin, Victor Borge, Noel Coward, Bertolt Brecht, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf... and Moe, Larry and Curly.

Not the likeliest social critics, nonetheless in 1940 The Three Stooges starred in "You Nazty Spy!", the very first Hollywood film to satirize der Führer—and an act of defiance that marked them for "moider."

NOTE:"You Nazty Spy!" opens with the following disclaimer: "Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle." The same applies to this blog post.

Make 'Em Laugh

The Young Rembrandt as Democritus the Laughing Philosopher

Life without festival is like a long road without an inn.  

— Democritus

Ancient Greeks thought of anyone from the city of Abdera: he's a buffoon.

That bias lives on even today in the phrase Abderian laughter, which denotes the laughter of a fool—of a schmegeggy who'll laugh at anything.

The citizens of Abdera owed their reputation to a native son, Democritus, known throughout the Greek Empire as the “Laughing Philosopher.”

Democritus believed the goal of man was cheerfulness—called euthymia in the jottings he left behind—and wrote, "They are the fools who live life without enjoyment of life."

Contemporaries said this "champion of cheerfulness" made a habit of staying merry by laughing at human foibles.

Laughter might seem foreign to us right now, as we steer through "these uncharted times" (a pet phrase of the peppy voiceover at my Safeway).

But laughter has always helped folks in distress, as just one example reminds us: an inmate of the "Hanoi Hilton"—itself a wry nickname for the horrific prison camp—wrote on the wall in the POWs' shower stall, "Smile, You're on Candid Camera."

Success, wealth, independence and leisure sound good, until you count their cost in fear—fear of their loss.

But cheerfulness leads to fear's absence—to athambria, as the Laughing Philosopher called it.

You can't be fearful when you're cheerful.

Counter Intuition

It's July 1935. Two of ten men and women are jobless. Breadlines and shanty-towns are common. Businesses have cut capital spending, deeper even than the year before.

In Massachusetts, two teenage brothers borrow $547 from their parents to open an ice cream shop they name "Friendly." They offer double-dip cones of store-made ice cream for a nickel―half the price charged by drug-store soda fountains―and stay open 'til midnight.

You know the rest: 40 years later, the brothers―after adding an apostrophe S to the name―own 500 shops.

Furloughed friends of mine ask if it's time to polish the resume or "go 1099." 

I answer, though it's counter-intuitive, "There's no time like the present to hang up your shingle."

It isn't easy to run a business, much less earn enough to support yourself―especially during a recession.

I know from experience.

But examples of businesses begun in recessions are bountiful: GE, GM, Marriott, Disney, HP, Trader Joe’s, FedEx, IBM, Microsoft, Instagram, Uber, Pinterest and Square, to name just a few.

The secret to success? 

It isn't capital or a "big idea.

It's hunger.

Recessions are distinct not only because they cause unemployment, but spawn survivalists, "spunky" entrepreneurs who launch businesses with low start-up costs and ready customers―like the ones hankering for a late-evening ice cream in 1935 Massachusetts.

But whatever you do, don't ask me for sound business advice.

I'm like the retailer who buys $3 shirts and sells them for $2. 

"How do you get away with that?" my competitor asks. 

“I make it up in volume.”

Unstoppable

George is looking down and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country. This is a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody.

― Donald Trump

As he signed a bill that interferes with the free market, free-market maven Donald Trump this week alluded to economists' notion that "a rising tide lifts all boats" and implied the bill would repair race relations in our country.

Apologists for the president don't grasp the fact that, while a rising tide lifts some boats, many Americans are marooned―black ones disproportionately.

More accurately, Trump's apologists don't care that many Americans are marooned.

Those of us appalled by Trump―a majority of Americans―recognize on some level that he's refusing to acknowledge a social evil and is therefore guilty of passive injustice.

Trump's failure to protest an evident injustice is itself an injustice―an injustice his apologists are content with.

Philosophers have deployed such willful indifference, advocating instead the "doctrine of acts and omissions."

The doctrine goes: when you can see that acting or refusing to act will bring about a similar result, there's an ethical, if not practical, difference between acting and refusing to do so.

In short, omissions can be as wanton as commissions. In a pinch, there's no such thing as a "bystander:" refusing to act is negligence.

Champions of the doctrine point to moral quandaries like the famous "Trolley Problem:"

Suppose a runaway train is about to arrive at a branch in the tracks. Ahead on both branches are track workers; one worker on one branch, five on the other. All are oblivious to the oncoming train. If it continues on its course, the train will kill the five workers. Should you switch the train onto the branch with one worker? As a bystander, you can intervene, though it makes you a killer; or take no action and let the train do the killing. Which choice is right?

Philosopher Peter Singer would answer: you can't just stand by and watch; you should kill the single track worker. 

As he says in Practical Ethics, the Trolley Problem shows that, in the face of life-and-death consequences, "the conventionally accepted principle of the sanctity of human life is untenable."

Americans are angry at Trump and his apologists because, while they lean on the brain-dead myth of the free market, they're blithefully ignorant of the consequences of racism in America.

But we're not ignorant and we're no longer bystanders. We know what's right―and where to send the runaway train. No one wants to run the president over; just vote him out.