Learning to Walk

You don't learn to walk by following rules. 

You learn by doing, and by falling over. 

— Richard Branson

I'm halfway through three months of physical therapy after shattering an ankle. I'm learning to walk again.

The therapists pester me constantly to walk, walk, walk, in order to speed my recovery. Willpower and workouts alone won't cut it, they insist. I have to "learn by doing."

Meantime, I'm tutoring an eighth grader in writing and asking the same of him.

Applying William Faulkner's advice to would-be writers—read, read, read—I've assigned him a small mountain of prose: pieces by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Friedrich Nietzsche, E.B. White, Hunter S. Thompson, John D. MacDonald, George Plimpton, Martin Luther King, and a pack of lesser-knowns. I've also introduced him to speed reading and have asked him to write chapter summaries of How to Read a Book every week through July.

All this for a boy who, before we met, only read an occasional gaming magazine and hardly wrote anything at all (his public school really let him down). But I want to make the most of our tutoring sessions. If he falls over once in a while, so be it; at least he won't shatter an ankle.

POSTSCRIPT: Want to help a good cause? Go to Mighty Writers to learn more.

Alfredophobia

Don't worry about the horse being blind, just load the wagon.

— John Madden

Relatives are forever reminding me my "executive personality" is galling. They don't grasp that I worry about the horse. 

It's an old occupational habit and hazard. But I know I must shed it and expand my "worry-free zone" to 24/7.

The challenge in doing so stems from yet another of my personality disorders, one I'll label Alfredophobia. 

Fear of becoming Alfred E. Neuman. I'd hate to turn so jolly and half-witted.

As told by The Paris Review, Alfred has an unorthodox origin story.

In 1956, MAD's publisher swiped him for the magazine's cover from a 19th-century postcard captioned, “What, Me Worry?”

MAD's editor later that year made Alfred the magazine’s mascot. "I decided I wanted to have this visual logo as the image of MAD, the same way corporations had the Jolly Green Giant," he said 50 years later.

Alfred was drawn by a veteran illustrator of pinups. MAD's editor told him to draw the mascot to look like "someone who can maintain a sense of humor while the world is collapsing around him.”

A decade later, the magazine was sued for stealing a 1914 trade character known as "Me Worry?" But MAD's lawyers verified the character predated the 1914 version and was public domain. They won the suit handily.

Alfred's origin, it turned out, was 19th-century advertising, where he'd graced not only newspaper and magazine ads, but postcards, playbills, signs, menus, calendars, product labels, and matchbook covers. His earliest spotting—so far—dates to 1894; but Alfred is probably older. Some fans believe he originated in political cartoons lampooning Irish immigrants during the 1870s. Given the red hair, that seems right to me.

The motto What, Me Worry? has an unorthodox origin story, too: a turn-of-the-century fad.

In 1913, the songwriting team Lewis & Meyer scored a hit with "Ische ka bibble." The tune introduced a mangled Yiddish phrase purporting to mean "I should worry?" and sparked a national craze.

Much like we say Whatever, Americans soon started saying I should worry? in response to every catastrophe: 

• Unemployed. I should worry?
• Can't pay the rent. I should worry?
• Girlfriend pregnant. I should worry?
• Going bald. I should worry?
• Executive personality. I should worry?

I should worry? so incensed upper class prigs, they wanted it "canceled;" but Broadway actress Billie Burke told Chicago's Day Book that Lewis & Meyer deserved a Nobel Prize.

Listen to Ische ka bibble here.

Lean Expression

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

— Cicero

The Kansas City Star taught 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway "the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.”

When Hemingway began as a copywriter at the paper in 1917, The Star's rules demanded brevity: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Eliminate every superfluous word."

With few exceptions, writers before him were masters of verbalism; but with a boost from The Star, Hemingway forged a new, vigorous and modern style of expression.

Lean expression.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about," Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, "he may omit things that he knows and the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

Hemingway helped his reader not only by omitting superfluous words, but by chaining sensations to emotions, as in this passage from A Moveable Feast illustrates:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

That's the "Hemingway style." Frill-free storytelling, uplifted by the compounding of repetition, rhyme, alliteration, stream of consciousness, Biblical and Bachian cadences, and strict avoidance of the flowery, routine and trite—no Latinate words, for example, like "mollusk;" no adjectives like "slippery;" no adverbs like "eagerly;" no clichés like "the world is your oyster;" and no mention of oysters' effect on the libido.

Eloquent, keen and lean.

POSTSCRIPT: Go here for more assessment. And treat yourself to A Moveable Feast. It's free.

Ratlines

Ratlines: a series of rope steps by which men aloft reach the yards.

— The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea

In the old navy, ratlines (pronounced "rattlin's") referred to rope ladders attached to the masts. When a sailing ship began to sink, those ladders would offer the only safety to sailors who'd missed the lifeboats, so ratlines came to mean a "means of escape.”

In today's military, ratlines refer to an enemy's means of escape—particularly clandestine escape. Ratlines in this sense were used by combatants during the Iraq War, the Yemeni Civil War, the Somali Civil War and the War in Afghanistan.

But by far the most infamous ratlines were those used by members of the SS at the close of World War II.

The SS called their ratlines Klosterrouten ("cloister routes"), because sympathetic Catholic clergy ran them. They allowed SS to escape the Fatherland through Italy, Spain and Switzerland, then sail under fake names to safe havens in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The Nazi ratlines were organized as early as 1943 by a Croatian priest and an Austrian bishop, with the blessing of Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, and the acquiescent blessing of Pope Pius XII. Without voicing despair, these men foresaw Germany's fall and hoped to set up Nazi governments in exile.

The ratlines helped as many as 300 SS escape, including Josef Mengele ("the angel of death"), Klaus Barbie ("the butcher of Lyon") and Adolf Eichmann ("the architect of the Holocaust"). Ironically, forged papers allowed many SS to pass themselves off as Holocaust survivors. 

Hans-Ulrich Rudel (who became a top advisor to Argentine President Juan Perón) openly praised the Catholic church for operating the ratlines in a speech in 1970. 

"One may view Catholicism as one wishes," he said, "but what the church, especially certain towering personalities within the church, undertook in the years after the war to save the best of our nation must never be forgotten. 

"With its immense resources, the church helped many of us go overseas in quiet and secrecy, thus counteracting the demented victors' mad craving for revenge and retribution."

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of retribution, the world's only Nazi-hunter, Brooklyn-born Efraim Zuroff, is still on the trail today, even though living Nazis are few. In four decades of detective work, he has tracked down over 3,000 of them in 20 countries. "The passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers," he told The Guardian this month.

God's Jury

When did you stop beating your wife?

— Unknown

True to the tenets of capitalism, anti-racism consultants are cashing in.

One New York-based consultancy, Pollyanna, charges $1,750 per hour to curriculum-wash, starting the process with a 360-degree review of a school’s faculty.

You know something's wrong when the $1,750-an-hour consultants turn into inquisitors.

During the 360, the Pollyanna's consultants ask faculty, for instance, to answer the question, "Do we talk about diversity and equity and inclusion too much at our school?"

This is an example of the infamous loaded question.

The loaded question seeks to change a person's mind by stealth. To answer it, the person must accept what the questioner merely presumes.

The favorite interrogation device of detectives, journalists, salespeople, extremists and witch hunters, the loaded question contains the seeds of the answerer's downfall:

"So where did you hide the gun?"

"Why are you content to bow to Iran?"

"Do you want a one- or two-year contract?"

"Why do you endorse the murder of unborn babies?"

"Why didn't you give up heresy when you knew it was sinful?"

Interrogators during the Inquisition were aware how unfair the loaded question was, but that didn't stop its use. They even encouraged widespread use of the loaded question in the handbook Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches).

According to philosophers, the loaded question (plurium interrogationum) is a trick question, a fallacy always to be avoided. 

It's a trick because the loaded question contains one or more question-begging presuppositions; for example, "So have you stopped grooming pretty eighth grade girls?" You can't answer the question without either lying or accepting statements you would deny.

The loaded question also lets the interrogator slip claims into his rhetoric without needing to prove them, or acknowledge their falsehood when unproven; for example, "Why does the media hate all conservatives?"

Like a loaded gun, a loaded question is a dangerous thing. 

In the hands of inquisitors, it's terrifying.