We Must Not Allow an Imposter Gap

I think we should look at this from the military point of view.

― General "Buck" Turgidson

Four centuries ago, Russia experienced a decade of anarchy citizens would soon call "The Time of Troubles."

Cossacks roamed the countryside, looting and pillaging, while millions of peasants mobbed the lawless cities, searching for food. The nation's government, minus a legitimate leader (the czar had died without a successor), collapsed. A third of the population died or were murdered.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories about the czardom proliferated—as did pretenders to the throne. 

Russians called the many imposters "False Dmitrys" (the real Dmitry should have succeeded his father, but was assassinated as a child). 

At least four False Dmitrys gained loyalists; and one, with the help of Polish Jesuits, was actually crowned czar on his promise to save the country. 

False Dmitry I, so called, reigned for eleven whole months, before being killed in a bloody coup. Wearing a jester's cap, his body was put on display in a Moscow square before being burned. His ashes were then shot from a cannon aimed at Poland.

Flash forward four centuries to our own Time of Troubles. 

Conspiracy theories proliferate and we have False Donald, our very our own pretender to the throne.

While news organizations and pundits like Rachel Maddow and Steve Schmidt issue dire warnings, I'm unalarmed.

The way out of our mess is simple: every American named Donald Trump should declare he is the real president. 

We would have not one, but 21 pretenders to the throne.

After all, the Russians had four. Shouldn't the US have more?

We must not allow an imposter gap!

HAT TIP: Ann Ramsey inspired this post. Spasiba.

Laughorisms

There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.

— Umberto Eco

Those pansophical gems known as aphorisms have captivated me since I first encountered them in Nietzsche.

"How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism?" the Victorian writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton asked.

Aphorisms—what one writer calls "the world in a phrase"—beguile you with their sagacity.

For example:

Many people are obstinate about the path taken, few about the destination. (Nietzsche)

The heart has its reasons that reason does not know. (Pascal)

Common sense is genius dressed in his working clothes. (Emerson)

Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. (Thoreau)

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road: they get run over. (Bierce)

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. (Wilde)

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. (Twain)

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. (Dorothy Parker)

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat. (Sartre)

From the pens of quipsters—Bierce, Wilde, Twain and Parker, to name a few—aphorisms are like sunny classrooms: you rejoice in what you learn from them.

From the pens of savants—Pascal, Thoreau, Emerson, Nietzsche and Sartre—they're like Agatha Christie cozies: you're charmed but stymied, until you figure them out.

But aphorisms from the pens of windbags are another matter. 

They're haughty, but stupid, like the bumbling stuffed-shirts in Three Stooges films. They wish to be taken seriously; but you can only laugh at them.

A case in point.

I belong to the Facebook group Practical Existentialism, where windbags post witless aphorisms by the dozens every day; for example:

Every skill is ultimately an extension of instinct, because something cannot be created from nothing. The profound evolves from the basic.

I rejoiced to see the post earn this comment:

What? Just quit this pseudo crap already. Jack Handey had deeper questions.

Laughable aphorisms—laughorisms—abound in social media, particularly in the posts of personal coaches, sales trainers, motivational speakers, gurus, clerics, psychotherapists, retired journalists, and amateur philosophers.

Here's a smattering (names withheld to protect the innocent): 

What you believe doesn't matter. How you believe is everything.

Truth is never the whole truth. Truth is not literally true.

To make a difference, you must first overcome indifference.

Nature is chaos and our minds are its children.

We’re little balloons floating through a godless universe. Nihilism is the slow leak.

Inertia has a momentum all its own.

Forever coiled, never sprung.

Everything is darker at night.

Fear dying, not death.

"Aphorisms are very seductive," says says philosopher Julian Baggini. "But I often think they’re too beguiling. 

"They trick us into thinking we’ve grasped a deep thought by their wit and brevity, but if you poke them, you find they ride roughshod over all sorts of complexities and subtleties. 

"A person who has an aphorism for everything gives thought to nothing."

Long and Winding Road

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

― Vince Lombardi

My next post will represent the fifteen-hundredth to appear on Goodly. The first post appeared nearly 11 years ago.

It's been a slog.

So I can't help snickering at the news that From the Desk of Donald J. Trump is no more. Trump has shuttered his blog after less than four weeks.

"Mr. Trump had become frustrated after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant," The New York Times said.

He should have asked other bloggers how they felt in the first month.

But that would require humility and empathy.

Trump went wrong expecting success overnight. When his blog earned few readers, his enthusiasm evaporated, almost as quickly, and he quit.

Trump wants only wins and adulatory crowds. A failure at everything, he doesn't understand success.

As Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

A Bum's Wages

Show me a man with very little money and I will show you a bum.

— Joe E. Lewis

You can't get good help these days.

I know. 

I've been trying for almost a month to find someone to turn on my sprinkler system (it's controlled by a bunch of servo-motors and above my pay-grade). 

Two different companies have already broken two appointments each; a third is now on deck to come to my home and do the 20-minute job three weeks from now—for five times the price asked by the other two oufits.

I won't hold my breath anyone shows up.

The proprietors are quick to point out to me the source of the trouble: bums.

While business owners are working 17-hour days, bums are sitting on their couches, collecting juicy federal payments. 

Never mind their companies collected juicy federal payments, too, last summer—in fact, three rounds of them.

The unspoken message: socialism breeds bums.

Or not so unspoken.

Today's Delaware Business Times features an editorial by the publisher headlined, "Delaware’s leaders need to rethink federal benefits." 

He calls for the state's governor (a Democrat) to follow the lead of the nation's Republican governors and withhold all federal unemployment payments.

The payments, he says, represent a "body blow for small businesses."

The metaphor makes clear the publisher believes business owners and elected officials are engaged in a boxing match.

"Ladies and gentlemen, in the red corner, 'Punching' Pete Proprietor... and in the blue corner, Patrick 'The Pickpocket' Politico. Let's get ready to rumble!"

Business owners make a simple argument. 

It goes like this:

There are tons of jobs available. But bums just want to sit at home and spend the $300 federal unemployment checks they get every week to finance their Commie lifestyles. They're not grateful for the bum's wages we so graciously offer—because they're bums. And the bums are being abetted in their ambitionless bumhood by the bleeding-hearts who want their votes. They should all be kicked off the gravy train and go to work—for us. Pronto. Profits are at stake. 

I, for one, don't care to admit our normal economy functions because of the millions of working poor who are paid a bum's wages.

I just want my sprinklers turned on. Now. Cheaply.

But you can't get good help these days.

UPDATE: As it happened, I had to call a fourth company to turn on my sprinklers.

Food Fight

Seventy-nine years ago today, a gang of female protestors entered a small grocery store in Nazi-occupied Paris and began yelling and snatching the canned sardines on display. Arms loaded, they ran back outside and tossed the cans to the crowd in the street.

It was a sardine riot.

The Nazis had been starving the Parisians during the Occupation, just to show them who was boss. They denied civilians everything from beans to broccolini, potatoes to pasta, sausages to sardines. 

The sardine riot—an organized street protest against the shortages—resulted in the killings of two policemen and, in time, a wave of reprisals by the Nazi puppets who ran the Vichy government.

The obscure event is recounted by French studies professor Paula Schwartz in Today Sardines Are Not for Sale, new from Oxford University Press.

Schwartz describes the food riot as "banal," a "human interest story consigned to oblivion. 

"Even the human toll of the incident was sadly banal," she writes in the introduction. 

An eyewitness called the riot, "a brief scuffle of no importance."

But the story's banality makes it enchanting. 

There's no Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, FDR or de Gaulle moving history's levers; no great armies storming the beaches or fighting in the forests; just a group of hungry French housewives tossing canned fish.  

"Microhistories" like Schwartz's are among my favorite kind of books. 

Launched in 1983 by Natalie Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, the microhistory craze goes on unabated. 

The best microhistories I've read have covered a crazy pageant of subjects: rock bands, businesses, hobbies, professions, books, paintings, voyages, meetings, battles, crimes, trials, disasters, animals, cities, and paleontological digs. 

One of my all-time favs, Small Town Talk, examines the history of Woodstock—the town, not the festival; another, Thunderstruck, recounts the invention of the radio. Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life describes the Smithsonian's plunder of a Canadian treasure. 

Microhistories, in William Blake’s words, try to "see the world in a grain of sand." They bring you so close to a subject you feel its breath on your face. Then, they pull back the lens. You get to look at the big questions scientists, psychologists, philosophers and theologians pose. 

Why, for example, do cultural moments always originate in villages? Why do we always credit thieves with history's greatest inventions? Why do we think only the strong survive?

Forty years in the writing, Today Sardines Are Not for Sale examines a 20-minute incident that, in a grain of sand, lets us see how Western Europeans—women, in particular—came to terms with Hitler's invading armies.

Through a 200-page close-up on “the women’s dem­onstration,” you learn what it was like not only to be a Parisian housewife, but a resistance fighter, a collaborator, a grocer, a cop, a spy, a snitch, a jurist, a Commie, a corrupt politician, and a Nazi occupier.

"As a protest action emblematic of its time and of its type, the affair presents an extraordinary opportunity to understand some signal features of everyday life in Paris under German occupation," Schwartz writes in the introduction.

But Schwartz's book, like all microhistories, does more than that.  

Today Sardines Are Not for Sale also asks several big questions. 

Why are most women's contributions throughout history forgotten?

Why is history itself a moving target?

And will Americans have to starve before they stand up to fascism once more?

The book is terrific. 

Try it out.