"Humor - Where Has It Gone?"

 Yesterday, London’s The Telegraph, among the English-speaking world’s better newspapers, reported that Penguin, in re-issuing some of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, are removing prose that sensitivity readers deem unacceptable. Since, in the first paragraph of the attached essay, I quote Bertie Wooster perhaps this piece should carry a trigger warning. But it won’t, as I assume you are all adults.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Humor – Where Has It Gone?”

April 16, 2023

 

“Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer

rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”

                                                                                                                                Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

                                                                                                                                American poet, playwright, novelist

                                                                                                                                The Book of Negro Humor, 1967

 

There is a sentence in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, in which Bertie Wooster speaks to Jeeves, that reminds me of today’s listening-challenged politicians and pundits: “On the occasion when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across the primaeval swamp…the clan has a tendency to ignore me.” Like Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha, today’s politicians bellow and do not listen; so, concerns, if they are not of the woke variety, are ignored. 

 

What have we become? Today’s transgender movement, with a biological male winning ‘woman of the year’ and with trans women athletes competing against biological females, is like watching a 1950s Hasty Pudding show. John Kerry and his crowd, in preaching of an impending climate apocalypse, remind us of a mythological Zeus hurling lightning bolts from atop Mount Olympus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion pronouncements could have been taken from Mad Magazine. Separate and segregated college graduation ceremonies are reminiscent of Jim Crow days: Dean Karayanis of The New York Sun recently wrote “that three dozen institutions from Yale to Ohio State are returning us to the days when ‘mixing the races’ was a secular sin, implementing policies that would make the most avowed Confederate grin.” Race and gender outrank merit in college selection and corporate advancement. Minorities, women, and the LBGTQ communities are told they are victims, and that they cannot rise above that appellation. 

 

Political arrests and prosecutions remind us of Stalin’s Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Mass shootings elicit the expected response from the usual suspects: a Second Amendment defense from the right and more regulated sales of guns from the left. Ignored are the estimated 450 million guns already out there, many of them illegally acquired; gun safety rules, which in my youth came with the ownership of a firearm, are never mentioned by elected officials, and neither is the disturbing emotional behavior of most shooters as a possible cause. Declining birthrates will bring future demographic challenges, as the work force shrinks and the ranks of retirees expand. But progressives are focused on the right to abortion, at any time and any place. School choice is “fine for me but not for thee.” Families have disappeared into the maws of politicized governmental ‘communities,’ which encourage a lack of individual responsibility and accountability and that discourage the dignity of work and the benefits of personal independence. Future generations will wonder at today’s absurdities when preferred progressives’ ends were used to justify regressive means. In this overly sensitive world, there is no laughter. 

 

Is there not absurdity in the idiocy of releasing criminals into poverty-stricken inner cities and then complain about an increase in crime? Do we help the nation’s most impoverished when we deny them choice in education and when we open the border to increased demand for welfare assistance? Where are the leaders who could offer perspective? Humor served Lincoln during the dark days of the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt reassured the American people through fireside chats during the Depression, and he reminded them of their commitment, as citizens, to personal honor and national service during the Second World War. Forty years later, Reagan used humor, as the country emerged from a decade of antiwar demonstrations, a prolonged recession, and crippling inflation.

 

Victory in the Cold War brought an end to the USSR, which as an enemy had united both sides of the political aisle. Now “the enemy,” as Walt Kelly once wrote in a different context, “was us.” Polarization, which began in the Clinton years, added fuel during George W. Bush’s tenure (with about a one-year hiatus following 9/11), gained steam under Obama’s time, got out of control during Trump’s four-years, and has derailed under Biden. Under all five Presidents, humor dissipated while anger intensified. 

 

There was a time when the media was trusted to offer a balanced view. We remember William Shrirer, Edward R. Murrow, Lowell Thomas, and Walter Cronkite. They spoke to all America, and we trusted them to provide a balanced offering of the news, which for the most part they did. On January 16, 1787, Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris, wrote Edward Carrington of Virginia that, since America’s new government is based “on the opinions of the people,” that if he had “to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”  Today’s press is a far cry from Jefferson’s ideals or from the news we were offered seventy years ago, which allowed individuals to form their own opinions. Today’s news is presented in soundbites and thrives on exaggeration. Some wag recently wrote that if a conservative pundit has not been called a fascist it means she or he is not effective. And if a progressive is not called a socialist, it means he or she is failing at their job. It is unsurprising that Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow have some of the highest-ranked TV news shows because both substitute opinions for news. Neither one smiles and both exude self-righteousness. In the early 20^thCentury, Oscar Wilde, in a Critic in Pall Mall, wrote: “It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.” How pertinent are his words today.  

 

When radicals dominate both ends of the political spectrum, it is hard to smile. As America grew wealthy, left-wing politicians, to stay relevant, focused on racial and gender inequities. They united their followers behind veils of extremism, as they divided the rest of us by age, race, gender, and ethnicity. They became intolerant of ideas that did not conform to theirs’. Yet there are a few who see humor’s value. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) is one who effectively uses it. Still, there is concern; Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who lost one eye in Afghanistan and suffered a detached retina in the other, wrote in Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage: “I fear we are losing this ability to laugh off the small stuff, and we are even closer to losing the ability to laugh at the big stuff…Comedians are worried they’ll offend an overly sensitive generation of students looking for any reason to be offended. This is deeply unfortunate…”

 

For this octogenarian, this lack of humor is sad. Still, it is fun to watch politicians wriggle out from uncomfortable positions, a talent necessary for political success. A hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce amusingly defined the word politician in his The Devil’s Dictionary: “politician, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice.” Today’s politicians have also mastered the art of saying nothing in a thirty-minute speech. But, sorrowfully, it is rare to witness the self-deprecating humor used so effectively by Lincoln and Reagan, to deflect criticism, and to put a smile on the face of listeners. Not only did it cause their opponents to laugh, it lightened the nation’s mood.

"Imagination"

 A cold, rainy Saturday allowed me to finish this essay – a diversion from the pervasive divisiveness of the political scene and the scare of the pandemic, neither of which we can ignore or from which we can escape. But we can temper their rough edges by letting loose our imaginations, in order we might see the world of tomorrow in a more favorable light.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Essay from Essex

“Imagination”

December 6, 2020

 

“But real life is only one kind of life –

there is also the life of the imagination.”

                                                                                                            E.B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                            Letter, E.B. White to readers of Charlotte’s Web

                                                                                                            1952

 

Within each of us there lies a bit of Walter Mitty. One does not have to be a milquetoast with a demanding spouse to lapse into daydreams, to imagine impossible deeds. It is the creative urge in each of us to reach for something higher, bolder.

 

In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll had Alice, laughing, say to the White Queen: “…one can’t believe in impossible things.” The Queen replies: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Many of yesterday’s impossible dreams are today’s realities, thanks to creative and inventive minds.

 

Watch children when they play alone or with a friend. They make up characters, have them speak and they act out fantasies. It is a learning process that breeds creativity. When my siblings and I were children, besides believing in Santa Claus, my mother told us – and we had no reason to disbelieve her – that the barn animals would converse in English at midnight on Christmas Eve. We never were able to stay awake long enough to discover if she was right, but I have no reason today to believe she fibbed. In The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis wrote: “Shasta stroked its smooth-as-silk nose and said, ‘I wish you could talk, old fellow.’ And then for a second he thought he was dreaming, for quite distinctly, though in a low voice, the Horse said, ‘But I can’” And a friendship was born. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself in the “Garden of Live Flowers”: “’O Tiger-lily,’ said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, ‘I wish you could talk.’ ‘We can talk,’ said the Tiger-lily, ‘when there is anybody worth talking to.’” Alice passed the test. Children’s imagination has been abetted by authors like Beatrix Potter, Thornton W. Burgess, Kenneth Grahame and E.B. White who anthropomorphized the animals they created. None of us should grow so old or so cynical as not to be touched by Peter Rabbit, Paddy the Beaver, Mr. Toad or Stuart Little.    

 

Writers of fiction, like my daughter-in-law Beatriz Williams, have great doses of imagination that allow them to create believable characters and situations. Their imagination keeps us on edge as their stories unravel. A few go to greater lengths. J.R.R. Tolkien, CS. Lewis and J.K Rowling created whole worlds for their characters – Middle-earth, Narnia and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Miltiades Peterkin Paul, the creation of Charles Remington Talbot (writing as John Brownjohn), lived in his own world, where he performed deeds that finally won him his spurs…and a kiss from his sister Abiathar Ann. 

 

Imagination extends beyond the literary. When I was growing up on a rocky farm in New Hampshire, I often imagined myself as someone I was not. As this was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, I might be the hero of a U.S. Army raiding party against the Nazis, assaulting a pillbox filled with Japanese soldiers, or a pilot flying through shrapnel to my target in Hamburg. Or, since we had horses and political correctness was not yet discovered, my brother and I would saddle up and hunt Indians or rustlers. We did that, even though we rode “English.” On other occasions, I envied birds, free of gravity’s pull, flying high above, with a vista to me visible inly in my imagination. A call to supper or a reminder of chores awakened us to reality. In Greenwich, while nodding off on a home-bound commuter train, I would imagine I was riding alone in my own private rail carriage, awakening, of course, when someone elbowed me in the ribs. Years later, sculling the marsh rivers of Old Lyme, where all signs of civilization were obscured by the aggressive (and non-native) Phragmite, I would imagine myself a Seventeenth Century explorer, the first to penetrate these waters and this land, until the sound of the Acela crossing the Connecticut River brought me out of my reverie. Even today, when returning to our apartment from the mail room, I walk home along two corridors, imagining this building to be ours, each doorway an apartment where friends have been invited to stay. 

 

It is imagination that led to great works of music and art. Think of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Handel’s “Messiah,” Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and Picasso’s “Guernica.” Michelangelo once said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Imagination, as well, can be sobering. Oscar Wilde, in an 1891 essay “The Critic as Artist,” wrote: “Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” In science, it is imagination that leads to discovery. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” wrote Albert Einstein, “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Video games are examples of imagination converted to commercial products, which appeal to the imaginative instincts of teenagers. Walt Disney’s Imagineering Department designs and builds their theme park attractions, resorts and games. Almost two hundred years ago, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau told us: “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”

 

Most people are bound by the realities of life – a job, a place to live, the raising of a family, acquiring the necessities to make life bearable. Logic and reason dominate our lives. But we should not forget, as E.B. White reminded us, that there is also the life of the imagination and it is that which fuels our creative juices. We should not keep hidden our Walter Mitty, yearning to be released. It is the imagination that turns a dream into an accomplishment. It is a dream of a better future that drives the immigrant, that causes a student to strive a little harder for that ‘A,’ and that guides the entrepreneur in a search for a new product or service. Dream on!

"Patriotism and the Mount Rushmore Speech"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Patriotism and the Mount Rushmore Speech”

July 9, 2020

“The essence of America, that which really unites us, is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion.

It is an idea, and what an idea it is – that you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.”

                                                                                    Condoleezza Rice (1954-)

                                                                                    Former Secretary of State

                                                                                    Republican National Convention, August 29, 2012

“Patriotism,” said Samuel Johnson in 1775, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” A little more than a hundred years later, Oscar Wilde wrote, “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” In 1906, Ambrose Bierce published The Devils Dictionary. In it he accused Samuel Johnson of being too gentle; Bierce defined patriotism as “the first resort of the scoundrel.”  From Mark Twain to H.L. Mencken, wits have had great fun belittling patriots and patriotism.

Patriotism is a positive force. In a cynical age, patriotism appears dated; it is out of sync with progressive beliefs. But true patriotism is deeply embedded. It accepts and withstands criticism. In Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin wrote: “I love America more than any other country in this world and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” That is as it should be – the right to criticize is implicit in free speech. Patriotism is devotion and attachment to one’s homeland and fellow citizens; it does not mean total obeisance, as is required by those from Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Patriotism should not be confused with nationalism, which is divisive, intolerant and nihilistic. In a multiracial and multicultural country, patriotism is what binds a disparate people. Patriotism is inclusive and feeds on love, while nationalism is partisan and is nourished by hate.

Patriotism was the theme of President Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3^rd. That was as it should be, as the United States celebrated its 244^th birthday. If one were to read only the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, or the start of Associated Press’ Jill Colvin’s postmortem, “After a weekend spent stoking division, President Donald Trump…”, one would conclude that Mr. Trump’s speech in South Dakota was dark and divisive. However, if one read it, without knowledge of the speaker, it would appear uplifting and optimistic.

Surprisingly, President Trump delivers a good speech. While he does not write his speeches – no President has since Warren Harding hired Judson Welliver as his literary clerk – the words, when he does not stray from the script, are powerful and inspiring. (His speeches should be read, which is my preference.) On July 16, 2017 in Warsaw, Mr. Trump warned of the steady creep of government bureaucracy, “invisible to some but familiar to the Poles…The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.” In this year’s State of the Union, he spoke of years of political stalemate and the divisions it has caused: “We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance, incredible progress or pointless destruction.” He ended that speech optimistically, by asking the men and women of Congress to look at the opportunities that lie ahead: “Our most thrilling achievements are still ahead. Our most exciting journeys still await. Our biggest victories are still to come. We have not yet begun to dream.”

President Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore: “Our founders launched not only a revolution in government, but a revolution in the pursuit of justice, equality, liberty and prosperity… No country has done more,” he added, “to advance the human condition than the United States of America.” He then spoke of the current campaign to “wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” The weapon of these advocates is a “cancel culture” that “shames dissenters” and “demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”  Those were the words alluded to by mainstream media as dystopian. He went on to remind the audience that “nations exist to protect the safety and happiness of their own people…We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for all citizens of every race, background, religion and creed.”  He was lighting a candle, not snuffing one out. Yet, this was the speech CBS described as being “fiery,” CNN claimed included “outrageous lies,” and the New York Times said was a “divisive culture war message.”

The speech offended the left, who called it “a battle cry.” In that, they were correct. It was a battle cry for liberty against forces of darkness that want to eradicate our past by desecrating statues and monuments. It was battle cry against the re-education of youth, like the phony narrative of the 1619 project – a project that perverts those who fought for liberty and independence into progenitors of oppression. Our Founders were not paragons of perfection, but neither were they Simon Legrees. The enemy within us is the one that wants to stifle opposing opinions, to “cancel” culture and history. This enemy has totalitarian instincts, demands allegiance from the “woke” and commands others to kneel in homage to their vision. It is a frightening prospect, reminiscent of Jacobin France and China’s cultural revolution.

He ended by saying he was signing an executive order to establish a “National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.” Of the thirty figures mentioned in the E.O., 57% are white men, 27% women and 17% Blacks. Certainly, there will be debate as to who will be included. For example, four missing that I thought should be added: Daniel Webster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes and, of course, my four-greats grandfather, Noah Webster.

Patriotism is many things: respect for one’s country’s history and uniqueness, symbolized by its flag. In the U.S., it is based on natural rights and elevates the individual; it is the recognition that we are a nation of laws, not men; it is tolerance for those of opposing opinions and the willingness to accept criticism. Patriotism was extant in Martin Luther King’s words when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 of the Founders “…promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” words that lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

America does not need to be “transformed,” as Mr. Biden urged last weekend. We are not perfect, but we are more perfect than other nations. We look to the future, while guided by mistakes of the past. We focus on liberty and ensure that everyone is equal before the law. We strive for equality of opportunities but keep in mind the universal moral truths of the Founders’ words, and we never forget that individual liberty is our greatest asset – the freedom for everyone to achieve his or her dream, as Condoleezza Rice told the Republican convention in 2012. That was the nub of Mr. Trump’s speech last Friday at Mount Rushmore.

Each of us is unique. We are multiracial and come from myriad cultures yet are bound by love for country. We applaud our nation’s ideals yet acknowledge her imperfections. And we understand it is patriotism that encompasses the “Unum,” in the motto of the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum.