MODERN WISDOM
NUMBER 286
MAY 2022
Copyright 2022 Francis DiMenno
dimenno@gmail.com
http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com
1. AMBITION
PART FIVE: GRANDFATHER WROLLAX
“Anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools.”–August BebelI must say that I cannot fathom where Junior picked up his unpleasant strain of anti-Semitism. Certainly not from me. I was an ardent, avid Goldwater supporter, and, as we all know, he himself was half Jewish. I was an enthusiastic supporter of statehood for Israel since the day they declared independence and the United States recognized them, practically on the spot. I always take great pains to leave the oak-paneled sitting room of The Club whenever one of the more déclassé members begins to fulminate about “the Yids”. Every phase of my public career, in short, has been spent in fighting the pernicious virus of Jew hatred. Never, in private or otherwise, has a word passed my lips criticizing the Jewish race. If anything, I am a philosemite. I admire the great Jewish culture which brought us the Old Testament, that bulwark of the Western Canon, and I tend to gravitate toward other conservative intellectuals who feel the same way. So I just don’t understand where my boy’s wildcat hostility comes from. It must have been the dope talking.
The way I see it, the Israelis are the cowboys. the Arabs are the Indians. And the Americans are the cavalry.
Anti-Semitism, I’m appalled to say, is as much a disease of the far left as it is of the so-called far right. It has to do, I think, with the conspiratorial mindset. “Commie-haunted apple pickers and cactus drunks,” as Goldwater used to call them. To my way of thinking, these soi disant conspiracy narratives are just so many ghost stories told around the modern-day campfire of the sadly ubiquitous cathode ray tube. One might as well speculate that there is a conspiracy of mice against cats, than that there is a conspiracy of “rootless cosmopolitans” (as the Stalinists called them) who are plotting in the fastnesses of their mountaintop fortresses to control the financial markets and overthrow all that is good and decent. Is there a solution for such odious thinking? There is none. Mankind has been under the thrall of superstitious myths and portents since time immemorial. I fear that all we can sensibly do is shrug off these kooks and go about our business. Because they are loonies who probably should be locked away in some rubber room somewhere.They are prime candidates for a straitjacket. Future denizens of the Laughing Academy. Prospective occupants of the Booby Hatch. They belong in a cell–a padded cell.
In the course of my (perhaps overlong) life, I have always prided myself as a man who would give as good as he got, and, often, in giving before I was got, in what one might refer to as a sort of preemptive strike. But it seems that I have often erred in applying this tactic to my son. Surely, my intentions at the time were good. I was not a bad father; I only wished to teach the lad, through both word and deed, some of the principles of argumentation as they were taught to my father by his own father. My paternal grandfather was a rather rigorously sententious populist who was always ginning up one argument or another in what we would, nowadays, regard as a defense of the indefensible. He was in favor, for instance. of Free Silver, which is to say, inflation. He was in favor of the subjugation of the negro, which is to say, of the virtual reinstitution of slavery. However, he was also in favor of a devolution of Federal rights in favor of those of the states; a laudable stance, endorsed and guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution (I, for one, did not doze during Civics class). To be sure, if this idea were to be taken too far, it would strip the federal government of the right to regulate commerce; to oppose or support tariffs; and even to wage war; rights which, of course, properly belong to the legislative branch; but also rights which, under certain circumstances, ought to be available to the Chief Executive as well, to use as he sees fit, should contingencies so demand. Let the Legislative branch sort it all out later. This is not a call to “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” but merely a plea for good old common sense when our country is faced with extraordinary dangers or opportunities. But no; grandfather was a State’s Rights man, who approved of the secession of the confederate states; he doubtless would have spoken against the Louisiana Purchase, had he been around back then.
One thing that can be said about my grandfather was that he was known as a very capable man–even in an era when that attribute was taken for granted. He could apply himself to any occupation and perform it with the practiced ease of an experienced hand. He could butcher a hog, construct the frame for a house, and build a stone wall to last a thousand years. I know this to be true, because he did all these things, and more. He sired my father at the advanced age of forty-three. He was to live for another fifty years, and he might have lasted longer had he not fallen and broken his hip while shingling a roof–at the age of ninety-three! I know this because at the age of fourteen, I was up there, helping him. I initially blamed myself for his demise, and was inconsolable; but my father assured me that I was not to blame, because “the old man” was “a stubborn cuss,” and since about the age of ten he was absolutely not to be dictated to, not even by his own father, who had fought and died in the War Between the States, as my grandfather called it until the day he died; that is, when he didn’t refer to it as The War of Northern Aggression.
Except for a brief period when he was quite young, my grandfather never worked for another man. He saw his opportunities, and he took them, in the apt words of George Washington Plunkitt. Nor did he entrust any one major part of his business to any one man. He made most of the family fortune on Wall Street, as one of the most feared short-sellers of that tribe. He wasn’t afraid to take enormous risks which, in his case, usually panned out. Because he kept a certain amount of his holdings in reserve, and never speculated with them, no matter how tempting the opportunity, he was never wiped out, even during the worst panics of the 19th Century. He was also a value investor, and early on was able to get into steel, oil, and railroads. He also invested in what we politely call convict labor, providing what we would now call start-up capital for many a would-be plantation owner. Farming in those days was often an especially dicey proposition, but grandfather was an excellent judge of men, as well as horses and mules. He could divine a farmer’s character just by talking to him for half an hour, which was no mean feat, as many of those honest sons of toil were inarticulate, if not downright taciturn. But it seems that grandfather made all the right decisions at least ninety per cent of the time. He was an early advocate of the telephone and a visionary who saw that the horseless carriage would eventually replace the horse (a proposition which was by no means certain in 1901), and he invested accordingly. He brought in some of the first farm machinery to the deep South; he discouraged over-reliance on cotton, and he treated his partners fairly, provided they were people of the right sort. He was a great believer of the maxim that breeding will tell; however, he was far from blind to a man’s faults, and he knew that when a farmer only ploughed two rows instead of four, it was likely because he was hungover from too much tanglefoot whiskey. Grandfather was himself by no means an abstemious man, and he most certainly understood the impulse to let loose every now and again. What he couldn’t forgive, in any man, was that he simply didn’t even try. If the hungover farmer ploughed no rows at all, instead of two, or was careless and didn’t keep his fences in good repair; or if he neglected to paint his house and barn, grandfather took these signs as an omen, and decided he would take his business elsewhere.
He had a variety of business ventures. His big-city tenements were some of the best money-makers in his portfolio. He kept his properties in good repair by employing a legion of muscle boys who were also intelligent and honest enough to collect rents, evict deadbeats, and report major problems and concerns to the head man in their district. These were generally sober middle-aged married men of good families who also owned property in the city and who relied on my grandfather for business loans. “Fixers,” some would call them. They nearly always “knew a man,” and they weren’t shy about calling in favors.
Anything which was too speculative, grandfather wanted no part of. He wasn’t greedy and he had a sense of fair play, though he was far from averse to cutting corners when circumstances compelled him to. He was not an overtly religious man, but he instilled in my father and his brother at an early age an abiding belief in a Supreme Being Who orders all our affairs–and that belief stuck.
They say that family traits often skip a generation. I believe my son took a great deal of his qualities from the old man. Surely, his sententiousness. Certainly, his argumentativeness.
As I have said, if I have any regrets regarding how I raised my son, perhaps one of them is that I may have instilled in him a habit of arguing. Perhaps Eddie took to conflict a bit too enthusiastically; a habit which, to my great regret, I may have done too little to staunch. My only defense is that I was so glad that the boy was no longer a little trimmer, over-eager to please everyone, and had gradually evolved, in his young adulthood, into a contentious individual who was able to hold his own in a colloquy, even if he didn’t always know what he was talking about. But Junior, sad to say, eventually developed, or should I say he regressed, to the point where he seemed to be at war with the whole world. Perhaps he became besotted by The Truth, or at least with that which he regarded as the truth, even though his philosophy was not fully formed. “Calculus of contrariwise” seemed to be his modus operandi; the boy was just so negative about everything and swallowed, whole, the prognostications of every doomsayer and Gloomy Gus who came down the pike. “Dad, don’t you know that materialism is destroying the planet?” he once brightly chirped at the breakfast table, in what I believe was his seventeenth year. Of course, at seventeen one knows everything; or thinks he does. Surely I was much the same way. The only difference being that I landed on the right side of history. You might be amused to know that my reply was as follows: “I refute Berkeley thus,” I said, and cracked open a three-minute egg with the proper utensil designated for that function. He was appropriately puzzled by this somewhat cryptic reply, as he had not actually read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, even though he pretended that he had. Nor had he read Plutarch, even though I strongly urged him to do so. And his knowledge of the works of the immortal Bard of Stratford-on-Avon was, I confess to my infinite chagrin, quite spotty. Why, I don’t think he ever finished reading Coriolanus, which is, of course, a leadership manual par excellence. I imagined that he would eventually be assigned to read it in college, which he had just started, so I was not so concerned.
Witness my dismay then, when Junior announced to me on his first visit home that the “punks” and “old duffers” of the Western canon were considered passé by the more advanced and enlightened set; under the new dispensation, students were encouraged instead to focus on the notion of the primacy of “the text,” and to analyze “the sociopolitical dimensions” behind the selection of the “so-called Classics” and to scrutinize how such canon-building as an exercise merely serves to “perpetuate the existing power structure.”
The immortal Bard–reduced to a mere “punk”, whatever that was. I nearly choked on my three-minute egg.
On the same occasion he tried rather strenuously to convince me that the rather vulgar left-wind troubadour Bob Dylan was “a greater poet than Keats or Shelley”. He bolstered his contention by asseverating that “nobody” still read “boring old Percy,” while millions upon millions “grooved on what Dylan was laying down.” And who, I asked, do you cite as your authority of this opinion? “Allen Ginsberg,” says he. Ginsberg! That unrepentantly homosexual arriviste! A wolf-ape, a deep-dyed scoundrel, a bearded cad! With his cod-Blake and his bad imitation of Whitman’s own bad imitation of the Old Testament. I wanted to give the little squirt a good poke with my right forefinger and point out to him that Shelley and his gang will be remembered long after the so-called poetry of the likes of the Zimmermans and Ginsbergs had faded from view.
Instead, I merely smiled. Which must have surely infuriated him, because he stormed out of the dining room without cleaning his plate, something which, to the best of my recollection, he was never known to do unless he was quite sick, and he hadn’t been quite that sick since about the age of five.
People speak of the 1960s as ruining an entire generation of fine, upstanding young men. If so, they are far too forgiving of the 1970s. During his first visit home from high school, he had asked me what my reaction would be if he brought a colored girl home. I instantly replied that if he were to do so with the sole intention of irritating me, then I would think very ill of him indeed; I would be quite disappointed, and I would also feel intensely sorry for the poor girl. However, I replied that I would go out of my way to be intensely polite to the hapless negro girl he was so cruelly using as his cat’s paw. If, on the other hand, I discerned that he had a genuine affection for the girl, I would say and do nothing to show my disapproval of his choice, notwithstanding the fact that, unless her family were highly placed indeed, there would be no chance that she would in any way be his social equal. But as long as she was a demure and proper young lady who did not curse or smoke reefers or use bad language or wear an excessive amount of perfume or flaunt a superabundance of cheap jewelry, and as long as her name wasn’t Leticia, or Bongo, or Cleotha or something ridiculous like that, then she would be treated as cordially as any white girl he happened in his transitory whims to fancy. “To even ask me such a question you must think,” I said to him, “that your old man is some sort of bigoted ogre. This points to a certain lack of observation on your part. Haven’t I told you, haven’t I stressed to you, ever since you were a small boy, that negroes are just as good as anybody else? Haven’t I praised the Reverend King in your presence, despite his bad behavior and deplorable politics which I personally think are irreconcilable with his professions of Christian faith? Though, after all, he is, come to think of it, a Protestant. Haven’t I instructed you that Christian charity demands that we treat other human beings with dignity and respect? So, to answer your rather foolish question, I wouldn’t care if she were green or purple, just so long as she was a nice girl and dressed demurely and paid regular visits to the hair parlor. I won’t mention the fact that your own hair is nearly over your eyes, and it’s high time you paid a visit to the barber yourself. You see, Son, you’ll find that most thinking mature adults take care to show restraint around adolescents. They usually are not given to constantly pointing out their lapses in manners and errors in judgment, unless they happen to be particularly egregious or life-threatening. In which case, punishment must be administered. Delivered up in a calm and dispassionate manner. And solely so the error will not be repeated. After all, the burnt child really does shun the fire.”
My rather burly scion did not take well to these admonitions. Nevertheless, I resumed. “You will discover, as you grow more mature, that RACE doesn’t really matter. It’s CULTURE that is the determinant. The superior man will always make his mark no matter what the color of his skin. And the cultured man, you will find, is welcomed anywhere. Well, perhaps not in a tavern frequented by motorcycle hoodlums, or a trailer park, or a ghetto tenement. But anywhere that matters. On the slopes of the Matterhorn, at the Pine Valley Golf Club, the Harvard Club, the boardroom, the celebrity soiree. You may prate all you like about ‘materialism,’ but at the end of the day, why shouldn’t the finer things in life be enjoyed by those who can appreciate them? I’m not going to say that if you try hard enough you can do anything you want to do. That is because when you were born I took a solemn vow to never lie to you. But I will say that you, with all your advantages, if you put in plenty of hard work early on, you can most certainly become a man of some distinction and live a comfortable life and socialize with like-minded people and be affluent enough so that you never need to get your hands dirty unless you want to. Now, about this business of bringing a colored girl home. Why would you want to do that? What would you and she even have in common? It would be like a Supreme Court justice falling head over heels in love with a, a pimply waitress who works in a truck stop, selling greasy eggs and stale pie to lonely long-haul lorry drivers. Why would you, in the prime of your life, tie yourself down to a liability? Can’t you anticipate how all your presumably respectable high school chums would react? There are certain incongruities which might make for rich fiction, but, as a practical matter, such relationships seldom work out. You would be of two different worlds. And, really, what would people think? Dating a colored girl might bring you a certain cachet among dubious beatniks, but I suspect that HER friends might not be too keen on the idea. Not to mention her family. Colored people are human, too, you know. And colored people can be just as bigoted as whites. Do you think her parents would be jumping for joy at the possible prospect of a mixed-race baby? Think again, young Romeo. There is every chance they would be horrified and appalled. You didn’t happen to get a negro pregnant now, have you?”
Junior answered emphatically in the negative. He said he didn’t even really know any colored girls. He said that it was just a, a– “A rhetorical question,” I said. “Well,” I added after a pause, “I certainly hope I passed your little ‘test’.” I couldn’t help the expression that flashed across my face at that moment–a certain curling of the upper lip, akin, perhaps, to the famous Elvis sneer. But if my son noticed this facial expression, he showed no sign. He simply said, “No, father, it wasn’t a test. I was just curious to know what you thought.” He then said that he was tired and wished to go to bed, and that it was rather late (it wasn’t even 8:30) and that he should get ready. This was his standard ploy, practically since he was a toddler, to avoid talking to me.
I bade him a good night. I do fondly hope it wasn’t too peremptory an envoi. Later, I thought of how other fathers would have handled this query. Perhaps another man would have leered at him with a lascivious gleam in his eyes, or have asked him something rude and vulgar, like whether he was looking to change his luck, or whether he simply fancied a chocolate-flavored treat. Well, I’m (thankfully) not that kind of a father, and I didn’t raise my boy to indulge in or even appreciate those sorts of rude jests and coarse humor, so-called. Yet I do hope that I managed to give him my most judicious reply.
Of course, I didn’t mention this conversation to the boy’s mother. It would have violated the boy’s trust; moreover, she probably would have had a heart attack.
On another occasion during his Christmas break, at the breakfast table, no less, the boy began quizzing me about the family’s extensive real estate holdings, some of which consisted of some rather admittedly superannuated tenements in the inner city which the corporation planned to dispose of with the collaboration of a prominent real estate developer, as soon as the moment was propitious (modesty prohibits me from mentioning his name, though you would recognize it in a second). My son informed me, with all the hauteur that a fourteen year old can muster, that the newspapers were calling me a slumlord. “Perhaps so, but not for long,” I said, perhaps a bit too jauntily, “as those despicable buildings are soon to be torn down and replaced with gleaming new condominiums, courtesy of a tax break from the city.” “But what about all those people who live there now? Where will they go?” “That’s not particularly my concern, Eddie, just so long as they ‘Get ’em out by Friday,’ as I believe the old saying goes. “But,” said Eddie, “they’re poor, and don’t the poor deserve–“
“Have you been reading The Catholic Worker again? What the poor deserve, Eddie, is no more than what we choose to give them. And by “we”, I mean the people like me who actually pay their taxes instead of being a drain on the system. Sonny Boy, someone, somewhere once said, ‘The road to success is paved with the dead bodies of losers.'” “But the Pentagon,” said Eddie, and, quite naturally, I could see where he was going with that line of left-wing cant, so I cut him off and said “Millions for defense–but not one red cent for tribute.” And I do mean ‘red’. Didn’t they teach you that in history class? The XYZ affair? Must we have this argument now? In case you’ve forgotten, Eddie, it happens to be Christmas, and if you continue to hector me with this nonsense of yours, we won’t have time to finish our breakfast. and we’ll be late for Church. “
Eddie silently ate the remainder of his breakfast, but, if I know my son, and I believe I do, I could practically see the little wheels and gears and cogs busily churning in his rather oversized head. I also noted, with some displeasure, that he managed to consume four pieces of toast, six pieces of bacon, and three eggs. At that rate, in spite of his coal-burner metabolism and his soon-to-be-raging hormones, he would turn out to be quite a fatty-pants. “A twenty mile march with an eighty-pound pack would no doubt do him a world of good,” I pondered.
Our family did make it to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and with a few minutes to spare. As we ascended the granite steps to the cavernous carven wooden doors, which, in spite of a hint of snow in the air were flung wide open–the gladsome bells tolled their merry peal on this, the most Holy Day of Obligation, which served to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior. . But G-d must have been winking down on me that day, for the subject of the priest’s sermon was, of course, that old Yuletide standby, “The Curse of Materialism.” It was the usual rot. “Where neither moth nor rust consume”; “the widow’s mite,” “beat your swords into ploughshares”–the ame old jumbled mess of platitudes that our Godly old priest trotted out year after year. Why, I do declare he was giving that same little sermon of his before Eddie was even born. It was all new to my son, of course. He gobbled it all up like a huge bowl of vanilla ice cream covered in gooey chocolate syrup. I do believe that if the priest had called for a March on Washington, Eddie would have been out there in the forefront, with John Ball and Ned Lud, waving a black flag. I felt like walking up to the priest after the sermon and reminding him that St. Patrick’s stood on some rather prime real estate itself, on which, I believe, it paid no taxes. But I refrained. Eddie’s mother would have been mortified. But I did not fail to notice that young Eddie was having a rather animated conversation with that self same prelate. I had too much respect for my son’s privacy to visibly eavesdrop, but I learned a few tricks in the service and could, by dint of some judicious lip-reading, gather from afar the gist of what my son was saying to the priest. Mostly, it was the worn-out cliches of the New Left; Christ was the first revolutionary; War Pigs have got to go; give the Commies whatever they want and then we’ll have “peace”.
Of course, Eddie knew nothing of the military. He didn’t even like to get his feet wet. When Junior was about seven years old, I attempted to take him for a Summertime hike in the woods, knowing full well that his cousin Bill, who was close to him in age, was already an accomplished woodsman and even accompanied his father on hunting trips. But, once again, little Eddie proved recalcitrant. No sooner had we gotten about a quarter mile along a well-marked trail, then he began to cry for his mother and said he wanted to go back to our cabin because he hated bugs.
I took him out fishing one time during that same summer. He screamed when he saw me bait the hook with a worm and ran crying back to the house.
And the boy’s mother actually had the gall to tell me that I should spend more time with the boy. She tried to excuse his disgraceful exhibitions by claiming that he was simply high-strung and anxious. Spoiled is how I would characterize it. When I was a lad of about his age, I would have literally jumped for joy had my father asked me to accompany him in his activities. (He never did.) But Eddie was–what should I call it?–a contrarian, at least when it came to pleasing his old man.
He had no appreciation for classical music, preferring instead insipid folk music, which was his gateway drug for vulgar rock and roll. He had no appreciation for the captivating conversations of cultivated adults. But he would stare, enraptured for hours at the moronic tripe spewed forth around the clock by the one-eyed idiot box monster squatting in the sitting room. He would just as soon, I feared, have “hung out” with the likes of The Banana Splits and Yogi Bear than with his own mother and father.
He didn’t like to get dirty, like normal boys do. Every cut, scrape, or bruise acquired while out of doors sent him home crying for his mother. It’s a wonder he had any friends at all. How I wished that Eddie were my brother Bill’s son instead–and that young Billy was my son! Of course, I never expressed this wish out loud–certainly not to Eddie nor his mother, not even when I was deep in my cups. But I did begin to depend more and more on young Bill to accompany me on such recreational occasions in the great outdoors as my busy schedule would permit. Brother Bill, of course, knew all about this and heartily approved. But at no time did he ever offer as a fair exchange to spend time with my little Eddie. But, then again, I could hardly blame him for his inanition.
Eddie did have the family pet to romp with; a superannuated King Charles Spaniel named Queenie which my wife had owned since she was a lass. But when the day inevitably came for poor old Queenie, blind and sick, had to be put down, Eddie simply refused to understand the compelling logic behind such an ultimately compassionate decision–and he never, I think, forgave me.
In the course of my career I, quite naturally, was able to form alliances with many notable and important men. Was Junior even the least bit impressed? Never in life. He took to referring to my distinguished colleagues as “Daddy’s weird friends”. Of one highly-regarded economist, he had only this to say. “I don’t like that man, Poppa. His breath smells bad.” I tried to explain to him that grown adults were not to be peremptorily judged on the basis of such superficial externalities, and he replied, “I don’t care. He should brush his teeth more often. His Mamma should make him do it. I told him that the man’s mother was, sadly, long-deceased, and he replied, “But my Mamma will never die.” Faced with such irrefutably childish logic, I lapsed into silence, and so did he. For about a minute. And then he said, in a fretful voice, while tugging at my sleeve, “Will she?” I was tempted to reply as Frank Sinatra replied to the importunities of Sam Rayburn, who once said to the famous crooner, “Won’t you sing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ for us, Frank?” To which Sinatra allegedly replied, “Hands off the suit, creep.” But I didn’t. I told him instead about his immortal soul.
I have often wondered whether perhaps there was a bad apple on my side of the family tree. Perhaps, centuries ago, there was some ape-like throwback in my gene pool whose potentialities silently lurked there until brought out by nuclear radiation or some such. In more sober moments, however, I reflect that perhaps Penelope Marguerite Wrollax, nee Fay, my wife, was the one whose distant ancestor bore the Mark of Cain, so to speak.
My son is, of course, incredibly intelligent, and has the superb educational credentials to prove it, but he often acts like the titular character of a play called The World’s Stupidest White Man. After college, he tried to make it on his own for several weeks, practically starved, crawled home to the family manse to be doted upon by his mother, and took a job in the family business. He proved to be so incompetent that I had to gently encourage him to seek employ elsewhere–and then, he disappeared off the face of the earth for several months, with nary a letter or even a card, much less a phone call. His poor mother was absolutely distraught. I find it difficult to forgive him for such diffident behavior. He was the very soul of inconsiderateness. I sometimes wondered if malevolent and crafty gypsies had somehow contrived to steal away with my real son, and leave an imposter in his place., and whether the actual Eddie Jr. might not currently be employed in some dismal city in far upstate New York like Watertown or Lockport or Ripley, duping credulous homeowners by offering to seal coat their driveways for cheap and instead, pouring crankcase oil on the area which would wash off during the first brisk rainfall. I imagined that my real son, by dint of his inherited intelligence, might very well by now be the King of the Gypsies.
2. SITUATIONIST COMEDY
In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.
In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure
the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.
Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.
The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.
Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm
3. WHENAS IN VINYL
Whenas in vinyl my Yazmina goes,
I see the putrefaction of them other hoes
The stupefaction of them grows.
Then, when I take off my shades and glimpse
Them other chuckleheaded pimps
Yo, how them bitches profit me!
(With apologies to Robert Herrick.)
4. THE OBSCENITY OF HUCKLEBERRY FINNNot many are aware that part of the reputation that Huckleberry Finn has
for being regarded as “obscene” resulted from an anonymous printer’s
particularly malicious prank. An illustration in the first print run
of the book was altered in a way that many then and now considered
“obscene”.
Contemporary account:
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/nyworld.html
1960 rediscovery
http://www.twainquotes.com/19600110.html
I will refer you to the following scholarly articles on the topic
(with the caveat that the image may be considered offensive, for which
I beg pardon in advance).
http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/?p=6616
http://americanliteraryblog.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html
http://www.tinet.cat/~fromeu/huckreception.pdf
ALSO SEE:
The Critical Reception: Contemporary Newspaper, Magazine Reviews
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/twapubint.html
5. RICH MAN, POOR MAN
The X-Men are a poor man’s Doom Patrol.
Starbucks is a rich man’s crack.
Lincoln was a poor man’s Washington.
TR was a poor man’s Lincoln.
Aquidneck Island is a poor man’s Manhattan.
Broseph is a poor man’s Dood.
Phish is a poor man’s Dead.
Sgt. Pepper is a poor man’s Mozart.
A rolodex is the poor man’s blackberry.
Smarm is a poor man’s irony.
Emo is a poor man’s folk music.
Dino was a poor man’s Sinatra.
OJ is a poor man’s Raskolnikov.
Bacon is the poor man’s chateaubriand.
Renaissance is the poor man’s Steeleye Span.
Sports are the poor man’s mythology.
Water is the thinking man’s gatorade.
Ice milk is the poor man’s gelato.
Juice blends are the poor man’s cornucopia.
Dartmouth is the Poor Man’s Harvard.
Yale is the poor man’s Princeton.
Brown is the poor man’s Columbia.
UPenn is the Poor Man’s Cornell.
A flashy gorilla is a poor man’s sage monkey.
Superman is a poor man’s God.
McClelland was a poor man’s Grant.
Poop is the poor man’s manure.
A stiff is the poor man’s mummy.
Old is the poor man’s mature.
Fat fills the poor man’s tummy.
A Porsche is a rich man’s dick.
Boston is a Poor Man’s San Francisco.
Lenny Kravitz’s music is better than Applebee’s food.
Jobriath was a poor man’s Bowie.
Skafish is…who in hell knows?
6. LITERATURE OF THE FUTURE
…Shall we blame/ A dog’s rapacity upon/ The carelessness of man/ And
query thus the need/ T’ solicitously discard/ Our punctured tins? Fie
on’t! / When Tray, Blue and Queenie ceaselessly besot our yard/ And
turn a quivering face against the deed!–The Tragicall Melodrama of
Rin Tin Tin
[The Ranger] in telling us not to steal the pickanick basket/
Delights in seeing us steal the pickanick basket/ For he has not yet
been superceded by/ A world which has no need of parks, or
Rangers, or n-yea-hey-hey-hee, of food..–Prologue to “The Yogi Cycle”
(Yogi Tyrannis, Yogi at Colonus, Yogi Agonistes), attr.
Hammurabi-Barbarus
THE BOOK OF SCOOBIE 10. 1. A tax collector of the town did come to Shaggy
and did say unto him, 2. Master, when the doorbell doth ring, Scooby
beginneth to bark. 3. And when visitants come late at night, this
barking of the hound doth surely make the neighbors wax sorely
wroth. 4. And Shaggy did reply: Verily, friend, I say unto ye, and Yoinks, it is
actually very simple. 5. When ye doorbell doth ring, thou shalt give
unto Scooby a snack. 6. And Scooby shall lift his tail and bow his
shoulders and circle three times his bed then go to the Mystery Machine. 7. And
thereafter any time ye doorbell doth ring Scooby shall go unto the
Mystery Machine in expectation of a Scooby snack and so peace shall
reign in thine home forevermore.
7. TOP TEN DUBIOUS CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS
10. Marilyn Monroe for Sominex
9. Tiger Woods for Trojan Condoms
8. Girolamo Savonarola for Duraflame Logs.
7. Anne Frank for Hide-Away Beds.
6. Jack Kerouac for Thunderbird Wine
5. Morris the Cat for Taco Bell
4. Isadora Duncan for Hermès scarves.
3. Adolf Hitler for Sharp’s Non-Alcoholic beer.
2. “Jane Roe” for Absorbine Jr.
1. Superman for Kryptonite locks.
[A tip o’ the hat to JS, PW, BR, CMD, & RMS.]
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