from a letter to Martin Kilmer, Nov. 23, 1958:
American university teachers have told me that most of their freshmen come from schools where the standard was far too low and therefore think themselves far better than they really are. This means that they lose heart (and their tempers too) when told, as they have to be told, their real level.
In the beginning there was darkness upon the face of the Earth, and there was no iced water. And Hilton said, Let there be iced water. And in every bathroom pipes ran with plenteous iced water, and Hilton saw that it was good.Then he said, Let there be music. And in every lobby, single study parlor, double French bedroom and luxury suite, yea, in every elevator, other pipes gushed with plenteous canned music. And Hilton saw that it was good.And he said, Let the earth bring forth Hiltons, yielding fruit after fruit after their kind. And so the El Paso Hilton begat the Beverly Hilton, which begat the Puerto Rico Hilton which begat the Istanbul Hilton which begat the Panama Hilton which begat the Nile Hilton which begat the Virgin Islands Hilton which begat the Trinidad Hilton which begat the Teheran Hilton which begat the Acapulco Hilton.And on the seventh day, Hilton rested.But only for an instant. For messengers came unto him and said, Behold, there is an Anglo-Saxon people that dwell in darkness and know not thy name, nor drink they thy iced water. And Hilton took his rod and smote upon the rock in the place which is called Park Lane and out of it came forth a pillar of 130,000 cubic feet of concrete. And the view from the top thereof was thirty miles in any direction, and from thirty miles in any direction thereof the view was, alas, of the pillar.Then sent Hilton for the scribes and elders of the people and commanded that they come to him. And they cast lots and sent unto him an elder named Maudling whom they could best spare to be sacrificed. And Hilton gave him a pair of silver scissors and bade him cut the tape, and Maudling would not. But the serpent Clore, who privily did own the freehold, tempted his handmaiden, Beryl, and she spake unto Maudling saying, Give me your scissors. And lo, as he stood wondering, as was his wont, what words to speak, she cut the tape and there was a great gushing of iced water and puking of piped music and a great charging of fifty guineas a night without breakfast.And Hilton said, Behold, I have given unto you the London Hilton containing everything meet for your needs: a view into the garden of your Queen, yea, and a library wherein you may read Hilton Milton, and 850 Hilton manservants and maidservants smiling Hilton smiles, which they smile not saying cheese, as other men, but saying Hilton Stilton.But the people were a stiff-necked people who would not drink of the iced water nor would they eat of the Olde English Breakfast, consisting of ripe melon, All-Bran, crisp waffles with ham or sausage, and hot chocolate. For they cried out, What is this Olde English Breakfast? We know it not. Neither will we pay 15/6 for it.And Hilton was exceeding wroth, and departed with a gnashing of his teeth to beget the Athens Hilton which begat the Moscow Hilton (which was called the Comrade Hilton) which begat the Berlin Hilton (which was called the Adolf Hilton) which begat the Pisa Hilton (which was called the Hilton Tiltin') which begat the Tel Aviv Hilton (which was called the Hilton Schmilton), which begat the Rabat Hilton and doubtless also the Sodom Hilton and the Gomorrah Hilton which were also turned into pillars of concrete.And it came to pass that the Hiltons covered the face of the Earth. And there was a great flood of iced water, and the darkness was greater than it was in the beginning.
When Orpheus smote his tuneful lyre
Among the Slocum Regis choir
Who, greatly daring, undertook
The celebrated work by Gluck
(Or, as some put it, tried their luck
At singing choruses by Gluck),
The name of his unhappy spouse
Diverse opinions did arouse.
For while sopranos, strong and screechy,
Loudly lamented Eurydice
And altos on the lower G
Bewailed the sad Eurydice,
The basses scorned distinction nice,
And sang the fate of Eurydice.
As given in the "Kipling Journal" (March 1968, vol. XXXV, no. 165). Introduced with the following: "...a memory of a verse which appeared in Punch many years ago and, if the Editor will permit, deserves repeating."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nL8eRuGMmc
Whole speech: Camille Paglia: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (and pronouns). Brooklyn Public Library, March 16, 2017 (1:20:50)
Q: So, in the realm of free speech, I was curious about your thoughts on the backlash received by Prof. Jordan Peterson on the U. of Toronto campus. Have you heard of the issue?
Paglia: No, I haven't. Want to tell us a little bit?
Q: Basically, he is in opposition of bill C-16 and basically his refusal of using gender pronouns on the campus. [NOTE: this is only partially correct. He has never refused to use someone's idiopronouns when asked. But he was and is opposed to making a law requiring it because that's compelled speech, an infringement on free speech.]Paglia: Oh.
Q: He's received enormous backlash in his videos on Youtube—Paglia: Wait. This professor refused to use the pronouns that are being requested or demanded by gender activists.Q: Yes.
Paglia: Okay. Well, more power to him, is what I say. This is getting ridiculous. My Ph.D. is in English literature from Yale. Contribute to the language. Write a poem. Write a book. Look at the way Gloria Steinem won her one great accomplishment, that she was a cofounder of Ms. Magazine. And there was a very important contribution made by the word "Ms.", because before this, unlike the Romance languages, in English you had Mrs. or Miss. So if you were unmarried at age 40, 50, 60, you were still called "Miss" in a very demeaning way. Whereas in France a young girl is called "Mademoiselle." The minute a person gets in her 20s and afterward, she is called "Madame", whether she's married or unmarried. "Madame." She has dignity, she has authority. And the same thing in Italian. You're "Signorina" if you're young, and "Signora" if you're old. It doesn't matter if you're married or unmarried. "Ms." was a very important contribution to the language. It took time to be absorbed.
But this political agitation to change everyday common speech, are you kidding me? People shouldn't be putting up with this for one second. What kind of nonsense is this? Absolute nonsense! These people who are searching for their own identity and want to impose on others, that's not my philosophy as a libertarian. That is an invasion, intrusion into other people's personal rights. Why? The English Language is owned by everyone! It was created by great artists: Chaucer and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Joyce and so on! How dare you, you sniveling little maniacs, to tell us how we're going to use pronouns! Go take a hike, I say to them!
By “joke”, I mean a setup with a punch line, not a retelling of a prank or deception of some kind. The oldest joke I know is from chapters 85-87 of The Satyricon by Petronius, circa 61 AD.
Here’s the modern version.
When the traveling salesman’s car broke down, he stopped at a farmhouse. The farmer said the only place he could sleep was with his daughter and warned the salesman to keep his hands off her. They went to bed and he made a tentative pass. She said, “Stop that or I’ll call my father!” But... she moved closer.
After more tries and increasingly feeble protests, finally he succeeded, and found her an accomplished and willing lover. Shortly thereafter, she tugged on his pajama sleeve, and said, “Could we do that again?”
After he drifted off, she awoke him and asked for yet another round of torrid lovemaking. He obliged, but not being the man he once was, fell back asleep at once. Again, he found himself being shaken by the girl, asking for yet another round. He turned over, facing away from her, pulled the covers over his head, and said, “Stop that, or I’ll call your father!”
In Petronius (tr. W. C. Firebaugh) the traveler (not a salesman) seduces his host’s young son. Note that he telegraphs the punch line (the original Latin does, too) and thus ruins it.
When I was attached to the Quaestor’s staff, in Asia, I was quartered with a family at Pergamus. I found things very much to my liking there, not only on account of the refined comfort of my apartments, but also because of the extreme beauty of my host’s son. For the latter reason, I had recourse to strategy, in order that the father should never suspect me of being a seducer...
In a few days, a similar occasion brought about the very same conditions as before, and the instant I heard his father snoring, I began pleading with the lad to receive me again into his good graces, that is to say, that he ought to suffer me to satisfy myself with him, and he in turn could do whatever his own distended member desired. He was very angry, however, and would say nothing at all except, “Either you go to sleep, or I’ll call father!” But no obstacle is so difficult that depravity cannot twist around it and even while he threatened “I’ll call father,” I slipped into his bed and took my pleasure in spite of his half-hearted resistance. Nor was he displeased with my improper conduct for, although he complained for a while, that he had been cheated and made a laughingstock, and that his companions, to whom he had bragged of his wealthy friend, had made sport of him. “But you’ll see that I’ll not be like you,” he whispered; “do it again, if you want to!” All misunderstandings were forgotten and I was readmitted into the lad’s good graces. Then I slipped off to sleep, after profiting by his complaisance. But the youth, in the very flower of maturity, and just at the best age for passive pleasure, was by no means satisfied with only one repetition, so he roused me out of a heavy sleep. “Isn’t there something you’d like to do?” he whispered! The pastime had not begun to cloy, as yet, and, somehow or other, what with panting and sweating and wriggling, he got what he wanted and, worn out with pleasure, I dropped off to sleep again. Less than an hour had passed when he began to punch me with his hand. “Why are we not busy,” he whispered! I flew into a violent rage at being disturbed so many times, and threatened him in his own words, “Either you go to sleep, or I’ll call father!”
You haven't had to do much lying, do you understand? ... You people were arrested, but we were herded into meetings to 'expose' you. They executed people like you, but they made us stand up and applaud the verdicts ... And not just applaud, they made us demand the firing squad, demand it!
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, pp. 436–437. | |
Leonard Moseley, On Borrowed Time: How World War II Began (1969), chapter 6, "Hitler over Bohemia":
The Kabarett der Komiker was a small night club which operated in a back room of a building on the Kurfürstendamm in the fashionable West End of Berlin, and any foreigner who visited it in 1939 was astonished at what he saw and heard. Not that the entertainment offered was prurient; when the Nazis came to power in 1933, one of their first acts had been to close down the homosexual and lesbian joints and the sadomasochistic striptease dives for which Berlin was famous. After-dark entertainment was now confined to high-kicking legs and an occasional glimpse of a bosom.
The Kabarett der Komiker had survived the Nazi purge because it relied on verbal rather than visual effects to make its impact. The entertainment was divided between sentimental singers, an occasional dancer, some slightly risqué sketches, and the services of what the Germans call a Conferencier, a sort of master of ceremonies who tells jokes and sometimes sings between acts. The only difference between Werner Finck and his counterparts in other countries was that his jokes were almost all political, and that every time he voiced them he gambled with his life and liberty.
Werner Finck [1] was an anti-Nazi who made no secret of his contempt for Adolf Hitler and the men who were running Germany. He did something no one else in the Reich had the courage to do publicly: he made fun of them. Bouncing onto the Kabarett der Komiker's minuscule stage in his floppy suit, outsize bow tie and floppy hat, he would lift his hand in a majestic Hitler salute. Then, after a pause, without a muscle moving in his face he would say, "That's how high my dog can jump."
Finck always knew the latest gossip about the Nazi leaders. When Field Marshal Göring's wife, Emmy, announced that she was pregnant, Finck sidled onto the stage and said in a whisper to his audience, "Psst! D'you know what she's going to call the baby if it's a boy? No? I'll tell you! Hamlet. Yes, Hamlet! Well, obviously!" And then, hand on his chin, he began pacing back and forth across the stage, reciting, "Sein oder nicht sein, das ist die Frage!" [2]
And each time he concluded his act for the evening, Finck would march to the wings, turn, give the Nazi salute, and shout in a strident voice, "Heil...er...er...Now, what is that fellow's name?"
No one knows why the Komiker was allowed to stay in business. Between 1936 and 1939 it was temporarily shut four times by Joseph Goebbels, and on five occasions Werner Finck was jailed for "insulting behavior toward the state." But each time the cabaret re-opened and Werner Finck returned, his repertoire as bitingly contemptuous.
On January 25, 1939, Captain Paul Stehlin, the assistant air attaché at the French Embassy, was sitting at a corner table with General Karl Bodenschatz, Göring's chief aide and the fourth most powerful man in the German air force. As the Frenchman turned to his companion he was relieved to see that Bodenschatz was laughing at Finck's mordant comments on the Nazi leaders. "So long as he doesn't mock the Luftwaffe!" said Bodenschatz.
[1] An indestructible who is still appearing at the Kabarett der Komiker on the Kurfürstendamm today [1969].
[2] Which in German means either "To be or not to be, that is the question" or "His or not his, that is the question."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (part 2, ch. 3):
“Did you really think we want those laws observed? ” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.”
[...] so when the Khashoggi thing first came out, and it was obvious Trump was sort of underplaying it, I said that's probably the smartest thing he's ever done, because that gives the USA tremendous leverage over Saudi Arabia, [...] because we would have a club over public opinion. Trump decided not to use that club.
What did he get in return? You don't know, do you? I don't know! Do you think that Trump, just think of his personality, think of his deal-making, and think of the fact he would've been completely aware that he had now leverage over Saudi Arabia? Do you think he didn't know that? I said it every day on live stream while it was happening? Yeah, of course he knew it. [...] Do you think [...] Saudi Arabia didn't know that? Do you think he got something in return?
[...] we do know the peace deals between Israel and other countries started coming together, and that never happened before. What would it take for those other countries to feel safe in joining with Israel on some kind of a peace deal? Well, probably they needed to know that Saudi Arabia wasn't going to be a problem. And they weren't.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, III, i:
Out of this wood do not desire to go:
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
Comedy of Errors, I, i:
Hapless AEgeon, whom the fates have mark'd
To bear the extremity of dire mishap!
Now, trust me, were it not against our laws,
Against my crown, my oath, my dignity,
Which princes, would they, may not disannul,
My soul would sue as advocate for thee.
But, though thou art adjudged to the death
And passed sentence may not be recall'd
But to our honour's great disparagement,
Yet I will favour thee in what I can.
These are probably coincidences, like the "Bible Code". For more information see "Shakespearean line-by-line acrostics" by A. Ross Eckler, Word Ways, Feb. 2007. (Free Library)
There's something Eric Hoffer said: "Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature." There always has to be a crisis—some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn't matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power. Many intellectuals' preoccupation with the poor is very much the same thing. The thing that gives it all away is that after they say, "We must have this program because the poor can't afford medicine, or can't afford housing," they will splutter if you say, "OK, let's have a means test so it really goes to the poor." If they were really concerned primarily about the poor, they would agree to it. But they are bitterly opposed to that, because the poor are a lever to reach other, political, goals.
Walter Williams figured out some years ago that the amount of money needed to move the poor out of poverty would be trivial compared to the amount of money that's spent on these damn programs that are supposed to help the poor but usually don't. But the poor are being used as human shields in the political battle. You put the poor up in front of you as you march across the battlefield and enemy troops won't fire, so you can expand your power, and raise taxes, and so forth.
Someone* once said, “Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” If you cannot place yourself in a state of mind where this statement, true or false, seems completely irrelevant as a critique of conservatism, you are not ready to think rationally about politics.* John Stuart Mill (in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington, May 31, 1866):
What I stated was, that the Conservative party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract this assertion; but I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, ch. 5, section 1 (Miss Hardcastle speaking to Mark Studdock)
Two or three of us who are agreed as to what a College ought to be, have been endeavouring to stimulate the undergraduates into forming some sort of literary society. In any other Colleges the idea that undergraduates should require, or endure, stimulus in that direction from the dons, would be laughable. But this is a very curious place. All [Magdalen] College societies whatever were forbidden early in the reign of the late President—an act which was then necessitated by the savagely exclusive clubs of rich dipsomaniacs which really dominated the whole life of the place. […] When I came I found that any Magdalen undergraduate who had interests beyond rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication, sought his friends outside the College, and indeed kept out of the place as much as he could.
[…] I am quite sure that this College will never be anything more than a country club for the idlest 'bloods' of Eton and Charterhouse as long as undergraduates retain the schoolboy's idea that it would be bad form to discuss among themselves the sort of subjects on which they write essays for their tutors. Ours at present are all absolute babies and terrific men of the world—the two characters I think nearly always go together. Old hearts and young heads, as Henry James says: the cynicism of forty and the mental crudeness and confusion of fourteen.
Except for classics (and that only at Winchester, and only a few boys even there) I really don't know what gifts the public schools [not the same as USA public schools] bestow on their nurslings, beyond the surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty."
The cercles of his eyen in his heed,Nun's Priest's Tale, 136-7
They glowéden bitwyxen yelow and reed
His colour was bitwixe yelow and reed,
And tipped was his tayl and bothe hise eeris;
I can tell you why men and women can never get together, Doc. Each wants something completely different. A man wants a woman, a woman wants a man! Impossible!Arthur, in Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953), act II. By Edward Chodorov.
Though she is probably the second most lampooned woman in U.S. politics -- after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) -- Pelosi is far from a household name. "I don't think most people know who I am," she says.
That could change in one historic moment if Pelosi is pulled from the trenches and plopped into the spotlight.
She sees it as an opportunity to change the culture of Washington.
"I think the fact that I am a woman will raise expectations in terms of more hope in government, and I will not disappoint," she says.
"The gavel of the speaker of the House is in the hands of special interests, and now it will be in the hands of America's children. I don't mean to imply my male colleagues will have any less integrity.... But I don't know that a man can say that as easily as a woman can."
But at every other mosque, Hill was struck by the intense anti-American hostility he encountered. Though these were not his own views, he barely had to mention that he thought American policy toward Israel and the Middle East was misguided, or that Jews wielded too much political power, to unleash a torrent of anti-American, anti-Semitic rhetoric. Many applauded the bombing of the WTC, lamenting that it hadn't done more damage. “Those are the towers of Jews”, he was told at several stops. Then his hosts quoted from the Koran [Sura 4:78]: “Wherever you are, death will overtake you, though you are in lofty towers in the sky.”
