Posted on 10/05/2007 9:16:30 AM PDT by Congressman Billybob
As often as possible, I share time well-spent with America’s greatest humorists and philosophers. This week it is Mark Twain and Thomas Sowell. That combination is not as odd as it first seems.
Philosophers dig down to basics, to find and state the truth. Think about it, humorists do the same, but faster. Humor is truth by surprise.
Mark Twain wrote: “When I arrived in Virginia City, there were eleven saloons, five jails, and some talk of building a church. It was no place to be a Presbyterian, and I did not remain one long.” In those two sentences, he tells three different stories.
One is the truth about the wild West. There was nonstop drinking, gambling, fighting, and running around with loose women in the mining camps of the American West. All that is referenced briefly but effectively. The second story is the somewhat priggish nature of the Protestant churches of his day. He wasn’t picking on just the Presbyterians. The third, and most interesting point is that Twain was not entirely displeased with the rough and ready life he found in that frontier town.
Right now, I’m reading Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.” I recommend it highly to everyone. The book is about differences in conclusions about society, based on people’s assumptions about human nature.
The subject sounds incredibly dry, but Dr. Sowell’s hands, no subject is dry. He writes about the most complex subjects with a breathtaking simplicity and clarity. Reading his work is like looking through a cold mountain stream at the bright pebbles at the bottom.
The connection between Twain and Sowell is here: Late in his life, tragic events turned Twain to a darker vision, and more sardonic remarks. He wrote, “Let me write a nation’s customs, and I care not who writes its laws.”
Twain states here a basic truth about both human nature and politics, with which Sowell fully agrees. Laws which run against the customs of a nation will always fail. The question is only how soon and how badly. Prohibition is the classic example. In a moralistic uprising, we wrote Prohibition into the Constitution. More than two decades later, filled with speakeasies, bathtub gin, gangsters and public corruption, we threw Prohibition out.
Consider the politically correct speech codes sanctimoniously established by entirely too many universities. Among the activities prohibited are jokes about various groups. I’ll cut to the chase, The groups in society that you can still make fun of are whites, males, and lawyers. So, feel free to fire away at me.
Stern pronouncements of professors will not stamp out jokes. It will only make the professors into jokes themselves. But then, if academic prigs could understand jokes, they would not be prigs in the first place. Since the supply of politically incorrect humor does not need to be imported by bootleggers, every college dormitory on such a campus is automatically a speakeasy.
Here’s a general rule I recommend to all. “Don’t trust anyone who can’t take a joke.” That’s especially true of jokes about ourselves and our own views. People who cannot laugh at themselves lack perspective to understand the views and beliefs of other people.
As Dr. Sowell writes so eloquently, advanced societies develop a collective wisdom over the centuries. Twain recognized that in his quip about customs.
Given the title and the subject, you probably thought I was going to comment on Larry (“Wide Stance”) Craig, soon to be the former Senator from Idaho. I could have written at length that I used to respect him. That he has demonstrated boundless hypocrisy, dishonesty, and egotism. That he has been surrounded so long by so many staff who tell him he can walk on water he thinks he can get away with anything, any time.
My wife says simply. “Larry Craig sends his shirts out to be stuffed.”
That makes the final point about humor. As Twain wrote in “The Mysterious Stranger,” only humor has the capacity “to destroy a public humbug at a single blast.” Boss Tweed of New York City was immune to prosecution because he controlled the judges. The cartoons of Thomas Nast made a joke of Boss Tweed and eventually brought him down.
Perhaps in this era when absurdity is all around us, we need more humor and less philosophy to fight the public rot. As the best of both humorists and philosophers will agree, humor is just philosophy without the long words and pages of explanation.
As I was about to publish this, Larry Craig lost his vain effort to withdraw his guilty plea, and then violated his own pledge and said he intended to stay in the Senate. It is time for an intervention.
When Justice William O. Douglas was getting senile at the end of his long service on the Supreme Court, a delegation of his three closest and longest colleagues came to him and made it clear he should step down. It is time for a handful of Republican Senators to do the same to, and for, Larry Craig.
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About the Author: John Armor practiced in the US Supreme Court for 33 years. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu He lives in the 11th District of North Carolina.
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That makes the final point about humor. As Twain wrote in “The Mysterious Stranger,” only humor has the capacity “to destroy a public humbug at a single blast.”Which explains the white-hot hatred of the Left for Rush Limbaugh. If they did not hold the MSM's bosses in an unbreakable headlock, every one of their humbugs would have been swept from the public stage years ago by Rush's jibes. ;)
You are dead on in the explanation of the hatred of Rush.To your second point, it makes more sense to think of journalists holding liberals in their pockets than the other way around. A seemingly minor point, perhaps, but the world makes more sense if you consider that journalism is just the mass production of criticism of the doers, and "liberals" (who of course are not truly liberal at all) get called that by journalists because journalists want to promote them with a favorable label. And journalists want to promote them because they are doing the self-same thing that journalists are doing - criticizing and second guessing the doers, to try to "count" more than "the man who is actually in the arena."
A socialist government is simply a government run by critics who can second guess but cannot make decisions in the absence of full knowledge of the results. It is all scapegoating, all the time.
Well played, indeed.
(Your wife's quip about "sending shirts out to be stuffed" also brought John F(wench) Kerry to mind...!)
Cheers!
Congressman Billybob
Heads up -- my announcement of running for Congress in 2008 will appear here, Monday afternoon.
Well the problem with this advice is, Harvard already has an overstock in their inventory of over-sized egos.
Given the size of his ego, where would you house the damn thing, other then the U.S. Senate ?
Just trying to be practical here.
Would'nt happen to have some extra property in the 11th district would you?
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