pith…

While listening to BBC news coverage of Iran on the radio this morning, the words “Revolution speeds evolution” came to my head. At the time, the words fit the current Iran situation very well and time will tell whether there is a revolution, a new election, or crushed hopes and lives. Since it rang in my head, I scribbled it in my ever-present notebook for later reference. As I scribbled the, I thought this must have been said before.

When I got to work, I googled the phrase, searching various combos for 10-15 minutes, thinking full well that those simple words had been written before. By somebody, sometime. More likely many times.

I was surprised when I found nothing. It’s SO basic. Too basic. Certainly too basic not to be found. It strikes me as such a fundamental truism that it almost goes without saying. A bromide at birth.

The fact that I was pretty sure such a bromide had been born before is conditioned by the lateness of human times, the “been there, done that” attitude to which one is prone in these late days. The post- after the post-modern, if you will, or maybe the post-post-. Who can say? Even the identifiers of “ages” can’t keep up. All I can say is this old horse feels like he’s always chasing a moving post, racing to, but never reaching, the starting gates where a race should begin.

Nevertheless I wrote it. Maybe I should copyright it. But what does copyright mean any more? In this not-world yet hyper-communicative ether of twitter & ilk? Words are open source. Now more than ever. Once released out to the ether, the interwebs (as the clever kids call it), words are community property.

And, after all, they’re all already in the dictionary. Already written, already t/here. Been there, done that, as it were.

Been there, done that? NO. NOT that post-y, unearned cynical pose that may blind us (especially the pre-jaded young) to very fundamental, wholly non ironic, potentially useful TRUTHS.

When we’re too jaded for fundamental truths, small or large, bromidic or aphoristic, we’re truly lost.

But I’m joesmith. A bromide at birth. What the fuck do I know that hasn’t been known already? Too basic to bother, but still do. Too common to claim ownership of anything, let alone three simple words. But yet…

Sometimes a bromide fits the bill.

Revolution does speed evolution. I’m with you in spirit, people of Iran. If I can, I’ll assist however a common man can. May your God be with you.

It is not a way of life that a wise man proposes, but a way around life.

*

You say nothing could be further from the truth. I say nothing could be further than truth.

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Sophistry is what reason becomes when it is employed for the purpose of reconciling us to life.

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So much havoc has optimism wrought in this world that pessimism appears not only a legitimate way of looking at things but a moral duty.

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In a fallen world no fear is unwarranted, and hence what the psychologist calls a phobia might more accurately be described as practical intelligence . . . The more things a man has the good sense to flee from, the less he will have to regret.

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The true difference between the compassionate person and the coldhearted one is that the former derives pleasure form the suffering of other while the latter does not.

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Inexcusable and unforgivable — two adjectives that may be applied to every living thing.

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Pessimism is the optimism of disaster — the undying hope of every dreaded outcome.

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It is not common sense but mental confusion that induces us to distinguish between those bent on utterly destroying us and those who have our best interest at heart.

*

© Christopher Spranger, Green Integer Books, Copenhagen 1998.

Brutal Truths, Bitter Wisdom, Gallows Humor

The world was made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness. — Bull Durham, screenplay by Ron Shelton

- You are free and that is why you are lost.
- In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.
— Franz Kafka

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. — Quentin Crisp

The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively. — Peter Beard

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. — Samuel Beckett, opening line of Murphy, the funniest novel ever written.

I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand. — Charles Schultz

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window. — Charles Baudelaire

Life is like a B-Grade movie. You don’t want to leave in the middle, but you don’t want to see it again. — Ted Turner

- To live is to lose ground.
- Once you see that everything is unreal, you can’t see why you should bother to prove it.
- No one ever recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
- Invalids of hope, we are all still waiting; and life is only the hypostatization of waiting.
- By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.
— E. M. Cioran (tr. Richard Howard)

The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots. — attributed to Paul Ginsparg

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notiously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony. — Paul Goodman, as quoted in The Return of the Portable Curmudgeon

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, pee in it, and serve it to the people that piss you off. — Jack Handy, Deep Thoughts

One is born into a herd of buffaloes and must be glad if one is not trampled under foot before one’s time. —Albert Einstein

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk. — Cyril Connolly

Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.
4. YOU hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Democracy is an abuse of statistics. — Jorge Luis Borges

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success disgraceful.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. — H. L. Mencken

- Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
- Liberty is being free from the things we don’t like in order to be slaves of the things we do like. — Ernest Benn

Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is a good thing. Fleas are interested in dogs. — P. J. O’Rourke

• Happiness : An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
• Hatred: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another’s superiority.
• Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.
• Deliberation, n. The act of examining one’s bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
• Day, n. A period of time of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
• Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters.
• LONGEVITY, n. Uncommon extension of the fear of death.
• MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.
• LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
• HAPPINESS, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
• YEAR n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
• LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed.
• APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence
• OPTIMIST, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Suffering is overated. — Bill Veeck

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. — Gore Vidal

God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life. — Jeff Magnum, Neutral Milk Hotel, “Two-Headed Boy Part 2,” In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it. — Art Buchwald

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
The trouble with the rate race is even if you win, you’re still a rat.
— Lily Tomlin