Category: Fourre-tout

Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration. Apuleius

Recently, numerous accounts of athletes refusing to stand for the National Anthem have grabbed the headlines.

I understand how this position can hurt the feelings of many Americans, especially the veterans of foreign wars. But personally, I believe that too much familiarity leads to disrespect. When the National Anthem is played too frequently, it loses its special aura.
To keep its cachet, it should only be performed on solemn occasions, not in every stadium, state fairs or rodeos.

Human beings have been conditioned to only show reverence for rarity. Playing The Star-Spangled Banner too often cheapens its value.

All objects lose by too familiar a view. John Dryden

There are many ways to voice political concern and shunning the National Anthem is not one of them. It is too divisive. It makes immediate enemies of people otherwise united by a common passion.

Politics is like religion. It does not belong at the dinner table, the bedroom or the arena. It is toxic and destructive.

If you are famous and want to express a political point of view, it is better to call a press conference. Spoiling a public event for thousands is not the way to rally people to your cause.

Politics should be excluded from sports, especially when brought to the fore by very well paid athletes. A jock is basically an actor, paid to entertain the public.

Can you image a thespian intoning:

“To be or not to be that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles…”

and kneeling for a few minutes before continuing his soliloquy? I can already hear the boos and catcalls…

Athletes should do what they are (very well) compensated for and leave the National Anthem and politics out of the entertainment sphere.

Alain

Mistress… Curiously this word rhymes with stress, underlining the fact that a liaison can indeed be very stressful.

I recently read in AARP magazine an article by Joe Queenan called “Men who don’t cheat”.

Here is an excerpt:

“Men like to plop down on the couch and watch sports and drink beer. Romance, by contrast, is labor-intensive; you have to shower, shave, put on something other than sweatpants, buy flowers, go to the movies, read a book every once in a while, engage in a conversation.
Cheating on your wife involves travel, dinner reservations, booking hotel rooms. Once a man has been married a few decades, the energy he would need to expend on an extramarital affair would be a life-threatening shock to his nervous system. That’s why so many older men wouldn’t even think of cheating on their wives. It is too exhausting.”

This is true. For some men (just like some dogs) the chase is way more exciting than the catch. Once they have caught their prey, they quickly lose interest in it.

“Next to the pleasure of finding a new mistress is that of being rid of an old one.”  William Wycherley

The pursuit is often a way to reassure an aging person that he is still a “player”; that he still can please and seduce.

But for a married man, keeping a mistress is a luxury that few can afford. It is time-consuming and costly. And with the advent of the tell-all smartphone, it has become increasingly difficult to keep an affair under wraps.

An older man falling prey to middle-aged lust is better off using the services of an “escort” (love those euphemisms) than making a Faustian pact.

Having a mistress is definitely a young man’s game. He has the energy and the naivety to propel him forward. The possibility of getting caught never crosses his mind. But caught he will be, because leading a double life is an exhausting enterprise, requiring superior fibbing capabilities and above average stamina.

When engaging in amorous pursuit, it is much wiser to stick with unattached people rather than diddling with tethered femmes fatales.

Alain

What is a Mistress? Something between a mister and a mattress. Jim Backus

We are currently witnessing a war of words between two spoiled brats: our volatile commander in chief and North Korea’s grandstanding autocrat. It would be a laughable interlude except for the fact that this could easily degenerate into a nuclear war.

Any sensible head of state has to show restraint before unleashing the dogs of war. None of these two airheads display any hint of that.

There is no doubt that in a war between North Korea and the United States, the US would prevail; but at what cost? While the two halfwits at the top might survive, thousands of people would surely perish.

And who knows what might follow? World War One was ignited by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Armageddon unexpectedly followed.

“The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was more than 41 million. There were over 18 million deaths and 23 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes about 11 million military personnel and about 7 million civilians.”

“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was once Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy precept. Any well-read individual knows and probably agrees with that; but is our present leader well-read? Or does he read at all? Besides authoring a book (written by somebody else) and sponsoring beauty contests, this remains very much in doubt.

Bombast and blustering never accomplished anything constructive. Let diplomats deal with each other quietly and cut out the juvenile cyberbullying.

Where are the great diplomats of yesteryear for crying out loud? Where are the Talleyrand, Benjamin Franklin, Henri Kissinger, Dag Hammarskjöld, Golda Meir, Abba Eban… the very people who valued peace and thought that diplomacy was preferable to whistling bullets?

An ignominious exit usually follows a populist leader who gets ensnared in his web of deceit. Let us hope that this happens way before the unthinkable occurs.

Alain

PS: Due to a request from Marc’s family, the previous posting (In Memoriam) was removed.