Leader (noun).—Anyone who keeps his or her finger in the dike long enough for the rest of us to forget that there is a North Sea. When the leader retires, the ensuing flood is the fault of the incoming administration.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I am appalled. I am also outraged. It would not be too much to say that I am incandescently furious.
What is the object, you ask, of my white-hot indignation? I have forgotten. It has been years since I was able to specify the cause of my appalledment. All I know is that I have been appalled for a good long time now, and in those years I have built up heaps of appalledness, a fortress of appalleditude, an appallation mountain as it were. I am appalled when I rise in the morning. I am appalled while I eat breakfast. I am appalled at work all day; I am appalled when I come home to my efficiency apartment; I am appalled when I lay my head on my pillow.
It is, in short, my state of unrelenting appalledification that gets me through the day. But I was not always so fortunate. I had to teach myself the skills I have so laboriously built up: no one taught me to be appalled this way. In school, outrage was not even a whole class, let alone the main focus of my education. Only in history classes was any kind of outrage specifically taught, and even then only in conjunction with very limited subjects, like slavery. Anyone can be appalled by slavery! Where’s the skill in that? It would not be too much to say that it took a lifetime of careful training and desensitization for the slaveholding classes not to be appalled by slavery.
What we need is a complete reform of our educational system. Throw out all the useless detritus of the past, which only a misguided reverence for tradition keeps alive. Children don’t need to learn math, because we have calculators on our phones. Children don’t need to learn to write, because we have artificial intelligence. Children don’t need to learn to read, because we have YouTube. What children do need is the skill to be appalled all the time, without the need of a particular subject to be appalled about. They need to learn the art of nonspecific outrage. Perhaps, if I may offer a suggestion, they can be taught to be appalled about their own education, and then it will be easy for them to generalize from there.
—Sincerely,
“Mad Marvin” Blitzmueller, M.Ed.
RULES.
From DR. BOLI’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY.
Healing Modality (noun phrase).—Any method of dealing with a disease or medical condition that does not actually work, as opposed to treatment or cure.
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INTRODUCING REBECCA MAXWELL BYLLESBY.
What then shall we say of Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby? When we have said that she is worthy to mingle in such exalted company, we have perhaps paid her the highest compliment we could pay to any poet.
Yet Byllesby is entirely unknown to the twenty-first century. Her one slim volume of poems—poems that ought to be as immortal as “The Tay Bridge Disaster” or “Temperance Reform Clubs”—has been stuffed in the back stacks of libraries and forgotten.
Well, that is about to change. Dr. Boli intends to do for Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby what Mark Twain and Bill Nye did for Julia A. Moore. Poets, after all, often must wait till many years after they have died to see any appreciation—a fact of which Mrs. Byllesby herself was all too well aware.
Why is it that the public will never realize
That a person is ever really great, ’til after he dies?
Then they will start and sing his praise,
And always with flowers they will strew his grave.
The one volume Mrs. Byllesby published during her lifetime was a collection of Patriotic Poems provoked by the First World War. Dr. Boli knew he had found a treasure with the first two lines of “Our Soldier Boys,” the first poem in the book:
Of our soldier boys we are mighty proud,
And in our praises for them we are always loud.
The poems only get better from there. Here is her tribute to “The Red Cross and Y. M. C. A.,” and if it does not make tears roll down your cheeks, you are made of stern stuff and are qualified for a job with the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The Red Cross and Y. M. C. A.
In this war both the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A.
Are doing their part to help win the victory.
When you see an ambulance with a red cross on the side,
You may be sure they are doing good far and wide.To the Y. M. C. A. the boys go, their letters home to write,
Their evenings are spent there nearly every night.
They are always waiting and receive them with joy,
For the Y. M. C. A. is the home of the soldier boy.The cross is on the nurse’s arm, and the doctor’s over the heart,
Both of them are soldiers, doing a hero’s part.
Caring for the sick and wounded certainly is an art,
But you’ll find the Red Cross has been there from the start.The Y. M. C. A. will keep them from many a strife,
While at the Red Cross they are always saving life,
For we know the home of the soldier boys, while they are away,
Is either the Red Cross or the Y. M. C. A.— Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby.
(Each one of the poems in the book is signed that way, though no other poets are represented in the collection.)
After this introduction, you are doubtless panting for more of Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby. Run to the Internet Archive and open her book of Patriotic Poems. By the time you close it 28 pages later (it is not a large book), you will be changed.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: My mom keeps telling me to eat my vegetables. But vegetables are yucky, especially after my mom has left them boiling on the stove for an hour and a half while she gets lost in YouTube and forgets everything she ever knew. Why should I eat them anyway? —Sincerely, Conor, Age 36.
Dear Sir: Dr. Boli was just taking a walk through a lovely stream valley where the Japanese knotweed is quickly strangling every other form of life in the landscape. His friends in the South report that whole counties have disappeared under a blanket of kudzu. Entire lakes are invisible under a gorgeous but suffocating carpet of purple loosestrife.
With these observations fresh in his mind, Dr. Boli believes he can give a reasonable answer to your question. You should eat your vegetables to prevent them from eating you.
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AN EARLY WORK OF FRANK GEHRY?
