Friday, October 30, 2015

313. No More Naked Ladies in the Center of Playboy.


The day of the Playboy centerfold is over, according to the  current Economist (10/24-30/15).   And English professors required to teach our civilization's most difficult, and eventually most intense, erotic poetry  are probably emitting a great sigh of relief. 

I remember the poetry of the late 16th and early 17th centuries as being so hard for sophomores that sometimes the only thing that would keep a class — or the males in a class — going were the glimpses of coming ecstasy provided by the poet.  The "snowy limbs" of Spenser's damsels wrestling in a pool, revealing more and more but seen "through a veil" of water and foam, until one, gasp, "her two lily paps aloft displayed."  Glimpses.   What good are they when the kid can pull a magazine out of his back pocket and wham, get the full view?

Hugh Hefner worked against everything we were trying to do with Renaissance love poetry.  Our age, led by scientists like Alfred Kinsey and pop psychologists like Dr. Crane, was flattening and coarsening the erotic imagination more every day.  It didn't have to be so, we thought.  Let these young people follow Herrick all the way through a frolic, or Marvell through an invitation, or Donne through a seduction, and they'd never read Playboy (or Cosmopolitan) again.  Love as orgasm management?  Ugh!

The eighty-three-year-old Hefner was treated by the Economist with the respect it (and most of America) accords all money makers, but I would guess that that's not entirely the respect he saw coming into his reach.   From The Playboy Forum, and the talk he encouraged about the "Playboy philosophy," and the serious prose he solicited (even an article by a U.S. senator!) to put alongside his pictures, and the beam on his face when pundits credited him with "a major part" in the sexual revolution, I got the idea that what most pleased him was respect as a liberator, a breaker of bonds, an usherer into sophistication from naiveté, into light from darkness.

The darkness, as with most 20th-century liberation movements, was 19th-century mores, in this case Victorian prudery, a dog beaten to a pulp in the twenties but lying there handy the rest of the century. 

The light is somebody's daughter displaying her pudenda as to a gynecologist, with, being in a centerfold, the whole male world invited in.

As for "sophistication," you can go no further with that word than to what the freshman pledge sees looking ahead a year.  The Playboy "philosophy" is fraternity sophomore hedonism. 


Ah, but seriousness?  Yes you can find it, in articles by James Baldwin and Vladimir Nabokov.  And certainly in that article by the senator.  Unspotted political philosophy — unless you count the semen stains.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

312. Neutral Discrimination: Going, Going.....


Get ready to remove one more word from the list of those we use to discriminate — that is, "distinguish accurately" — among things and people.  The New York Times has proposed (10-20-15) that we retire the word "alien," the word most of us use simply to distinguish a foreigner living in the United States from a citizen living there, but which some use as a disparaging word.  These few, mainly Republicans, have spoiled the word.  So it's both the offensive Republicans and the sensitive Democrats who are taking our vocabulary down.

Projecting the line they've put us on to the end I see we're left with just one noun, "people," and one verb, "love."  Looking at the users of words I see only a loving mush.



Tuesday, October 20, 2015

311. Gangsta Rap and Elementary Schooling in the Thirties


While I was writing Post 306 I had some pretty derogatory but, I thought, accurate words ready to use to describe the songs that have now, I see, become mainstream in popular culture.  But when the time came I left it to the reader to guess that it was hip-hop, or rap, I was calling "bigoted" and "barbaric."

Why this reluctance?  Here's what I was looking at:

I don't fuck with you
You little stupid ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you
You little, you little dumb ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you
I got a million trillion things I'd rather fuckin' do
Than to be fuckin' with you

And further on:

From the Bay to the Murder Mitten,
my niggas put murder missions
She choose him, that's her decision, free my niggas in prison
On the phone with a bitch who can't do shit
For a pimp but make a nigga hella rich
(Kanye West and others)

When I think of adding "trashy" to "bigoted" and "barbaric" I begin to envy my elementary-school teachers, who used that word freely.  Obscenity was trashy.  Talking ugly to girls was trashy. 

Those women teaching at the Williams Avenue Grammar School were a caution, I'll tell you.  Going to normal school (teacher's college) so early in the early twentieth century they were practically pure vessels of Victorian (in America, Genteel Age) values.  They still used the word "suggestive."  Ogling or slithering a certain way in the class play brought the word into their conferences.  The public performance couldn't be "in bad taste."

To our Sunday-school teachers profanity was a sin.  To my seventh-grade teacher it was "a sign of a limited vocabulary."   That was cool, and coming from her it had some force.  She was the one who showed us how far poets' vocabularies went.  Edgar Alan Poe (oh my god, "the tintinnabulation of the bells") and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("all in a hot and copper sky").  If you thought of her, up in the classroom lined with the classics, your fourth use "son-of-a-bitchin" ("fuckin" was way in the future) on the playground would catch in your throat.

In class we really wanted to please that teacher.  When we sang we kept our backs straight and enunciated distinctly.  When we read "Thanatopsis" or passages from "Snowbound" aloud to the class we paid attention to the meaning of the words.   Making us want to please her was part of her skill. 

It seemed to be a skill of all of those teachers, part of a general skill, even genius, that I recognized later, and found hard to account for until I understood how the circumstances of the time had selected them.  Teaching and nursing were all a woman, no matter how brilliant, could do.  The women who taught us at Williams Avenue might now, I think, be running Hewlett-Packard or laying out genomes.

At Williams Avenue they used their genius in finding just the right project to turn us on —  making a papier mâché mummy, making the sarcophagus, doing the hieroglyphics, knowing the meanings of the hieroglyphics, to learn about Egypt; turning the whole class into a formal club to learn Roberts Rules of Order, the way to debate; diagramming the relation of all the Greek Gods to each other, an odd pyramid, with parallel lines to their Roman equivalents, filling the blackboard. 

Talk about filling the blackboard.  After Mrs. Davison got us into sentence-diagramming, her own system, and challenged us with longer and longer  sentences, we competed among ourselves.  "Who can diagram the longest sentence?"  We filled the whole damn board.  And completed my education as a teacher of English Composition.  The courses I took later added nothing new or, I thought, better.

These teachers got a hold of us before we had any idea of what was "too much work for a teacher to assign."  That came in college classes, if not in high school.  In Mrs. Davison's class you had to read a book a week (from the floor-to-ceiling library in the back of the room) and write an essay-review of it.  If you wanted to you could read other books and get the points she assigned to them, according to their importance and difficulty.  She gave you your point total at the end of the month, and you could compare it  with other students' totals, which of course all the competitive sentence-diagrammers did.  (Oh she knew us, and, of her time, felt no shame at encouraging competition.)  We read like demons, three, four, five books a week.  Jumping on the hardest ones for their point count.  I have an idea that, if you could see through the pants and skirts of those students who went up to get their total (and a talk, to see how well you read), you'd see a ring around every bottom.  The bathroom was the place for undisturbed reading.

What we were getting in those last three grades (fifth, sixth, seventh) was, essentially, our first course in Western Civilization.  Heavy on the classical period.  In Miss Sheets' class Egyptians and Mesopotamians coming out of the dark past with written language, little (meaning only the country) Phoenicians scurrying all over the Mediterranean, spreading civilization, Greeks and Romans bringing it to glory, and to us.  "You'll learn a lot more about this in college."  We could hardly wait.

Every sample of knowledge they gave us suggested great things over the horizon.  "See here in your geography book [our first one, big, full of color], 'young rugged mountains,' 'old worn-down mountains,'  'sub-arctic tundra,' 'dry plateau,' or 'fertile lowland'" (in the book, dark brown, brown, light brown, and green).   What variety!  And it explained the variety in people.  Miss Aurand took us through sections on a Norwegian family, an Eskimo family, a Bedouin family, and a French family.  We could learn more about them, too, in college.  (Traveling to learn more was beyond our dreams.)

The variety of people.  Did Miss Aurand "show discrimination"?  Only, as I remember, in the neutral sense, looking at the differences determined by geography, "If you want to understand people, find out where they grew up."  We left her class with that fertile understanding, and carried it home.

Home was a different matter, and its difference was explained by "variety of people" too.  The variety in Norwood in 1934 was pretty well limited to three, and that only recent.  To the people established in comfortable, two-story houses spaced on shady streets had been added arrivals from industrial sections (moving, joy, "out to the suburbs") and arrivals from Appalachia, finding a better-than-mountain income in nearby Cincinnati industry.  The Depression split many of the big old houses into flats, rented to arrivals.  (My family had arrived from industrial South Side Chicago, and rented a flat.)

There was discrimination in the bad sense, but — remember here that you're looking through a child's eyes and hearing with a child's ears — it wasn't emphatic.  At home I heard the contemptuous "briar hoppers" (for mountain people, incompetents) but not much more, probably not anything near what a sensitive sociologist would hear now in the jokes about (stereotypical) Jews,  the laughs at blacks on the radio, prejudice casual and habitual.  I think it was pretty much the same in other houses.  If lines were drawn inside our all-white suburb they disappeared as soon as you got working with somebody on a job or doing business with them in the world. 

Lines are worth mentioning here because that's what I instinctively want to draw when I hear rap music, the line between the barbaric and the civilized, and then find myself confused by lines between, oh my, races, generations, wealth, power, privilege, lifestyle, moral status, who knows what all.  With what's on each side of them easily stereotyped, unfairly sampled, and mocked.

At Williams Avenue when you went for a fly ball you were supposed to yell "I have it, I have it" instead of the "I got it, I got it" heard on every playground away from school.  A bug on the gym teacher would have shown it.  You could replay the tape and make your point about that generation, with fact and a laugh.  "Oh those prissy schoolmarms, over the top on grammar as they were on chastity."  Of course the real people, the manly boys, paid no attention to such hoity-toities.  As their manly fathers paid no attention to women's temperance unions.

And so up in the classroom brilliant, learned teachers with the respectable Victorian cause of advancing "the best that had been thought and said in the world," the people with the best chance of civilizing us barbarians on the playground, are discredited by a young gym teacher who goes too far.  As, to my mind, those advancing the cause of tolerance now are discredited by those who carry political correctness too far.  The world is full of hilarious, convincing  examples.   You can pluck them out for your case, as lawyers pluck out psychiatrists, and if you run out of them the silly-siders will keep supplying you, until the movement is done in.  Victorianism, what my teachers spoke for, had so many silly sides (imagine, avoiding the word "leg" when you spoke of that part of a chicken!) it's a wonder any of it got through the twenties.  But then, my busy teachers were probably unaware of "the twenties."

But back to that boys' playground.  It was unsupervised most of the time because, forced by job cutbacks, the teachers had to take on too many other tasks.  Fighting went unchecked.  What we were doing, I saw later, was regressing first to my father's playground in Chicago (which I glimpsed when he said to me, "If you get in a fight, go for the nose") and then to my older uncles' playground in the Illinois coal-mine country, which I glimpsed in their talk about becoming "cock of the walk" there, the boy nobody could lick.

Those ladies now, in the classrooms above the playground.  Dresses, high heels, hair dressed and in place.  The only time you ever saw a lock of Mrs. Davison's hair — molded, white, maybe a little bluish — out of place was during a paper-drive to make money for the school.  After she had been lifting papers from our wagons onto the junk man's scale for an afternoon you could see two, maybe three, strands of white, at her forehead, over beads of perspiration. 

I say high heels but only the young, still marriageable, women wore them.  The heels on most of the women were too blocky to be called high, though they still looked uncomfortable, and, after an eight-hour day, probably were.  Their wearers were never out of earshot, in those days, of that cruel word "Old Maid," carried here from father's mouth to son's, and up from the playground to open classroom windows.

There it is, there's what's powering this blog post.  I want to go to the window and yell down, "That's trashy, you little ape!"  Exactly what I want to yell at that rapper.

I'll get to that but first I need to adjust my picture of the teachers.  They weren't all women.  There was Mr. Dahl, to whom every student was sent for arithmetic, apparently because women couldn't be trusted with mathematics.  He always wore a black suit, the one suit he had, probably, and he would sometimes play ball with us at lunch break, folding his coat over the railing.  We were impressed by his ability to hit the ball over the left-field fence, but we didn't see much of him. 

And then there was H. H. Maddux, the principal, who tried not to add to your fright when you went to his office as a "serious case" (one the teachers lacked the weight to handle) and who appeared in front of the class once a week or so to give us "a serious talk."  He wore a vest with his coat, and a gold chain that ran to his watch, but he was not pompous and he conferred smilingly with the teachers.  For a long time he had a bandaged ear, injured by an errant golf ball.

Not being a spinster made Mrs. Davison an exception.  She was exempted by the death of her husband from the rule against hiring married women, a rule designed to reduce competition for the jobs needed by those who had to provide for families.  Mrs. Davison was the only woman teacher to have had a child of her own, a boy who had died at three.  (When we came to Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue," a poem about a boy who had died at that age, she asked a student to do the reading.)

You had to be deaf and blind not to feel the change when you came into those teachers' classrooms after the bell — 8:00, 10:00 ending recess, 1:00 ending lunch break.  But being boys, males, we (I, maybe) had a hard time carrying what the teachers had civilized back onto the playground.  There: "He don't take no shit off nobody."  My barbarian heart responds, under Mrs. Davison's frown.  I tingle at the thought of being the one complimented, the cock, maybe, of the walk.

How much I was drawn to such fellows came to me one evening when I made a smart answer to a teacher who tried to slow me down running in the halls of the high school, where we had been taken to hear a concert.  "Hold on there," she said, "where are you going so fast?"

"Places," I said, and ran on.  At the end of the hall, a classmate, big on the playground, asked me who had spoken to me.  Having had a glimpse of her I said, "Old lady Davison," adopting his language and view. 

I was ashamed of that betrayal of Mrs. Davison for a long time, but when I wish that she and the other women had completely won the battle for my soul, and the other souls, earlier and more completely, I think of another incident.  In 1935 the head of the Boy Scouts of America, Walter Head, had come to the Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in Norwood to raise contributions, and had chosen me to come up and stand beside him to illustrate a point he wanted to make.  "Boys this age," he said to the large audience, "are in Germany now marching in Hitler Youth organizations all over the country.  To make them strong and ready to fight."  He explained Nazi militarism and went on to make some comparison that I realize now could have been right out of Pericles' speech to the Athenians, comparing them to the regimented Spartans.  I was a visual representation of our youth alternative, our only alternative, to the modern Sparta.  And democracy's proper alternative.  Give to the Boy Scouts.

"Was I the proper alternative?" I ask now.  A kid half pacifist (after my Scottish mother), half aspiring poet, with a weakness for powdered, white-haired, gentle-speaking women? Considering the war that was coming wouldn't the savage who "didn't take no shit off nobody" have been better?  Wasn't he the kind who won World War II?  If that playground was our "playing fields of Eton" (you know, where Waterloo was won) you'd have a good case.  For that war and all preceding ones.

See how that tangles the line I want to draw?  They, those roughnecks, would fight for civilization too.  I wanted to draw a line between the barbarians on the playground and the civilizers in the classroom, those ladies fighting such a hard battle.  Fighting for poetry.  And then I ask, "If the playground fighters hadn't won the later battle, hadn't defeated the Great Barbarian, Adolf Hitler, where would the poets be?"

"That'll teach you not to draw lines," I might be told now.  "Why draw lines at all?  Why make judgments about people?  Why categorize them?"

Tough question now, but it would have made no sense to the  parents of Norwood, nor, I think, will it make sense to any parent.  Parents have to draw lines between kinds of people out in the world because that's where children go, and keeping company with the wrong kind can ruin their lives.  "In what crowd might there be the temptation to try that first shot of heroin?"  In Norwood the word for that crowd would have been "trashy" and "heroin" would have been "unmarried sex."  I don't remember lectures but somehow we knew that in high school you didn't go to the Norwood Roller Rink because that's where the wrong kind of boys and girls hung out.  You know, girls that got picked up and then got pregnant, and boys who would do that to them — and then leave.  If you wanted to skate you went to the skating parties in the basement of the Grace M. E. Church,  whose elders had put in special smooth concrete for that purpose.  Smooth enough to keep you away from the trash on the other concrete.

(Somehow we knew not to go to the Norwood Roller Rink?   Maybe we knew the way Arthur Winner's daughter in By Love Possessed knew not to go to a certain roadhouse: by a message from her womb, that pouch "no bigger than a pack of cards" that rode inside her and signaled its coming product, with its needs.  Can boys know that way?)

But "trash" now.  As a reference to people the word possibly came to us from the South, which (according to Kentuckians) began right across the river: "white trash."  "Trashy" was the way those people talked and acted.  Those people and us people. 

But again, the exceptions and complications.  The friend who turned me on to the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was from West Virginia.  "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,/ We could nor laugh nor wail;/ I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,/ And cried, A sail! a sail!"  He, equally smitten by Mrs. Davison, recited that during one of our evening walks.   Then another friend told me that when he had stayed over at John's house for dinner he heard his father say, as he was coming down the stairs, "I'm sa hungry I could eat the ass off a skunk."

It's hard for me to tell whether the teachers drew any of the lines I saw drawn in town because I saw them only when they were concentrating on their jobs.  I got a glimpse only once, when after school I told Mrs.  Davison that I might be moving to a mixed neighborhood in Chicago.  I remember her fearing bad influence on my education.

What I say about lines drawn in the classroom won't make sense unless you understand the seating.  Tall students were put in the back, short students in front, "where they could see."  But with the practice of holding students back to repeat a year and advancing quick students a year this, certainly for the students, located ability.   The "dumb kids" sat in the back.  That was my perception, a casual one, then.  Now I realize that children from the arriving families, particularly from mountain families, were the majority in the back. 

A line was drawable.  Did my teachers draw it?  Memory and a child's attentiveness give me so little, but there's this.  When the class put Roberts' Rules of Order into practice, in motions and amendments and maneuverings and debate, nearly all the action, the energy, was in the front half of the room.  And that's where Mrs. Davison's attention was, that was where, as she looked on, her smiles and pleasure were generated.  It's where (I say, looking at my college teaching experience) mine would have been. 

So yes, she drew a line.  But I don't think it affected her actions.  When back-row Oliver was too sick to prepare for a big spelling test she sent me over to his house to coach him.  I went over the words he had missed on preceding spelling tests. "Choir."  When I put it to him his listening mother said, "Oh, is that how you pronounce it."  In her coaching she had pronounced it "chore."  I didn't understand, but I'm sure Mrs. Davison did.

Then, more than a glimpse.  I remember being sporadically affected by Mr. Maddux's talks, which were sometimes about "life," sometimes about what we had read in My Weekly Reader (a child's news magazine), and sometimes about citizenship and the reasons for our rules, and for all rules,  We shouldn't forget how long the arm of the law was, and we should be glad we lived in America.  The talks were consistent with the routine he (or the Superintendent of Schools) had established for pupils in every class.  8:00: stand up, hand on heart, while a member of the student Drum and Bugle Corps played "To the Colors" at the end of the hall (while other members, outside, were raising the flag).  At the conclusion, hand out to the classroom flag, pledge allegiance, then fold your hands, drop your head, and say with the others "The Lord's Prayer."

The talk that affected me the most was the talk about what was wrong in America.  It was pretty new to me, and was consistent with only one thing I had read before in school, in our arithmetic textbook (newer than the others, published after the recent Crash): a warning, in the section on interest and dividend calculation, against the great evil of  STOCK MARKET SPECULATION (yes, it was capitalized).   Mr. Maddux talked about slums and scams and Al Capone and corruption and all kinds of crime, filling us in on so many bad things that he thought (I guess) we were now ready for.

I don't remember much of the detail but I remember what it did to my eyes.  While he talked Mr. Maddux often hooked his pudgy little fingers over the ridge of my front-row desk, playing them there while he spoke. Two fingers, then three, then four, then back.  I couldn't take my eyes off of them.   In this talk, though, I remember raising my eyes, toward the end, to the big map of the U. S. on the front wall.  Bad stuff filled it.  Sea to shining sea.

Then came this, in another talk, near the end.  A joke about TNT.  Rastus saw the initials on a box and immediately ran away, at full speed.

"Why are you running, Rastus?"

"I know what dat mean.  It mean Travel, Nigger, Travel."

Now here's a question about line-drawing.  Would any of the women in that school have told such a story?  From everything I heard from them, through six years of listening, I feel sure that they would not even have come close.  Is there a gender line here?

I think there is and it comes very close to that line I want to draw between the civilized and the barbaric.  What?  Are women the great carriers of civilization?  

And if they are, what words will they use to carry it and protect it?  What words would they need?  What words would men need to protect them?  Out on the playground: "Shut up, you little ape, that's trashy."


That's back on a thirties playground, but how about now, listening to a black rapper?  Some kind of line appears, and it's a heavy one, cutting across one line after the other.  The line cries for explanation, but it's all so terribly complicated.




Thursday, October 8, 2015

310. Sex Scene Choreography and W. H. Auden.


What a happy coincidence.  The New York Review that has Auden objecting to nakedness on stage (10-22-15) is on the coffee table at the same time as the New Yorker carrying an interview with a fellow who choreographs sex scenes on the New York stage (10-12-15).

You can go from advice to an actor on where to put his penis during simulated intercourse (so it won't get crushed) to one of the nicest arguments for privacy and public decorum you're likely to hear.

Auden is spare, as usual, and you have to supply the rest of the argument he suggests.  He, thinking about the people "doing all those things" (in 1969), wonders if they "can have any real friends."  To him friendship depends, apparently, on observing "an essential difference between the public and the private life."  If you are really friends (or, lovers), "You take off your clothes in private; sex is a private matter."

To the choreographer, Yehuda Duenyas, disrobing "is all about getting past cultural inhibitions, the elimination of shame.  'You have a body and your body is beautiful.'"  In the nude rehearsals he gets naked right in there with the actors.

Their arguments don't exactly meet.  Auden, who might believe equally in the beauty of the body, is against displaying its sexual encounters in public.  Duenyas defends that display with his easily believed statement about the body's beauty.  Easily believed, but on the Auden side easily seen as irrelevant — and, by some I'm sure, as the common sign of uncertainty and weakness on the part of a cultural ground-breaker.

Knowing Auden for the poet he is, and knowing now of his strong physical attachments (he was a closeted gay), we can hear him telling us, in his insistence that friendship and love are a private matter, that yes, of course, that's where the excitement is, in partner knowledge, personality knowledge.  Without that knowledge you don't have friends, you have bodies.  Much less exciting.

And Auden, again like a good poet, stimulates you to go on.  Past those people doing and displaying "all those things."  How about those people watching?  What do they have?




Friday, October 2, 2015

309. Niccolò Handles the Islamic State


It's as plain as the nose on your face.  You can't do the dirty ground work against the Islamic State yourself, you can't find an ally inside Syria to do it, you can't find an ally outside Syria to do it, you can't find any potential ally organized enough and motivated enough to do it.  Don't you see?  Vladimir Putin is just what you're looking for.

"But Putin is an ally of Bashar al-Assad."

Giving you more organization and motivation.  Syrian government, Russian government.  We're talking about taking over territory, aren't we?

"Yes, and some of us are very happy to find terrorists concentrating themselves in a territory." 

Well, Putin and Assad know how to take over territories.  The U. S. knows how to help: from the air.  The right proportion of clean work and dirty work.  Success is just around the corner.  Rejoice.

"Niccolò, I know you have a reputation for realism, but here you are so far out of it.  We simply cannot ally ourselves with Bashar al-Assad.  That's backing him."

And who, may I ask, are you now backing?  Which of those 29 varieties of wonderful Muslims now in Syria?  It is manifestly in your interest to ally yourself with Putin and Assad.  It gives your people, your Prince, what they want most, victory over the Islamic State.  I would recommend it to my Prince in an instant.

"But your Prince has not had Assad (not even to mention Putin) held up to him for such a long time as an impossibly bad person.  And justifiably so.  He killed, even before the rebellion against him, as many as 20,000 of his own people, some by poison gas."

First let me tell you something about my Prince.  If I had said to him, "Accept Assad as an ally, my Lord, or lose your principality," he'd have done it in a heartbeat.  Even if he had had Assad held up to him as a bad person since birth.  He trusted my advice.

"All very well, but my Prince will not elect anybody who changes like that.  Flip-floppers lose elections."

And your Prince will lose his ass — your equivalent of a principality — if he goes into Syria.  To keep your ass in this part of the world you've got to have good allies.  And all your allies are bad, easily chased off, no matter how much you train them.  (How can you still be so nuts about training after you've learned that the  guys chasing your guys have had only three weeks of it?)  Assad's soldiers, with Russian and U. S. support, are not going to get chased off.  Oh, I've kept up with things.

"Oh, Niccolò, can't you see that an ass is not the worst thing you can lose.  You can lose your conscience, your honor, your humanity, your soul."

Oh, terrible.  And worse, you'll lose your commitment to democracy.  Imagine, losing your commitment to an ideology.  I know the line, and I take democracy to be an ideology.  A little better than the others, maybe, but still an ideology.  Certainly not anything to lose your ass over.

"All right, but still there's this thing I'm sure is more understandable to you.  We can lose our reputation — as a rescuer, a defender of the defenseless, a life saver."

Of course I understand reputation.  It often translates into power, and is very useful.  And yes I understand life-saving.  Arithmetically.  The more lives you save the better.  How often have I found that the number of lives lost after you have stepped in to save lives — or  your reputation for humanity, or your conscience — is greater than the number you stepped in to save.  The vile killer, Bashar al-Assad, had taken about 20,000 lives.  The number lost after the Arab Spring rebellion —which you cheered on — got going is up to 220,000.  The number of lives lost after you went after Saddam Hussein is at least as great as the lives lost under him. Measured quantitatively your kind of life-saving doesn't compute.

"Well, Niccolò, we here can't just count where you're counting; we have to count at the ballot box.  And the total our executive (of our Prince's orders, called The President) needs there is counted at the moment, not when all the long-term totals, the ones you're counting, are in."

I see, and one becomes the executive by measuring the moment better than the other candidates.

"Right."

Thank you.  I now understand what makes your job different from, and probably more difficult than, mine.  Your Prince has a shorter attention span.

"Yes, one of the many faults our teachers — you know what bears they are on paying attention — are working on.  He's learning."

Well if he's learned anything why does he keep losing his ass?

"Because part of him (he's deeply divided) keeps wanting to risk it.  To save lives, you know.  And that part won't let the other part win at the ballot box.  If it does win, this part keeps hounding the executive (that life-indifferent ass-protector) who won."

 Hounding him for possibly saving 200,000 lives?

"By your way of counting, and those lives would be lost later."

Well, lots of luck doing it your way.

"And lots of luck doing it your way.  I think you'll need more of it."