FinermanWorks

Western Civilization has just averted an immeasurable threat:  me on jury duty.  Oh, you might think that I wouldn’t be that much of a danger to your life, limb and liberty.  After all, aren’t I just another kind-hearted liberal?  Well, I might be a liberal but so were Cromwell and Robespierre. 

Here is how I would judge the following cases…

Athens, 399 B.C.  Socrates is guilty; however, I wouldn’t have convicted him of corrupting youth.  Youth is inherently corrupt, and you can only imagine how the spoiled brats of Athens were.  However, teachers are supposed to impose some constraints on their little monsters.  Socrates abysmally failed.  The parents of Plato could forget about grandchildren.  And what did Alcibiades learn?  During the Peloponnesian War, he managed to betray Athens, Sparta and Persia;  he probably cheated the Chinese and the Mayans, too.  My verdict:  Socrates would have to refund everyone’s tuition.   

Jerusalem, 29 A.D. Jesus is guilty of practicing medicine without a license.  I don’t care if he did cure lepers; he still needed malpractice insurance.  For instance, a cured leper now will keep his fingers but what if those fingers then become arthritic.  Jesus could be sued–and I’d be stuck on that jury as well.  My verdict:  ten shekels for court cost and a restraining order keeping Jesus thirty yards from the crippled, blind and dead.

Rouen, 1431.  Joan of Arc is guilty of something.  In France being a 18 year old virgin is tantamount to treason.  Furthermore, she obviously was not conversing with France’s favorite saints.  Given their heavenly omniscience, wouldn’t those saints have told Joan to forget about the English and start worrying about the Germans?  My verdict:  Joan can continue to wear men’s clothing but only if it is a straitjacket. 

Massachusetts, 1692:  Guilty, guilty, guilty.  The evidence of Satan is incontrovertible.  The afflicted speak in arcane gibberish, they mock and abuse the unpossessed, and they think themselves superior to God.  My verdict:  Harvard must be immediately closed.  (Oh, did you have a question about Salem?) 

Paris, 1894.  Captain Dreyfus is guilty of gullibility.  Did he really think that those French aristocrats wouldn’t be Anti-Semitic?  Couldn’t he take a hint:  the other officers received epaulets and he got a “Kick Me” sign.  My verdict:  Twenty Franc fine for trespassing.

Dayton, Tennessee, 1925.  John Scopes is guilty of tactlessness.  When a person says he hasn’t evolved, he obviously hasn’t.  That person has every right to say that he was made in God’s image (although he actually would hate to look like an old Jew).  My verdict:  condemned not to have any of the memorable lines in “Inherit the Wind.”        

Court is now adjourned. 

What can Donald Rumsfeld do next?  Such arrogance and incompetence are too valuable to waste. 

After all, every company needs a scapegoat. When a business is reeling from federal indictments, creditors’ liens or lawsuits from orphans, someone on the corporate roster should embrace the blame. Unfortunately, most executives, especially the guilty ones, lack the talent for self-sacrifice. They will deny everything, demand exorbitant “retirement” packages or squeal to the grand jury. The company, the media and the investors deserve a more obliging scapegoat.

Donald Rumsfeld is available.

Yes, corporate America, he is your perfect dupe. Hire him as the blameworthy executive, and then incriminate him at press conferences and stockholders’ meetings. For a suitable severance package, he can be humiliated and fired. If the company is a Japanese subsidiary, he can also feign suicide. The public will love the spectacle, and it might even improve employee morale.

Happy Veterans Day.

I don’t think that a member of my family has seen combat since 1905. (Unless you count family dinners, in which case, I make Audie Murphy seem like a Quaker.) My great-uncle Joe fought in the Russo-Japanese War. Can you guess which side? The wrong one, of course. Aside from being on the losing side, he probably would have found the Mikado less Anti-Semitic than the Tsar.

Both of my parents served in the army during World War II. My mother, as a librarian at Ft. Hood, actually came closer to fighting the Civil War. Being in Texas, Ft. Hood had segregated facilities but that didn’t include the library. No one expected the “coloreds” to use it. One African-American did, however. When he returned some books, my mother apparently said something provocative by Southern standards: “thank you.” An army sergeant wrote her a reprimand: “White ladies do not talk to the coloreds.”

My father’s military career was less harrowing. He had a fine singing voice so he was assigned to the U.S. Army Chorus. Even though we were fighting a world war on two fronts, the military brass still required receptions with entertainment. Once the Army Chorus was sent to the Bahamas to serenade its governor, the Duke of Windsor. That was the closest my father ever came to a Nazi.

And if I am permitted to create my own heroic mythology, I can just imagine one of my ancestors as the morale officer at Masada. Of course, given the family resemblance, he would have been court-martialed for ordering in pizzas.

Be sure to wish to thank a veteran today…even if he is your cantankerous father-in-law.

On this day in 1865 Henry Wirz was hanged. Being born 150 years too soon, he was the only American to be executed for war crimes. The Swiss-born Confederate had no qualifications but a German accent to be the commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp. Under his sadism and neglect, the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia could have been advertised as Club Dead. Its 45,000 prisoners lacked housing, had only theoretical meals and a trickle of a stream for both drinking and sewage. How could they survive under such conditions? They really were not supposed to; and 13,000 did not. The rest held on until the Union won the war and liberated them.

Among those wretched survivors was my great-grandfather.

George Cohen was not the brightest of my ancestors. Arriving from Danzig, Prussia in 1863, the teenager obligingly signed any paper handed to him by the immigration officials on the wharves of New York. One of those papers was an enlistment in the Union Army: surprise! General Sherman must have felt reassured to have such capable men in his command.

Private Cohen was on picket duty outside of Atlanta when the Confederate forces launched an attack. The Battle of Peach Tree Creek is remembered as an Union victory, but the Confederates had the consolation of capturing Private Cohen. I imagine that he was the only Private Cohen at Andersonville.

Whatever deprivations he suffered there, it did not prevent from eventually fathering 14 children.

“BUSH, PELOSI HOLD WHITE HOUSE TALKS”

 In an incident that might have spoiled a bipartisan lunch, Nancy Pelosi noticed a rattle snake in her coffee cup. The snake had inexplicably found its way into Ms. Pelosi’s pot of coffee. Fortunately, the snake posed no real danger, having been poisoned by the arsenic, cyanide and curare already in the coffee.

Press Secretary Tony Snow offered the explanation that a White House chef might have mistaken a cookbook by Lucretia Borgia for one by Erma Rombauer. “All those foreign names sound alike.”

Faux News, however, broadcast that “Commissar Pelosi had tried to poison herself just to make our President look bad.”

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales saw no evidence of anything other than a bad cup of coffee. However, he did announce that would prosecute Speaker-to-be Pelosi for vandalism in dropping the porcelain cup. He also appointed a special prosecutor to investigate if Ms. Pelosi had ever taken any Sweet ‘n’ Low from a restaurant.

Here is one tabulation from the use of touch-screen voting machines. The entire neighborhood now has Mrs. Weinstein’s cough.

An election judge (Republican, of course) challenged me on the correct spelling of my name. “Shouldn’t it be ‘Finnerman’–with two N’s?” Perhaps “Finerman” was our attempt at anglicizing.

But enough of my suburban shtetl. Here is your RDA of Irony….

Early Wednesday morning President Bush telephoned Nancy Pelosi. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales taped the following conversation.

Him: They tell me that’s all I have to say. Bye.

Under the tsars, the Russian people were oppressed by good-looking imbeciles with flawless table manners. Vladimir Lenin envisioned a new world in which tyranny would be based on pathology rather than pedigree. However, Russia was not ready for communism during the first decade of the century.

According to Karl Marx, the Revolution would occur in an advanced industrialized society in which the workers starved but read Hegel. In the early 20th century, Russia was still perfecting feudalism. Lenin became resigned to a life in exile, playing chess in Switzerland.

In 1914, after decades of extravagant militarism, the European powers surprised themselves by having a war. To protect Serbia from Austria, Russia went to war with Germany. (To protect Austria, Germany attacked Belgium. If anyone had possessed a sense of direction, it wouldn’t have been a world war.)

Russia couldn’t even supply all of its soldiers with rifles. In 1915, 25% of the Russian troops at the front were unarmed; they had to wait to inherit the guns of dead soldiers. At least the tsarist government demonstrated even-handed incompetence by neglecting civilians. The transportation system broke down, and the cities went without food and fuel.

By March 1917, the civilians were rioting and the soldiers mutinying. The tsar, Nicholas II, was at the front “inspiring” the troops. His imperious majesty would have been safer with the Germans. He found himself under arrest and confronted with a delegation of government officials demanding his abdication.

Thus, a new and liberal government came to power in Russia. All those cultured, sensitive souls from Chekhov plays were running the country. This provisional government commanded the fervent support of millions; unfortunately, none of them were in Russia. What is freedom of the press to a nation of illiterates? The provisional government inherited chaos and chose to perpetuate it. Although the world war had toppled the monarchy, the new government intended to keep Russia in the carnage. The Russian masses were ready for any leader or ideology that ended the war, and Lenin took this as his opportunity.

In late March 1917, Lenin walked into the German consulate in Zurich and offered to overthrow the Russian government. He must have learned the word “chutzpah” from Leon Trotsky. Lenin peddled the Bolshevik Revolution essentially as an initial public offering. If Germany provided him with the start-up capital for his venture, he would seize control of Russia and withdraw it from the war. Germany could then shift its eastern army to France, and, with that additional half-million men, bludgeon its way to Paris and victory.

Though Lenin’s scheme was preposterous, the Germans were receptive to gruesome ideas. The Second Reich had already pioneered submarine warfare and poison gas, so it was willing to invest in proletarian uprisings. Germany provided the train and traveling expenses for Lenin and his cadre of Bolshevik exiles. They arrived in Russia in April 1917; they were in control by November.

There was no one to defend democracy in Russia. Russian liberals made excellent novelists, but their idea of defense against a Bolshevik onslaught was to make a sarcastic remark in French. Most of the liberals survived the revolution (even Lenin thought that they were too amusing to kill) and ended up as tenured professors at Ivy League schools.

Lenin had promised peace to Russia. Indeed, the Russian army assumed that a promise was as good as a treaty; the soldiers began an impromptu retreat home. Germany, however, was not ready for peace. While it had achieved victory in the East for the price of Lenin’s train fare, Germany now wanted more for its investment. The Second Reich demanded control of Poland, the Baltic States, Finland and the Ukraine. Russia would lose 27% of her arable land and 73% of her coal fields. For all practical purposes, the Baltic Sea now would be a tributary of the Rhine. Lenin had no choice but to capitulate. An unopposed German army can be very persuasive.

Fortunately for Lenin, Germany never collected on the debt. There still was a Western Front, and Germany’s first encounter with Captain George Patton and an American army would be the precursor for the main event. While Germany was whimpering about the Treaty of Versailles, it was no position to enforce its juice loan to the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Germany might have taken some satisfaction from subsidizing the Bolshevik state. After all, someone had to threaten Western civilization, and if it couldn’t be Germany, why not the Soviet Union?

Comicsar Yevgeny 

So whom should we root for in the Peloponnesian War?  Glorious Athens or brutal Sparta?  If you think that it is an easy choice, you underestimate the popularity of Neanderthals.

Ask yourself:  how many high school teams are named “the Athenians”?  Feel free to cheat and look at the sports pages.  You can see that the Spartans have won this war, too.   

With the possible exception of the chess club, no team wants to be named the Athenians.  From reading Plato and Herodotus, high school coachs just aren’t comfortable with Athens.  It was a little too “artistic” for the locker room.  Besides, a team wants to be named for a winner, and Sparta is the obvious choice.  The Peloponnesian War would seem like a duel between Truman Capote and Vin Diesel.  You can’t fight stereotypes; but history confronts us with an intriguing contradiction.  The War lasted 27 years.  Either Vin was overrated or Truman knew what he was doing.   

Today is the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up Parliament and the Royal Family. On this day in 1605 Fawkes and his fellow conspirators believed that a successful explosion would somehow restore Catholic rule to England. Mary, Queen of Scots, literally could have been a figure head.

The conspirators were a little indiscriminate with their targets. The Royal Family also would have been happy to blow up Parliament. If Mr. Fawkes was an attractive young man, James I wouldn’t have turned down the offer.

(The King’s tendencies had a rather depressing effect on his wife, Anne of Denmark. And for solace, the poor neglected woman turned to Catholicism!)

Of course, the plot’s failure did not make Parliament’s Puritans feel any more ecumenical. Guy Fawkes’ Day was long celebrated as an Anti-Catholic holiday. Bonfires throughout England roasted effigies of the Pope, although a real Jesuit would have been a welcome alternative. Today, Fawkes’ religious affiliation is downplayed. The current euphemism is that he was “Pro-Spanish.”

Now, how should we celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Day? In keeping with the holiday’s origins, you could rent Going My Way and make derisive remarks while watching it.

The truth can always be improved. We see it all the time in ads for films. For example, let’s say the movie reviewer writes, “once again that puerile bore Rob Schneider attempts to be funny,” The ads for the movie will quote this from the review:”funny.” That may be slightly out-of-context but the quote is technically correct.

Now the same creative technique is being applied to political ads. Your newspaper may have written, “In his proposal to outlaw any sexual position he can’t spell, State Senator Wendell Gopper reveals himself an execrable buffoon”. The ads for Gopper will quote the newspaper praising Gopper as “able” and “buff.”

There are other ways to create such quotes. Gopper’s campaign could put an ad in the singles’ section saying, “I am looking for the type of person who thinks that Wendell Gopper is a brilliant statesman and God’s gift to our district.” Since it is in the newspaper, Gopper’s TV ads have every right to quote it. So what if it wasn’t exactly on the editorial page!

Of course, the same creativity can be applied to negative ads. The Gopper staff, remembering to use blank stationery, could submit this letter to the newspaper. “It is long overdue that candidate Drake Preenwell deny that he is a necrophile.” If the letter is published, then it is technically a quote. And the Gopper TV ads will publicize the line as if it were a Pulitzer Prize-winning pronouncement.

But what if the letter is not published? There is a way around that.

Show an unflattering picture of Drake Preenwell. The ad’s voiceover begins and the following words appear on the screen:

Your newspaper says, “a drunken degenerate”…”a ludicrous public spectacle”…”a disgrace to his family”…”dying of syphilis.”

And every quote would be true. Of course, the quotes were from an article on Toulouse-Lautrec but that is a trivial detail.