Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Boswell told the story of how he and Johnson were in a group with a lot of aristocrats when a woman sitting near Johnson passed noisy gas. She immediately began rubbing her own leg against a table leg to create the illusion the noise was a friction sound vibration resulting from the two legs in two-part harmony.
“We heard you the first time, Lady. You don’t have to find something that rhymes with it,” Johnson pointed out.
Which sums up a lot of the problems we human beings have trying to solve what we believe are our major issues on any day. We fudge on our rhymes. On big issues we’re especially bad about boxing ourselves into lousy rhymes.
For instance, after Roosky peasantry had been beaten and starved by their aristocrats a few hundred years they wanted to find something that rhymed with the French Revolution. They talked about it endlessly, batted it around, finally created a poem with rhyme and rhythm of their own.
But it took Joe Stalin to write the last stanza. The one about Napoleon.
For some reason that particular poem always ends with Napoleon. Evidently no way of avoiding it.
Today in the US and a lot of the world the folks in power are trying to find something that rhymes with Edward II and the Dispensers. The folks who aren’t in power are trying to find something that rhymes with the American Revolution. And both agree there’s a sidebar hope of finding something that rhymes with the crusades.
You don’t hear much out of Washington DC about Edward II and the Dispensers these days, but you see a lot of attempts to find things that rhyme with it. But nobody’s doing much thinking about the final stanza of that one, either.
For the ones trying to find the US Constitution behind trees and under rocks, the final stanza to the American Revolution was probably the Civil War.
I can’t recall the final stanza of the Crusades, but I suspect a piece of it had to do with the massacre and looting of the Templars [and Edward II and the Dispensers].
When human beings passed gas back in the time of Johnson, or Edward II, or the French Revolution I’m betting it smelled and sounded pretty similar to when they do it today. We aren’t much better at rhyming today than we were then.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 