October 2017 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

The Book

A Story

Books are going out of fashion, I believe. At least those meant to be read. Books as commercial objects, especially old books, are still hot items in the collectors’ world. My friend George knows all about this. He loves to visit flea markets and garage and estate sales in search of literary treasures. But most of the books that catch his eye are not treasures. He will handle mostly books that in his estimation he can resell for, say, two or three times of what he paid for them. It’s a regular little business he runs there. He uses the internet to find buyers. His dream, of course, is to hit the jackpot, like picking up a first edition of The Wizard of Oz which, according to available records, would fetch more than a thousand dollars. But this would work only if somebody (a) has a first edition, (b) does not know its value, and (c) wants to get rid of it. The probability of being confronted with this combination is extremely low, obviously.

But there are other opportunities, smaller fish, so to say. One might, at an estate sale, unearth a volume of the speeches of President Coolidge, for example, a small volume, probably. Not many people would pay money for this. But there may be a scholar somewhere who would gladly give you fifty dollars for it. Which is a good deal if you got the little book out of a grab bag for a dollar. When George spots a likely find he follows a certain routine. Typically the seller names a price. George then examines the book and talks a bit to the seller about the book, remarking perhaps that it is a rather steep price for this kind of a book. The seller usually responds by coming down a bit on the price. Now it all depends on how much George thinks the book might be worth. If he decides to buy it he will close the purchase with the formula “Will you take x dollars?”, x being an amount just a little under the sellers last quotation.

To most sellers the books they offer mean nothing. So if they ask for thirty dollars and get only twenty not much is lost from their point of view. Twenty dollars is money, after all. A useless book is a useless book that takes up space. Occasionally a seller is really ignorant as to what makes an old book valuable. Just because Grandfather once owned this copy of Moby Dick adds emotional , but not monetary value to the book. George often has to explain this to disappointed people.

Rarely, very rarely, George’s eagle eye spots something a notch above the ordinary, say a slightly worn copy of a well known poets early works, worth maybe a hundred dollars. When this happens it is very important, George says, to show no anticipatory emotion when asking for the price. Pokerface is the order of the day. You then take your time looking the book over, making sure it really is what you thought it was, then pay and quietly move on. Those cunning windfalls are the stuff of endless telling and bragging in collectors circles. George was a master in this art.

One day, though, the force was with him for sure. He stopped at what looked like a very poor house. An eight year old boy was watching the spread-out garage sale merchandise. Shirts, pants, and shoes mostly. There was a power drill amid the things. “Does your Dad not need this any longer?” he asked the boy. In a small, shy voice the boy answered that his dad was dead. There was not much else of interest. George almost passed it up but there was a box full of mostly paperbacks and maps. Also buried in this box was a hardcover book, the binding of which had come loose. As George picked it up his heart almost stopped. It was time for the poker face. This looked like a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, dated 1884. The book was in bad condition but by George’s estimate could still fetch about a thousand dollars. “Look at that”, he said under his breath, “this is unbelievable.” His eyes lit up. The vulture in him circled for the kill. This, he realized, was the big one, the chance of a lifetime. The boy was watching him with wide eyes. He, too, sensed that he was about to have a paying customer. But something happened. George, still holding the book in his hand, just stood there motionless looking at the boy for a long minute. Then he fished for something in his pocket, pulled out an old envelope, stood there as if thinking about what to write, then scribbled a note on it and stuck it in the book. “Kid”, he said, his voice suddenly turning raspy, “is your Mom at home?” The boy nodded. “Here, take your book and show it to your Mom, right away”. The boy took the book and ran inside as told. George did not look back. He got to his car and was gone.
I don’t know what got into him. He must have been temporarily insane that afternoon, or something.

The Old Man In and Out of Paradise

It stands to reason that the world is actually much older than the Bible stories make us think. In fact, the history of the creation of mankind goes way back. I have no proof, but intuition and blind faith tell me that early on God was still inexperienced. She had never yet tried to create humans before. She had done well with snakes, though. Their brains had turned out powerful and perfectly capable of cunning, as we later found out. But let us begin at the beginning.

For one thing, Earth was also new and time was still set at “universe” which meant that things went extremely fast and extremely slow at the same time. Later this sort of thing was shoved into a box labeled “quantum theory”. Remnants of the old clock setting still remain today. While in the United States, for example, “time” means money and by extension, “hurry up”, in Italy, Spain, and many other cultures “time” means “take yours”, in other words, “Hey, not so fast”. But I am digressing again.

So it took God only a day or so to start “Project Mankind”, but from then on development was slow going. The thing turned out to be more complicated than expected. As a matter of fact, it took decades, celestial decades. By the time the first complete model, Adam, was rolled out he was already in his celestial eighties. So when God set him down and explained the basic rules he was almost deaf, or at least hard of hearing and, truth be told, did not understand a word of what she said about the tree and the apple, for example. It did not matter because that topic wasn’t to come up ’till later. First she had to convince him that the least he could do was to make himself presentable when in public, and that Eve should do the same. Three fig leaves would be the norm for her, one would do for him, God said. But as we already know Adam did not hear well and consequently just gave God that blank stare of senile non-comprehension. So she tried to communicate with him in an audio-visual way. She showed him artists’ renderings of Eve before fig leaves and Eve after. The idea was to make him see the difference, what is better: with or without. Like the optometrists do, flipping lenses: “One more time, Left? or Right?” The answer seemed obvious to God but the procedure was completely wasted on Adam who had already lost most of his vision by the time he hit celestial seventy. All he could say was that he did not notice any difference. He must have been stone blind, if mixed metaphors are in order.

Just then God accidentally dropped her clip board. Adam, who had already developed some innate sense of politesse, instantly bent down to pick it up, a maneuver he was not prepared for. Some thing snapped and he could not get up. He had to be helped to his feet. At that moment it occurred to God for the first time that maybe she was going to have to scrap this model.

The next item on the list was that apple thing. That was important, after all. Maybe, she thought, he will understand, and maybe he will straighten out once it sinks in that this is serious. So preparations were made and Eve, wearing her finest fig leaves, brought the apple to Adam, suggesting that he take a hearty bite of it, just as the snake had instructed her. He was most willing to do that. The red-cheeked ripe juicy “Paradise Delicious” smelled so good. But his one wobbly upper front tooth, assisted by equally wobbly pre-historic partials, just did not cut it. Literally! He was unable to cut into the hard skin of the offered fruit. That did it. “If he can’t even do this!”, God mumbled. She turned the lights out in Paradise and went back to her drawing board to start over.

How long that took I do not know, but celestial time had rolled on and we were approaching modernity. We get back to the story at about Genesis 1:26. We now have a little problem, though. Can we assume that God spoke some sort of Proto-Greek? She must have spoken something. How else could anyone have heard her. It could not have been English. Even the English themselves had not been invented yet. But if you follow the text you know that she was about to create mankind, something like anthropos, and that there would be an andros and a gynaika. But then English came into use and sure enough, the English speaking translator picked the word “man” for anthropos. I wish he had been a jew. I am sure he would have called him “a mensch”. That might have been too much praise but at least it would have disspelled the notion that God favored the male of the species. That misconception, alas, has now hung on for thousands of years. It is still gospel in much of the world. I find it refreshing that lately we are beginning to suspect that in world affairs at least, we have long enough ignored the fact the Irish poet Thomas Moore laid before us, namely that “‘Tis woman, woman, rules us still”.

Perhaps “rules” is too strong a word. The old Hindu philosophers claim that it is not “a woman” or even “women” that hold sway over us but the female principle, and that is also why I think “God” is a “she”, yet not a woman. But I don’t much go for this nebulous mystic talk. And as for man, i.e. andras, the male of the species, I really have to dig deep in my memory. When was the last time one of them did anything really helpful? I believe that from time to time it simply does take a woman to set things right, here or there. A Meir, a Thatcher, or a Merkel, say.

Lazarus

The 1880’ies are often called the Golden Age. In Russia, unfortunately, these years were characterized by massive Church-inspired pogroms, events at which pious churchgoers, walking behind their priest in procession, would still yell “Kill the Jews”, and mean it.

Emma Lazarus, a minor American writer and poet intent on helping the oppressed, believed that she spoke in the name of all Americans when she wrote The New Colossus. Later, when the Statue of liberty was erected, her words found their way to the wall of the foundation structure.

Now, a hundred years later, Liberty Enlightening The World by Bartholdi is said to be the best known public sculpture in America. Lazarus’ sonnet contains probably the best known line of American poetry: “Give me your tired, you poor, your huddled masses”. Maybe the words once meant what they said. America had a big heart then. Alas, America’s heart has shrunk a bit. Those words sound hollow these days. Do we not have enough trouble with unemployment, automation, outsourcing, social security, health insurance, etc.? We need the housekeepers’, waiters’, gardeners’, and field workers’ jobs for our own people, now essentially blocked from getting into those lucrative manual labor careers. We cannot take on the problems of other nations’ poor as well.

America for Americans is a more honest slogan than ‘Send us your poor’. And if honesty matters we ought to bring Emma’s words up to date lest any newcomers visiting the statue of Liberty misunderstand what we are about. Here is one attempt:

Take back your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
They should breathe free, live without fear.
But please,
Not here.