¡But Some of Us LIKE Nasty!

Dear Dr. Bones,

When ‘folks’ talk ’bout havin' feelin's . . .

Unfortunate I can’t really blame Alan (or Setti) for dropping, all things considered, but an unchallenged nominee makes me nervous. She’s done great so far, but I have a feeling this campaign will be nasty. jimc @ Wed 26 Oct 9:13 PM Reply

. . . McNasty (’66/’72) must reflect how vastly superior it is to have an "intellectual foundation" (as somebooby just called it) upon which to lay one’s silly little head. Upon which one's hormones can get to work.

For example: strapped to the commuter rail tracks, poor Pauline, mere Ninety-Niner, IQwise, that she cannot help herself being, announces that she "feels a little scared." Had she been predestined by her Mother Nature and/or her Father Zeus to a three-digit percentile [0], however, she would speak rather of "a rational perception of the headlamp and roar of the swiftly on-rushing St. Elizabeth Express." [2]

A reactionary writer of great stylistic merit has guessed that when ‘folks’ talk like that, they are merely bein’ plight: "To avoid the rudeness of saying ‘I have detected a _non sequitur_ which I will now demonstrate, we feign that what is really, or what we take to be, a rational perception, is merely a fugitive emotion."

Though Pauline is probably safe enough for the moment, the St. Elizabeth has just terminated Comrade Hazy and plunges onward in her wild career [3]. Somebody *really* important must be late for a meeting, I guess. ¿Is the Duchess, perchance, giving another machine-in-the-garden party?

Happy days.



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[0] Mathematical pedants will be aware that there is only a single "three-digit percentile" available, the one-hundredth, most of it already owned or leased by the Greatest University in the County [of Middlesex].

Nerds and other Levelers can count from zero at the bottom and then have no three-digit percentiles at all, thus living up to the diagnosis which lovers of the Spiritual Beauties of Inequality have very justly been making about us for millennia: if we cannot have any, we simply snatch it away from those who can. ¿What, after all, on G*re's green earth could be more fairembalanced than nothing for nobody?

Antilevelers, if that's a word, are free to visit Lake Woebegon and see for themselves how much progress has been made on reclaiming additional luxury percentiles at the high end of the ever-immortal Herrnstein-Murray ©u®ve . I suspect not a lot, but ¿what would I know?

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[2] Or how about "saw the handwriting on the wall in terms of money and attention"?

(( Jugheads who feel a little embarrassed about being frankly juggical in public, possibly because they wish to continue to be taken for lieberals and demoncrats, ought to find that formulation helpful. It is not they, it protests, who go about scribbling graffiti on other ‘folks’' walls; they only report what Mlle. de la Main Invisible has placarded already.

(( _Facilis descensus Averno_, "¡This way to Foxcuckooland, ladies and gentlemen!" ))

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[3] That's just ridiculous: of course: the Paulines and Alans and miscellaneous assorted "small people" are in danger of getting juggernauted by a ‘City of St. Elizabeth’ only because her course is not the least bit ‘wild’ but proceeds with utmost reliability and rigour "down the ringing grooves of [Hope and] Change," as the Poet of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum (¿? -- ¡good old HST!) hath it.

Maybe a little behind schedule now and then, admittedly, but it is not as if these tin lizards keep jumping off their grooves all the time.