British author and playwright, W. Somerset Maughm, once wrote, “Impropriety is the soul of wit.” This observation came to mind as I watched Stephen Colbert prepare to leave CBS, and again, as I read numerous news reports of the hounding of Jimmy Kimmel and his network over a remark about Melania’s impending widowhood, a jab Kimmel meant to refer to the advanced age of the failing, flailing president.
In any other, pre-2016 world, it might be have been highly improper to so relentlessly diss a president, even with a great deal of wit, but for this present white house squatter, it’s more like chickens coming home to roost. Not that he is able to recognize the connection identified by Maughm.
That is to say, he’s got part of it down, and, believe me, it is not the “wit” part. Let’s all agree that the “build me a ballroom and we’ll all be safe” clown knows a lot about impropriety. He spends his days committing more of them in every five minute statement, self-enriching scheme and AI generated tweet than anyone, by far, never thinking of his own actions as improper. He flings insulting labels everywhere, like chicken feed in the wind, without recognizing that he is simply criticizing, in others, traits that more appropriately describe himself.
Indeed, if you want to find an accurate label for him, simply take any of his own favorite words and apply them. We know, as the old saying goes, he never met a mirror he didn’t like, but he doesn’t seem to realize that he also pulls his favorite insults out of what he sees, but fails to recognize as his own image, in those same mirrors.
Ask him a difficult question and you are “low IQ.” But he’s the one who doesn’t get and can’t take a joke. Likely because humor requires an IQ above your total number of fingers. Satire takes wit. Appreciating satire requires intelligence. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take intelligence to order your goon squads at the FCC to go after network licenses in order to kill the very soul of wit.
Criticize him and you are a “loser”. Which would exactly describe his successes at managing a range of businesses, even up to the present day, as it now seems that his crypto scheme, World Liberty Financial, is currently in the middle of collapsing.
Fortunately, however, while he is devastating our oil and gas reserves as well as our stockpile of deadly missiles, we are not running out of satire and wit. These are the very talents needed to organize and wield the elements of his unraveling, a kind of “disinfection by sunlight”, giving us a useful progression, from faux king, to very real palace clown, to “you’re fired!”.
Rescued By Monopoly
During World War Two, British Intelligence invented a remarkable escape scheme for prisoners of war being held in Nazi POW camps. Using invented charitable organizations, they sent hundreds of Monopoly sets to be included in Red Cross packages to the prisoners. The sets were actually geographically specific escape information. They hid silk maps in the boards themselves (silk, so that they wouldn’t rustle when the prisoners moved or took them out to read), inserted tiny compasses into the game pieces, stuck sharpened files into small slots in the boards, and substituted real German, French, or Italian money between the usual monopoly bills. Thousands of Allied soldiers escaped using these “games”.
It set me to thinking about how we can help each other escape from the prison into which this preening bully has put us.
So here’s the plan. Drop off little innocuous looking board games with secret protest signs tucked into the sides of the board. Tokens that hide clever protest buttons to wear. Monopoly money marked cleverly with reminders to vote and the dates. Chance and Community Chest cards with quotes from the Constitution.
Or maybe even specialized sets with instructions for getting your ship through the Strait of Hormuz. Or finding the ICE agents hiding in an unmarked van down the block.
Well, I can dream can’t I?
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