Oliver Wendell Holmes was a remarkably gifted man: physician, author, poet, a man of many talents
.
This poem, which he wrote in 1833, is a favorite of mine. These days, we are surrounded by so much that is ridiculous that satire becomes nigh impossible. But that’s all the more reason to laugh when we can.
***********************************************
The Height of the Ridiculous
I WROTE some lines once on a time
In wondrous merry mood,
And thought, as usual, men would say
They were exceeding good.
They were so queer, so very queer,
I laughed as I would die;
Albeit, in the general way,
A sober man am I.
I called my servant, and he came;
How kind it was of him
To mind a slender man like me,
He of the mighty limb.
“These to the printer,” I exclaimed,
And, in my humorous way,
I added (as a trifling jest,)
“There ’ll be the devil to pay.”
He took the paper, and I watched,
And saw him peep within;
At the first line he read, his face
Was all upon the grin.
He read the next; the grin grew broad,
And shot from ear to ear;
He read the third; a chuckling noise
I now began to hear.
The fourth; he broke into a roar;
The fifth; his waistband split;
The sixth; he burst five buttons off,
And tumbled in a fit.
Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,
I watched that wretched man,
And since, I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
Ha!
Don’t take this advice, Diane! Keep the deformers squirming!
The proper response to Education Deform is derision. The deformers should long ago have been laughed off the national stage. Your joke, today, about the Ravitch–Gates, Ravitch–Duncan Debates was at the same time one of the funniest and most tragic things I have read in years. Funny and tragic because neither would ever happen, of course.
Bob Shepherd: ah, the rapier instead of the battle axe…a la Cyrano de Bergerac rather than a Viking berserker…
Yes, yes, yes!
And remember that old saw [ok, I made it up, but someday people will forget that and think it’s really old]:
“Laughter is poison to the pompous.” So too satire and caricature.
But the ironic twist to all this is that nobody—I repeat, NOBODY—does a better job of ridiculing the self-styled “education reformers” than those self-same “leaders of the new civil rights movement of our time.”
They insistently call for the sorting, labeling and ranking—with subsequent [few] rewards and [many] punishments—of everyone else but themselves using the scores of high-stakes standardized tests filtered through, distorted by and mangled by VAManiacal formulae. And the leading users/abusers of that junk science don’t even pretend to understand it themselves.
Painfully funny. And it doesn’t take much effort…
A Parade of Dancing Letters Spelling Out EduFad Tag Lines du jour: Teach Like A Champion. Whole Brain Teaching. Commoners Core. Grit & Determination. SLANT. Then another visual: an egg frying on a pan. Voice over: this is your brain on education reform. As the voice over ends, a picture of Michelle Rhee floats across the screen, in the background a recording of her teeheeing as she describes the bleeding lips of dozens of her small students. Ends with an advertisement for masking tape: A Teacher’s Best Friend [Endorsed by ex-School Chancellors everywhere!]
Followed immediately by a firm assertion by the current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that he is somewhat for/somewhat against/somewhat for & against the preceding infomercial.
😡
I wish we were only making this stuff up. But truth, well,
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” [Mark Twain]
😎
ROFLMAO!
Yes, those of us who would brandish words against the invaders of our schools could do worse than to channel Cyrano!
VALVERT (a toady to de Guiche)
Observe! I myself will proceed
To put him in his place.
(Walking up to Cyrano)
Ah your nose . . . ahem
Your nose is . . . rather large!
CYRANO Is that all?
VALVERT (turning away contemptuously)
Oh, well
CYRANO
Ah, no, young sir!
You are too simple. Why, you might have said
Oh, a great many things! Mon dieu, why waste
Your opportunity? For example, thus: —
AGGRESSIVE: I, sir, if that nose were mine,
Id have it amputated on the spot!
FRIENDLY: How do you drink with such a nose?
You ought to have a cup made specially!
DESCRIPTIVE: Tis a rock a crag a cape
A cape? say rather, a peninsula!
CYRANO (continuing)
INQUISITIVE: What is that receptacle
A razor case or a portfolio?
KINDLY: Ah, do you love the little birds
So much that when they come and sing to you,
You give them this to perch on?
INSOLENT: Sir, when you smoke, the neighbors must suppose
Your chimney is on fire.
CAUTIOUS: Take care
A weight like that might make you top-heavy.
THOUGHTFUL: Somebody fetch my parasol
Those delicate colors fade so in the sun!
PEDANTIC: Does not Aristophanes
Mention a mythologic monster called
Hippocampelephentocamelos?
Surely we have here the original!
FAMILIAR: Well, old torchlight! Hang your hat
Over that chandelier it hurts my eyes.
ELOQUENT: When it blows, the typhoon howls,
And the clouds darken.
DRAMATIC: When it bleeds
The Red Sea!
ENTERPRISING: What a sign for some perfumer!
LYRIC: Hark the horn of Roland calls
To summon Charlemagne!
SIMPLE: When do they unveil the monument?
RESPECTFUL: Sir, I recognize in you
A man of parts, a man of prominence
RUSTIC: Eh? What? Call that a nose? Naw Naw
I be no fool like what you think I be
That there’s a cucumber!
MILITARY: point against cavalry!
PRACTICAL: Why not a lottery?
With this for the grand prize?
Or parodying Faustus in the play
Was this the nose that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
These, my dear sir, are things you might have said
Had you some tinge of letters, or of wit
To color your discourse. But wit not so,
You never had an atom and of letters,
You need but three to write you down Aye Ess Ess
Moreover if you had the invention, here,
Before these folks, to make a jest of me
Be sure you would not then articulate
The twentieth part of half a syllable
Of the beginning! For I say these things
Lightly enough myself, about myself,
But, I allow none else to utter them.
The title of this post misled me. I read “The Height of the Ridiculous” and assumed that it was going to be about yet another video from Lord Coleman defending Big Data, the Common Core, standardized testing, and VAM.
Bob
I read that they are considering putting David Coleman’s image on the new $100 bills, not replacing, but in addition to Ben Franklin.
This is to honor him for the obscene amounty of money that he will be generating for the corporate reformers.
That should read “will be” NOT “are considering”