Whiz Bang Editorials
“The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet”
During the past month, we have received an inquiry from a reader asking us to define a “lounge lizard.” We have nothing of that caliber in this rural community of Robbinsdale. Most of us are poor financially, but strong in the knowledge of Mother Nature and the homely ways of the farm and fireside. During the midst of our studies, we journeyed through Shakespeare’s immortal “King Lear,” and in the scene before Gloucester’s castle, we find the following:
Kent: Fellow, I know thee.
Oswald: What does thou know me for?
Kent: A knave, a rascal; and an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action taking knave, a glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue. One that would’st be a bawd in the way of good service, and are nothing but the mad composition of a knave, beggar, coward, and the son and heir of a mongrel; one whom I would beat into a clamoured whining if thou denyest the least syllable of thy addition.
We have omitted some expressions from this denunciation. We have deliberately weakened it. We cannot find it in our soul possible to condemn any fellow man in such language as Shakespeare uses. We follow the quaint philosophy that every man has a redeeming quality and that none combines the bald badness which Kent ascribes to Oswald. In our community, a man denounces another in few words. We shake our fist and call our enemy “a blankey-blank-son-of-a-blank.” Our language may not be as polished as Shakespeare, but it seems to satisfy the vendor.
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Wonder what a dog thinks about while he sits hours at a time watching his master bending over a battered desk pecking with two pitchfork-blistered fingers at a typewriter model of 1898?
Have you ever stopped to consider the dog? I’ll admit that in the eight years my collie breed “Shep” has been my faithful companion, I have never stopped to give him thanks or to reason with myself why this dumb beast should love me so.