Aesop on "The North Wind and the Sun," Old Rabbis on Stolen Bricks — and Junk Mail

 

    I grew up on Aesop's fable of "The North Wind and the Sun" and the rabbinical parable of the bricks. In the fable, the North Wind and the Sun get into a contest to see who can get a man to remove his cloak.

    The North Wind blows and blows and then blows some more and harder, and the man just wraps his cloak more and more tightly. Then it's the Sun's turn, and the Sun turns up the heat, and the man takes off his cloak. MORAL: The same as the one that went into English as "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," which I'll throw in since what interests me isn't that MORAL but the behavior of the North Wind: failing in a ploy and then repeating it and repeating it more strongly.

    The rabbinic parable has a guy thinking about moving into a city and meeting and being treated very nicely by his future neighbors. So he decides to build a house there and gets materials, including a large pile of bricks. Then the night before he's to start construction, the neighbors come over and each one steals a brick — one brick — until the pile is gone, or pretty much. Next day the guy comes over, sees the theft, and laments the loss and demands tracking down the thief. The neighbors come by and ask, rhetorically, "What thief?" And the first one adds, "I took one brick. Surely you're not such a petty cheapskate you'd make a big deal over one lousy brick?!" No simple MORAL here, but a traditional conservative view about social responsibility and how little misdeeds for individuals can add up to a significant social evil. (Also an important idea for questioning the right of each individual gas-station owner to determine who may or may not use his toilets if the upshot is that Black families had problems finding convenient toilets when driving, say, from Florida to DC. Or each arguably legitimate refusal to cooperate with a public health measure if the cumulative upshot is the spread of disease.)

    There's much less at stake here. Here it's my repeated complaint about the repeating and repeating and repeating of individually okay or even admirable e-mail and US-mail appeals for money and support if the cumulative upshot is to overwhelm people (e.g., me). In my case, with rare exceptions, I've just stopped responding, tossing them all (all such mail: into paper recycling or MacTrash): doing without in the case of commercial appeals; just repeating my past donations with charitable appeals; and putting almost all my political money into a local political group that doesn't often bother me for money (and has long since sold my contact information).

    So: Sending me more electronic or hard-copy junk-mail appeals isn't going to help you, gals and guys — you're just doing the North Wind thing. Plus kind of the opposite of stealing bricks: piling up (figuratively burying a guy in) appeals.

    I see no solution here, although it's another reason for better public financing of public services so we need fewer charities, plus public financing of elections, with spending limits. Well, and the US Postal Service should charge junk-mailers more than publications, people mailing bills, and actual letter-writers — and there's got to be some way to charge people per item of electronic mass mailings.

 

    Taking as a funding model the idea of Constant Contact — actual name of actual firm — may not work so well. 

Of Ants, Grasshoppers ... and Payback (20 Feb. 2013)

            When I was a child, people still read Aesop's fables, and I grew up on, among other stories, "The Ant and the Grasshopper." Except I grew up on a somewhat Disneyfied version.

            The story goes that one warm summer's day a Grasshopper was hopping about a field playing his song — or her song, if you're telling the story in a Romance language where both "Grasshopper" and "Ant" are feminine nouns — but as I heard it in American English it was his song, and the grasshopper was playing a fiddle and having a fine old time. Anyway, Ant comes along dragging an ear of corn, and the grasshopper asks the ant why she's working so hard, and Ant says she's laying in food for the winter and advises Grasshopper to do the same. Grasshopper points out that the weather is still beautiful and goes about playing, while the ant gets back to work.

            Winter comes and the grasshopper finds himself starving and crawls up to the ant hill and sees the ants eating heartily of the food they stored up, leading to the MORAL: "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity."

            Okay, but between the set-up and the MORAL, there's a climax to the story. In the version I heard as a kid, the grasshopper begs the ants for food, and they invite him in and feed him and let him join their winter party, and he learns his lesson. In the original, the ants let the grasshopper starve (although hyperthermia probably killed him sooner).

             I only recently learned the original version, however, and between childhood and my current old age I worked my butt off in school and went on to teach and got to observe a fair number of rich, spoiled, and energetic-at-play (only) figurative "grasshoppers" among my fellow students, and then just my students. I lived thirty-five years in a college student neighborhood in Oxford, Ohio, and around the corner from a consolidated high school, and, in some rare moments, I got a bit bitter. So now and then I retold the story.

            Same buildup in my version, but when Grasshopper begs for food the ant queen invites him in — and looses on him her hit squad of ichneumon wasps, who paralyze him with their stings, inject their eggs, and the hardworking ants and wasps together feed on the grasshopper for a joyous winter.

            MORAL: "Payback is a motherf*#%er!"

            But that story is bitter and overstated and, if you know about ichneumon wasps, a little bordering upon cruelty and the grotesque.

            So I'll switch to a more upbeat story, from the prime of my life, when I was in grad school at the University of Illinois and living in Champaign, IL, sharing an apartment with two other graduate students in what had pretty well been a grad-student enclave.

            We three graduate-student ants worked our jobs and taught and studied and had a good first semester. And then, mid-year, the new neighbors arrived. Undergrads. Undergrads who'd been residents of the dorms; they were, as my more bigoted roommate called them, still basically "Dorm Rats" or, more neutrally, "Dormies." Dormies in their first apartment. Right downstairs of us. Dormies who left with us at the end of the school year the two traffic signs they'd stolen. One was a stop sign, and the other, for a nice touch, was a caution sign showing silhouette-children playing or trying to cross the street.

            The new neighbors were definitely Grasshopper-ish: playing their music, loudly, and singing drunken songs, badly, and having a fine old time in that last term before graduation.

            (The Dormie-hater got a bumper sticker for his car warning, "I DON'T BRAKE FOR UNDERGRADUATES.")

            And then final exam week approached — three-hour finals were standard at the U of IL, essay exams and problem-solving ("Show your work!") in the more respectable programs — and our ex-dormies got quietly desperate as they crammed for their finals.

            We were grad students. We'd worked hard all year and had completed the work in the courses we were taking. We taught courses where you could assign a final paper and have a lot to do the last week of school, but then we were finished.

            So we threw a party toward the end of the last week of classes. And we invited all the neighbors (except the grasshopper crew downstairs), and our guests invited friends, and a couple guys showed up with enough dope to share — dopers in that time and place still remembered their manners — and some ATO's arrived about midnight from hell-'n'-gone in Urbana with cases of beer on their shoulders, saying "We heard you were throwing a party." And the cops arrived about 2 a.m. and said it was without doubt the best party they'd been called to break up at least that month and stuck around until their next call (finally exiting by stepping over the passed-out body of our major dealer).

            And the party went on until we hosts just went to bed, knowing we'd brought happiness to a lot of people — way more people than the fire inspector would've been happy with — and proud to have impressed such connoisseurs of inebriated brawls as the Tau's and the Champaign cops.

            Our neighbors, so we guessed, passed their exams and didn't flunk out of school, got drafted, and sent to Vietnam to die. Anyway, they left us their signs to dispose of, which was recognition of our competence if not exactly a totally unambiguous gift. (My roommates dropped the signs off at a police station very early one morning: on the lawn to be precise, and leaving the scene at a goodly pace.)


            We figured there were no hard feelings from the aging boys downstairs; and we all learned something. Grasshopper in the fable learned, "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity"; as we grad students got confirmed in the belief "'Revenge is a dish best eaten cold,' with some cheap white wine to wash it down, passing a bong, and playing classic rock loud enough for a block party."

Flies: Watch Out for Honey / Consumers: Watch Out for Deals

"You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

— Poor Richard's Almanac (traditional)

 
         On the web on 27 August 2011, someone posting as "Jeremy" noted "that you actually attract more fruit flies with vinegar than honey, because the acetic acid in vinegar makes them think they sense fruit," but he (?) was good enough to note also that even if that bit of natural history is true, the proverb is still that you can deal more effectively with people if you are sweet to them than if you are sharp and biting. The upshot of the saying is the same as that of Aesop's fable of the Sun vs. the North Wind (Boreas), competing to get a man to take off his cloak. The more and harder Boreas blows, the tighter the man wraps his cloak; when the sun shines bright and hot, the man, of course, removes it.

         From the man's point of view, however, either way he's ultimately doing what some minor deity wants him to do, even if in basking in the sunshine he's doing what he immediately wants to do. But let's move to the point of view of the flies.

         I'm not old enough to have ever seen people try to kill flies by putting out honey or vinegar, nor even old enough to remember flypaper. I do, though, remember fly ribbon, also called fly capture tape: "a fly-killing device made of paper coated with a sweetly fragrant, but extremely sticky and sometimes poisonous substance that traps flies and other flying insects when they land upon it. "

         You can spray insecticide and kill flies efficiently (until they mutate and you get immune populations), and you can try to smash flies with newspapers. It's arguably more effective, if esthetically pretty nasty, to capture and poison, or capture and starve to death, flies with sweet sticky stuff.

         I have been thinking about such things because I have a "Rewards!" coupon from Office Depot that expires shortly, one for $24.48, and I will almost undoubtedly go to Office Depot and cash it in and buy computer printing cartridges I don't really need yet.

         And there's a fair chance that while in the store I'll see something I don't need at all but will come to want and will buy.

         That is, of course, the whole idea. If coupons really got customers to spend less money, companies wouldn't give them out.

         Like most people, I prefer to be warmed by the sun on a mild day rather than be blasted by the North Wind. Like most people, more relevantly, I prefer to be bribed rather than coerced.

         Still, I don't like to be manipulated, and I am quite certain that the bribe from Office Depot — or the Kroger Corporation or Bed, Bath, and Beyond — will end up costing me one way or another, even if, to my surprise, the coupons and other deals end up saving me money.

         'Cause unless you're Scrooge McDuck and get your kicks rolling around in money, money itself isn't your goal. What we want are the things money can buy, and for me, one of the major things money buys is some of my freedom and sense of control.

         Mainly, money buys freedom from money worries that are endemic to most strata of capitalist society. Having modest but secure income, and being careful with my money — not cheap but definitely tight — I've been able to live most of my life not having to worry much about not having money. I also haven't had to worry about just how to invest and conserve my fortune since having a modest but secure income I didn't have enough money to invest and conserve.

         It has made little sense, and continues to make little sense, for me to sacrifice any of my time to money issues to save a few bucks.

         Ah, but that $24.48 coupon is a temptation. Cheap people don't want to spend money; we tightwads will spend, but we get very upset if we waste money, and some place buried deep in my brain, probably just north of the limbic system, there's a small set of over-trained ganglia convinced that not cashing in a coupon for $24.48 is wasting $24.48 and — and those brain cells are sending out the neurological equivalent of "The horror! The horror!"

         I finally gave in to the Kroger Corporation, so I have a Ralphs card — Kroger's in the West is Ralphs — and also a card from Von's, another grocery chain; grocery stores make you an offer very difficult to refuse: you either allow them to track your purchases or you pay significantly more for their products. Freedom is valuable to me, but not paying $4 extra per pound of shrimp, which was the bit of extortion that got me to finally give in and get the card.

         I have done this much however, especially since shopping at a supermarket has become a rat-running exercise in figuring out a maze, as the rat: I make a shopping list of basics and try to buy the same basics every time, with only minor variations. So KrogerCorp can track my purchases, but the data, I hope, will bore even a computer program.

         "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" and, all things considered it's better to be bribed than coerced. Still, with all the PR people, advertisers, politicians, and propagandists trying to get our votes and our money and our "hearts and minds" — I'd just as soon do without both for. Or, if I had to choose, I think I might prefer an outright threat (if nonviolent) to a bribe.

         On the other hand, I pass Office Depot fairly regularly, and $24.48 is almost twenty-five dollars ….

The Lion and the Mouse — and the Alligator (23 Jan. 2014)

"Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."

— Haitian Proverb I Like to Quote

            When I left Cornell U in Ithaca, NY, my friends gave me a copy of a book of classic insults, which had as its headnote what I have as mine above: "Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."
            I have not always followed this good advice, but at least in theory I would go further and advise against insulting even small alligators even when you're well beyond the river and are pretty sure you'll never see an alligator again. Yea, verily I would say unto you: If you can, make the alligator your friend.
            Three examples, two from the side of the human, and one from a small and figurative alligator's point of view.
            In my late teens, when I was a junior counselor or counselor at a summer camp, teaching archery, a father visiting "my" archery range nocked an arrow and drew a bow while facing away from the targets. We didn't have the term "zero tolerance" back then, and I wouldn't have liked the idea — I definitely don't like it now — but one should never, ever fuck around with weapons of any sort, so I told the aging juvenile to leave the range. I was later asked by a fellow counselor if I knew who the wise guy was. "Sewer Rat's father," I said, naming one of the less popular campers. "Uh huh," my colleague said, and left smiling cryptically.
            When the summer was over and I was back in the City, I read in the pre-Rupert-Murdoch Chicago Sun-Times that Sewer Rat's father had been found in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental with a couple bullets in his head: as we used to say at that time in Chicago, "an obvious suicide."
            On a later occasion, when I was a college junior or senior and a fraternity officer, I called the home of a pledge to remind him he was to come back from vacation a couple days early to help get the house ready for mid-year Rush.
            While we were mopping floors, or whatever, a fraternity brother of mine noted that the pledge in question had been dropped off by his father, who seemed somewhat pissed off at the house generally and, perhaps, me in particular. No big deal, but … "You were polite and respectful, right?" Of course I had been, but firm; I had other calls to make, and if I had to cut my vacation short a couple days, so could a freshman who would've been flunking out of school at a neighborhood animal house if I hadn't gone along with getting him depledged there and over to us in an arcane maneuver arranged by our Rush Chairman and agreed to by the other house with rapidity and graciousness that I should have thought more about.
            "You were polite and respectful right?" "Yeah. Why is this significant?" Did I know what the pledge's father did for a living? I did not. "Contract work," I was told. Maybe a couple contracts a year, and they lived on that, lived very, very well. When this Dad visited again, I didn't make a big deal out of it, but I did show, briefly, unostentatiously just how respectful I could be.
            Nice thing growing up in Chicago when I did: You learned the wisdom of manners if for no other reason than you could never be sure with whom you were dealing and if and how that person might be, as they said, "connected."
            An armed society probably isn't a polite society, certainly not in Chicago, but it can reduce young males' tendencies toward incivility if Ms. Manners might be a representative from the local B'nai Mafia chapter and advise respect while carrying a tire iron.
            My story from the other side, so to speak, is from the subtler world of scholarship. Long ago, I wrote a couple articles dealing with (among other things) Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's fine but underrated and under-read 1955 novel, Gladiator-at-Law. My writing went unnoticed for years, and then I came across an article by a young scholar that not only cited my work but (unnecessarily for the citation) commented on it briefly, but at sufficient length to suggest that it — my work on this novel, my whole rather old-fashioned approach, actually — sucked.
            Okay, I finally get a citation, and a bit of a comment to boot, and it's insulting. Like the guy could have just had the citation, or said that I took an approach different from his and one he thought less useful, but, nah, he had to say something harsh.
            A couple more years pass, and I get a note from the guy who cited me saying, more or less, Hi, hey, what a coincidence, the Chair of his department —let's call him Rick — was a friend of mine from grad school and Rick said that the young scholar should write me. The guy needed an outside evaluation of his scholarship, which he hadn't had time to write much of, so his Gladiator-at-Law piece was going to be important for him to get tenure, and I was one of the few other people to write on the novel at the time and Rick said that I'd write a carefully composed and effective letter for him because I was a nice guy and a responsible scholar and would always give an honest evaluation and all the young scholar had to do was ask me politely and grovel, just a bit. He groveled; I wrote. The punk got tenure.
            "Keep your words soft and sweet," mostly — to modify somewhat a quotation attributed to Andy Rooney — "just in case you have to eat them.” But we should go even farther than avoiding giving offense. And here I'll paste in a fable out of Aesop that I learned as a child and — since I read it in a Latin version in college, not because it was around in my childhood — I'm sure is out of copyright.

A Lion asleep in his lair was waked up by a Mouse running over his face. Losing his temper he seized it with his paw and was about to kill it. The Mouse, terrified, piteously entreated him to spare its life. "Please let me go," it cried, "and one day I will repay you for your kindness." The idea of so insignificant a creature ever being able to do anything for him amused the Lion so much that he laughed aloud, and good-humouredly let it go. But the Mouse's chance came, after all. One day the Lion got entangled in a net which had been spread for game by some hunters, and the Mouse heard and recognised his roars of anger and ran to the spot. Without more ado it set to work to gnaw the ropes with its teeth, and succeeded before long in setting the Lion free. "There!" said the Mouse, "you laughed at me when I promised I would repay you: but now you see, even a Mouse can help a Lion."

Beyond the cynical advice on waiting to insult alligators, beyond the obvious prudence of not insulting Mafia accountants or free-lance hit men — or anyone just casually — "The Lion and the Mouse" teaches the more positive but equally practical lesson of being nice to others whenever we can. As the tough-minded among the Anarchists and communitarians argued, we practice mutual aid in part because it is right to do so and because it feels good to do so: but that good feeling comes from a reliable sense of superiority as well as more admirable altruism; also, however, we practice mutual aid and should be nice to one another because the one sure thing in life is that we will eventually get into trouble.



            So, MORAL: do not insult even small alligators and help when you can. If nothing else, you never know when you'll need a favor, or from whom.