Quote of the Day (Stephen Colbert, on Cynicism, ‘A Self-Imposed Blindness’)

“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.”—American comic and late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert, Commencement Address at Knox College, Galesburg, IL, June 3, 2006

The traditional commencement exercises that had been scheduled for yesterday by my alma mater were cancelled a few days ago.

I’m not going to retrace the words and actions that led to this decision. But I thought I would offer for students there and elsewhere in this tumultuous year a replacement of sorts, a throwback to another commencement address, from Stephen Colbert nearly two decades ago.

Extreme idealism—demands expected be fulfilled immediately—is also blindness. But the deformed moral vision that Colbert identified is more deadly in the long run, because it withers the soul day by day.

If you want to know something close to my philosophy on change, I can think of few lines better than these, from Bernard Malamud’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Fixer:

“I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer—he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.”

Movie Quote of the Day (‘All About Eve,’ As a Theater Critic Introduces Himself and His World)

Addison DeWitt [played by George Sanders] [voiceover intro]: “To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater.” —All About Eve (1950), screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz based on the story “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

At this point in the Academy Award-winning All About Eve, Addison DeWitt is merely droll, in a way that Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward might approve.

But look at the picture accompanying this post. This is an observer who not only takes it all in, but is utterly unillusioned by it all.

Cynical and manipulative, he is also one of two outsiders who perfectly understands the vanity fair of swollen egos, insecurities, and deceptiveness in which the actors, playwright, director, and other assorted figures in this comedy-drama move.

The other outsider is Birdie Coonan, a former vaudeville actress, now the personal assistant and confidant of reigning theater queen Margo Channing. Like DeWitt’s, her sideline view of events allows her to see early on through the movie’s title schemer, Eve Harrington.

Addison and Birdie differ vastly in class and education, but neither is anybody’s fool. “You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I,” Addison says in confronting Eve, a true Becky Sharp of Broadway. “We have that in common. Also, our contempt for humanity and inability to love, and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other.” 

Birdie, less self-interested than the critic, is equally perceptive of motive, telling Margo that Eve is studying her, “like you was a play, or a book, or a set of blueprints. How you walk, talk, eat, think.”

For his performance as DeWitt, George Sanders won an Oscar. For hers as Birdie, Thelma Ritter—one of Hollywood’s consistently superior character actors—received her first of six Oscar nominations.

Not one of these netted her the coveted statuette, leading the actress to a most Birdie-like wisecrack: “Now I know what it feels like to be the bridesmaid and never the bride.” 

Quote of the Day (Sir Kenneth Clark, on What Kills a Civilization)

"It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.”—English art historian, museum director, and television personality Sir Kenneth Clark (1903-1983), Civilisation (1969)

Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on People Speaking)

“Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.”—American editor, columnist, and philologist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing (1949)

Quote of the Day (James Russell Lowell, Responding to an Earlier Age of Cynicism)

 

“But stay! no age was e’er degenerate,         
  Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,        
  For in our likeness still we shape our fate.           90
    Ah, there is something here           
  Unfathomed by the cynic’s sneer,   
  Something that gives our feeble light          
  A high immunity from Night,          
  Something that leaps life’s narrow bars               95
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;       
  A seed of sunshine that can leaven  
  Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars,          
        And glorify our clay       
  With light from fountains elder than the Day.”—American poet, editor, and diplomat James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865,” in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman, edited by John Hollander (1993)

Quote of the Day (Joe Jackson, on Cynicism as a ‘Disease of the Young’)

“Some of my early stuff was infected by the deadly disease of cynicism, which is a disease of the young, I think. When you’re young, it seems very clever to be cynical. But as you get older, hopefully, if you’re not completely stupid, you realize that you have to be a bit more positive, as a simple matter of survival. You know what I mean?”—English singer-songwriter Joe Jackson quoted in Sarah Larson, “Joe Jackson, Past, Present, and Fast Forward,” The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 2015

Yesterday marked the 67^th birthday of Joe Jackson, a musician who has grandly resisted genre pigeonholing. Sarah Larson’s combined concert review-interview from a few years ago captures his “sideways, sly” lyrics, as well as his impatience with the late Seventies stereotyping of him as an angry young man in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. (“I was really poking fun. A lot of people were doing that back then.”)

I myself have been partial to the two LPs he created in the early Eighties after coming to New York, Night and Day and Body and Soul, which incorporated pop, jazz and salsa textures.

It was a long way from his upbringing in Portsmouth, England, a dingy place that fueled his desire to escape. Admission to the Royal Academy of Music set him on a lifelong path, described memorably in his 1999 quasi-memoir, A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage:

"I saw music as White Magic. Pure energy, pure emotion, pure spirit. I thought that musicians, regardless of what kind of music they played, were beyond reproach, like firefighters or nuns.”

I have never had the opportunity to hear Jackson in concert, but YouTube clips suggest an idiosyncratic, interesting performer not content with note-for-note playing of oldies, as does this quote from a February 2019 interview with Jim McGuinn on the Minnesota Public Radio musical website/station “The Current”:

“Obviously it's me that's changed rather than the songs. But in some cases the songs embarrass me and I don't play them anymore. In other cases I still like them and do play them. A lot of times I've tried to do new arrangements of them — change them around and keep them interesting. And every now and again, some of the songs on this tour, we've gone right back to playing them exactly as they were recorded, which kind of goes against the grain a bit for me, to be honest. But sometimes it's fun to do that as well.

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Those Who Refuse to Take Part in Government)

"The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men." —American essayist, poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Eloquence,” in Society and Solitude (1870)

Quote of the Day (Michael Idov, on Cynicism and Dictatorships)

“One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it.”— Michael Idov, “Russia: Life After Trust,” New York Magazine, Jan. 23, 2017

The image accompanying this post shows Russia’s Vladimir Putin—not only the dictator of his country’s own autocracy, but also a model for would-be strongmen elsewhere. This article was published three years ago, but it is no less relevant now--and probably more so.

Song Lyric of the Day (Elvis Costello, Describing My Current Mood)

“Oh, I used to be disgusted

Now I try to be amused.”— Elvis Costello, “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” from his My Aim Is True LP (1977)

Quote of the Day (Marcia Angell, on the Price of ‘Blanket Cynicism’)

“Blanket cynicism gives the illusion of understanding.” —Physician-author Marcia Angell quoted in T.A. Frank, “America's Least-Favorite City Has Become Television's Favorite Subject,” The New Republic, December 9, 2013

(I took this nocturnal photo of the Capitol in DC while on vacation there a year ago. “Blanket cynicism,” I think, goes a long way toward explaining the fix in which this country finds itself as I type these words.)