If you ask me, I'd say Captain America has been taking things a little bit hard, wouldn't you say, Bartender?
Well, if the Gentlelady will forgive me the platitude, I'd say that reality is stranger than fiction, Ma'am.
Or maybe fiction is informed by reality?
As is reality by fiction, I suppose. Joseph Campbell used to say that it has always been the prime function of myths and fiction to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward. In counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.
We all know what side Bucky Barnes eventually joined.
Bucky has his heart in the right place, Ma'am. And so does Captain America. They ended up on the same side.
"There are but two ways to win the game: to play heart or to cheat."
"Cheating is difficult; a caught cheater is beaten. Playing heart is simple. You must have some, that's all. You believe yourself without heart? You are looking at your cards poorly."
It's a quote from Jean Cocteau.
It was once remarked there are two kinds of people in the world——those who divide everything in the world into two kinds of things and those who don’t.
Kenneth Boulding, I think. An economist, Ma'am.
It figures.
I much prefer Robert Benchley's take on it: "There are two kinds of people in the world—those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t."
But I've always had a fondness for humorists.
Which is not to say that economist have no sense of humor.
I was told once that there are actually three kinds of people in the world, but that only two types really mattered.
It would depend on whom you ask, I suppose.
I know, right? But this was not your usual run-of-the-mill pop-psychology/astrological Myers-Briggs analysis "revisited according to your Zodiac sign" kind of stuff or some such. Rather, the commentary came from one of those auto-proclaimed pragmatic men of power who pride themselves in having no time for idle intellectual speculations or artistic pursuit, much less psychology or "pseudoscience."
"Time is money!"
Precisely. You know the kind. Your typical nondescript "self-made" trust fund kid, stuck on hisself, who fancies himself up in the upper crust. I imagine the man ostentatiously displays a copy of Machiavelli's Prince or Sun Tzu's Art of War on his coffee table. Anyway, according to him, people can be grouped into "us" and "them," and the "irrelevants." Those assigned to the "them" category, as opposed to the "irrelevants," being mostly comprised of those he views as either resources to use as long as they are useful, or obstacles to overcome. I don't know, it seems to me like a rather limited and self-limiting, constricted, unimaginative, spiritless view of the world.
It has been my experience that all attempts at lapidary categorizations oftentimes lead to unfair misrepresentations, but, as it seems to have become the recurring theme of the evening, allow me to present one of my own.
There are three kinds of people in the world:
1. People who have enough money so they are "not so poor that they have to work for a living," as I have once heard it stated at the bar by a gentleman of a socioeconomic station I imagine to be the same as the self-referencing fellow you were telling me about.
2. People who are working (be it for money or out of vocation) at their dream job, as the saying goes. They are part of what's commonly referred to as the workforce but they don't mind because they love and have a genuine interest in whatever it is they are doing for a living. I suspect these people are possibly even fewer than the people in the first category I was just describing.
3. That leaves the rest of mankind. "The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free." And (in the shrinking job market of this brave new world, where labor is cheap and human life even cheaper) "the wretched refuse on the teeming shore" of global corporatism and organized crime. The homeless, "the tempest-tossed," are sleeping in the streets at night—or on the beaches of this gentrified coastal city of ours, where they are being tolerated just so long as they don't ruin the scenery too much for the tourists. The city, after all, has an image to uphold.
This "gentrified coastal city," and who knows how many more?
Honolulu comes to mind.
Or New York, New York, Ma'am?
"She lifts her lamp beside the golden door"! But see them, she does not.
She is looking for Diogenes.
Diogenes lived in a barrel. Or a large ceramic jar, as the story has it.
He also was sold into slavery (after being captured by pirates.)
What a world!
His Philosophy, Cynicism, is at the root of what was to become Stoicism.
Stoicism! Who wants that? The endurance of pain or hardship without a display of feeling and without complaint? Really?
Mankind overlords want that—that's who!—not for themselves, of course.
The masses? They want to be free!
No, wait... Cross that out.
Spirit! Spirit wants to be free!
Yearns to be free!
This is where creative expression springs from.
Music. Creative writing. The arts.
And new evolving media...
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