Worldly wisdom from a long-ago Jesuit, #2

What to tell people and when to tell them. Keep cards close to the vest:

iii Keep Matters for a Time in Suspense.

Admiration at their novelty heightens the value of your achievements, It is both useless and insipid to play with the cards on the table. If you do not declare yourself immediately, you arouse expectation, especially when the importance of your position makes you the object of general attention.

Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery arouses veneration. And when you explain, be not too explicit, just as you do not expose your inmost thoughts in ordinary intercourse. Cautious silence is the holy of holies of worldly wisdom.

A resolution declared is never highly thought of; it only leaves room for criticism. And if it happens to fail, you are doubly unfortunate. Besides you imitate the Divine way when you cause men to wonder and watch

He published several best-sellers without permission, this one in 1647, and paid for that sin.

Source: The Art of Worldly Wisdom: The Art of Worldly Wisdom: 1-49

Tips from a Jesuit on how to survive in the modern world

Worldly-wise advice from the 17th century:

Balthasar Gracian [1601-1658], a Jesuit priest, wrote this collection of pithy sayings four centuries ago.

Gracian speaks to the twenty-first century as well as the seventeenth. It’s only a matter of time before someone markets Gracian’s life advice to busy executives, like Sun Tzu or the Book of Five Rings (if it hasn’t been already). . . .

Blithe Spirit readers should be apprised of at least two other, more recent, translations, by Christopher Maurer (Doubleday ,1992) and Jeremy Robbins (Penguin, 2011).

Robbins notes in his introduction that Gracian (1601-1658) in 1657 was “punished by the Jesuits for his consistent failure to obtain formal permission to publish, as required” — not only this “oracle” but a novel and other works.

This included being removed from his teaching post, being publicly reprimanded, and put on a diet of bread and water. He considered leaving the Jesuits for another order, but was rehabilitated and sent to a college, where he died months later.

Begin with this first epigram, from the 1892 translation by Joseph Jacobs.

i Everything is at its Acme;

especially the art of making one’s way in the world. There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make Seven Sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than was required with a whole people in former times.

So matters stood in the 17th century, as now in the 21st, when the advice applies as precisely now as when written.

Source: The Art of Worldly Wisdom Index

The Donald has ideas

 

A “regular people” party?

The most interesting thing Donald Trump has said recently isn’t his taunting of Hillary Clinton, it’s his comment to Bloomberg’s Joshua Green.

Mr. Green writes: “Many politicians, Trump told me, had privately confessed to being amazed that his policies, and his lacerating criticism of party leaders, had proved such potent electoral medicine.”

Mr. Trump seemed to “intuit,” Mr. Green writes, that standard Republican dogma on entitlements and immigration no longer holds sway with large swaths of the party electorate. Mr. Trump says he sees his supporters as part of “a movement.

”What, Mr. Green asked, would the party look like in five years? “Love the question,” Mr. Trump replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years.”

My impression on reading this was that Mr. Trump is seeing it as a party of regular people, as the Democratic Party was when I was a child and the Republican Party when I was a young woman.

This is the first thing I’ve seen that suggests Mr. Trump is ideologically conscious of what he’s doing. It’s not just ego and orange hair, he suggests, it’s politically intentional.

Knows what he’s doing, that is.

Source: Peggy Noonan, Clinton Embodies Washington’s Decadence – WSJ

Rahm has good idea of what do with a crisis, says Rauner doesn’t

Rahm is just mad because someone else believes in not letting a crisis go to waste.

The mayor said in a statement: “With a stroke of his pen, Bruce Rauner just told every Chicago taxpayer to take a hike.”

That said, about wasting a crisis, Rahm has a lot of nerve, getting indignant about this, he being a lover of the blue-state model, whose idea of a crisis is an opening for a new  fix-it program.

Tsk.

Source: Rahm says Rauner’s veto tells Chicago taxpayers to ‘take a hike’ | Chicago Sun-Times

State program throttled, senior citizen suffers. Illinois blues.

Thumbnail-sketch case study of standoff fallout:

The budget standoff hit home for Rachel Grainer when Illinois didn’t put up the money it promised seniors under its property tax-deferral program.

Fine. Of course, standoff doesn’t stand alone. It’s ridiculously inflated Democrat budget vs. Republican Gov. objecting to same. So I would like to see something futuristic that illustrates Illinois with budgets like this one.

Somewhere there’s a really smart columnist who can put future flesh and blood out there, online and on paper, to give us an idea of what the Republican governor finds objectionable. I ask you, is it too much to ask?

Source: BROWN: Oak Park woman faced tax hit on home over budget standoff | Chicago Sun-Times

Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters

Wash Post after Trump for using “gendered language”

What next, not using “person” when you mean “man” or “woman” or child?

The most offensive language, though, came from one of the warm-up speakers [for Trump at New Mexico rally].

David Chavez, a former state lawmaker, compared voting for Clinton because she’s a woman to drinking bleach because it looks like water. “I’ve heard people say: I don’t know who to choose: Trump or Hillary. Even Bill Clinton chose other women. So you should, too,” Chavez said.

(Jenna, our reporter in the room, says the crowd laughed and applauded…)

You can criticize someone, but very carefully. You can’t mock the mockable, ridicule the ridiculous, mind p’s and q’s. In short, you have to be careful what you say and how you say it. There are comfort zones out there with big signs saying Keep out!