Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity

[ Vanity, vanity … etc.: Ecclesiastes 1:2]

Hannity, Hannity, fatter than a Manatee…
       ~ John Cleese, from a poem by

Yes, Virginia, this IS a fisking, but a needed and almost never seen in my writings, fisking of a Lonesome Rhodes sort of display in the mass media that ought to shock us, both as an absurdist but dangerous defense of the Madness of Donald Trump, and as a flagrant example of the deterioration — even rotting — of academic standards once held in highest regard by an educated society that considered education the KEY to rising in that society. Just ask Abraham Lincoln, who is peripherally involved in all of this, as we shall see.

I have just had a sort of epiphany of sophistry. This is not hyperbolic, nor is what I have to say controversial, save that it might offend some of those from whom the epiphanic state was engendered. Now, bearing in mind that this sophistry — the tree that produces no fruit whatsoever — is only explainable by laying it out in reverse, I will, withholding certain information until the denouement, begin thusly:

Let us go down, and there confound their language

Happy New Year!

Here’s a fun true story about NOT hiring a bilingual proof reader:

Many years ago, I got a job typesetting for a company that specialized in supermarket flyers. Several of our accounts were for flyers in Spanish. But, like good Orange County, Cali. gringos, they couldn’t be bothered to hire a bilingual proofreader. Came the new year, in giant HEADLINE type: