Confidence?, The Tragic Owl, Deceptive Leaves

March 5, 1909

Confidence?, The Tragic Owl, Deceptive Leaves

To one and all, thank you so much for your heartfelt ( I hope) birthday wishes. I promise to continue to flood Dustpec with mordant commentary. The NATIONAL FINANCES are unsteady. The papers are filled with lengthy pieces on THE CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE. From the “Free Silver Mercury” to, my personal favorite, “The Antifederalist Almanac,” commentators all across our republic call for it. Far be it from me to naysay, for it, tempered with a sanguine spirit, is a tonic for problems far and wide. Indeed, it is part of our national fiber. Just ask the Wandering Historian: Our Founding Fathers, Mothers, Children, and, I suspect, even their pets, were hopeful. But now we live in a decayed age; if Henry, Otis, and Washington, if they appeared in the halls of power, would likely be arrested for lunacy. They were confident in Providence, Natural Rights, and the people; we moderns withered and flattened like a deceased fowl (more on that in a bit) prefer CONFIDENCE MEN:

The wide-eyed stare of “Ephraim Jones,” late of the Capital City, is an image that is burned into all our heads. We all recall his cheerful promises two autumns ago, promises that investing in his bank’s TRUST would given us all a stake in the Fertilizer Market, which he intended to corner. Like Gould in the 1870s, he promised that “when a penny in the coffer rings, your fund to prosperity springs.” I should stayed in Mulch which, if not as dramatic as manure, doesn’t linger when it begins to go bad. Ask Thunderclap and Coolbreeze about the compost heap that went wrong, horribly wrong, last week. Now I’m not saying that all the prophets and pundits are like Jones; there may even be a remnant of the noble and good among our legislators, though, like the bluebird of Spring, I’ve yet to see one. All I know is that they, and we know who they are, keep telling us bad news, then tell us to be confident, and then, finally, assure us that we should trust them and follow them, in sum, have confidence in them, because they told us bad news. If I follow the syllogism correctly, it looks something like this:

Things are bad: People tell me they are bad: We lack confidence: We need confidence: Trust them because they have told us things are bad: Be confident.

Honesty may be the best policy, but even a thief can be honest when it suits him. Jones, after all, did tell Mayor Pearson that too much coffee can permanently force your eyes to stay open. No, honesty is not enough; just declaring reality doesn’t mean that you deserve my confidence, such as it is. Which brings me to my next illustration:

Ever since Trapper Matt moved to town, we have grown fond of his pet owls. A few, of course, have met their fates in various fashions, and some have managed to be preserved for posterity by Hoots. I still maintain that his “Patriotic Tableau of Stuffed Owls Resembling Calhoun, Webster, and Clay” is one of the most memorable examples of the taxidermist’s art I’ve ever seen. Indeed, I have encouraged Lightening to compose a suitable poem, preferable in elegiac couplets on the display. Despite our familiarity with these “winged warriors of the night,” who, ever more useful than any politician, consume rodents rather than imitating them, it was still a shock this morning to see the body of one of them—I believe it was Hazlitt—outside the main building of the Academy. A tragic fate, and one that I hope is not an omen. Since the haruspices have left town, having been driving out by a faction—led by Stuntz and Vizzini—who have favored tarot and absinthe as the modern way to divine the future—we’ve no one around to remove and interpret its liver. Thus, any message, beyond the force of gravity and the effects of age, disease, and wind, its lifeless body may be conveying, is lost to us. No doubt, however, someone will soon write that, it is telling us to be confident. Finally, a knot of citizens were gleefully pointing to the one tree last week and its tiny leaves. Apparently, leaves are a GOOD THING because they are a SIGN OF SPRING. That brings me back to the meandering theme of this week’s Hornet: CONFIDENCE? While hardly a relativist, though I do confess that, like Heraclitus, I don’t think I could put my foot in the same river twice—even if we had a river and not just

the ditch down by the fence, which every once and awhile does fill up with uncertain liquid, I am not at all convinced that green shoots on gnarled branches automatically portend good things. They may, after all, be weevils. And even if they are leaves, and that does mean Spring, the season itself isn’t a safe bet. Haven’t had a good April since ’78; that’s when I got fitted for my truss. No, the leaf on the tree is just that; leaves are deceptive. And they die and fall anyway, just like the aforementioned owl. Thus, as far as your correspondent can see—which isn’t all that far—CONFIDENCE, like a dead owl, a leaf, and a ditch, doesn’t guarantee pie for supper. If you clean up the mess, rake the leaves when they fall, and make sure whatever is floating in the ditch doesn’t raise up a miasma, then, I guess, they were seeds of confidence. You may even get a pony. But you worked for it. Back to reading my Bastiat. Till next week…

Don’t build your heaven on earth next to my shed.