If by Rudyard Kipling – one of the most popular poems and one of Realini’s Top 100 Favorite Poems http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world - 10 out of 10

 If by Rudyard Kipling – one of the most popular poems and one of Realini’s Top 100 Favorite Poems http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world

10 out of 10

 

 

There are a few ways to interpret, enjoy or contest If and one hilarious perspective belongs to a stand-up comedian, albeit I do not know his name alas, but you can have his take, or at least what I could make of it…the ingenious performer looks at the lines ‘If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…’ and has an original conclusion and says that you should have your head examined, however different he will phrase it.

 

And the stand-up artist does have a point, for there is so much lunacy in the world that ‘being so sure of one self’ can be both reason to cheer – and we could refer to the ultimate expert on the matter, Nathaniel Branden, author of the life-changing The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/six-pillars-of-self-esteem-by-nathaniel.html - and a sign of madness, as exemplified by the MAGA crowd in the Divided States of America, once the symbol of greatness, power, intrepid spirit, the Man that If refers to if you will, and now a land where we can all find our demise, for if they fail, we are all doomed to live in a Chinese Matrix, perhaps with some Russian characteristics…

There is the insurrectionist that takes down the Capitol Hill and does not doubt that he ‘can trust himself’ when in fact he should and see a doctor soon, then follow the medication and since that will not work (‘this is mean man’, as one line of dialogue in Payback, with Mel Gibson and maybe in the earlier version would have it, when the hero is coming for the seventy thousand that had been taken away from him, he shoots in the suitcases that are covered with some expensive alligator skin [was it alligator, I wonder] and then the character played by James Coburn is annoyed by the insult) seek further help by becoming a patient in an institution that has fellows like him rambling, such as the republican aisle of Congress.

 

Trump would be the epitome of what could go wrong when you take If to the wrong extreme – but before going there, let us just say briefly that yes, the main significance that Kipling had in mind is not this jocular, comedy banter, but the opposite, he meant that we should be valiant, strong, munificent, resilient and many or all the other character strengths (let us still count more, for it helps to remember, perhaps even try one or two for measure, courage, kindness, love, transcendence, temperance, forgiveness, humility, patience, justice, citizenship, leadership, wisdom, curiosity, perspective, appreciation of excellence and beauty and you find the whole set by googling, what else, for Martin Seligman, co-founder of positive psychology and the studies he made, and you can assess your own standing)

The fool is worshipped by about seventy million Ericans – this comes from Lake Wobegon Days, where it is argued that America should have been called Erica, since they owe much more to Eric of Norway than to Amerigo Vespucci, and there is another key idea there, the fact that most people think themselves better than the average, at driving, reading, when it is not possible and we have the so-called Lake Wobegon Effect http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/08/lake-wobegon-days-nine-out-of-10.html

 

Donald Trump is not the archetype of the man with self-esteem, on the contrary, he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and the aforementioned Lake Wobegon Effect in the extreme, he does not see himself better than average, he is better than anyone else at…everything, and the Mirthful Perspective on Kipling’s If is personified by this Mad Man, who looks around and ‘If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…’ has that galactic laughter associated with the self-proclaimed ‘very stable genius’ , a boast than in itself proves what an extreme mental case this is, he has done so much harm and yet he ‘keeps his head’ in that parallel universe…

This is a great disappointment and there is serious chagrin to have to witness all this Fall of the Erican Model, especially for people like me, who had had to live under a communist regime brought in by the Soviet Union – which another idiot, Kremlin Shorty, for dubious reasons praised for his intelligence (just because he had been as a cunning killer, some appear to think that must be clever, wise, smart, which it is not) tries now to reassemble, by invading Ukraine and then take other moves, Alhamdulillah, it has failed so far, though he keeps mentioning the nuclear weapons and if he does have cancer, he may wish to go to Infinity and Beyond with all of us attached to his departing rocket and use the infamous ‘Apres Moi, le Deluge’

 

I took part in the Romanian Revolution http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html with the hope that this land would be more like America aka Erica and cut down the time difference – there was that joke we had, if the end of the world comes, the American and Russian (always Putin) presidents will appear in the media and say ‘do not worry, we have space ships and we will leave the earth, and at the same time ours shows on television and says, ‘do not worry, we are anyway one hundred years behind’- which used to be enormous in the communist days, but while on economic, financial, per capita spending and so many other indices we are way in the past, there is hope, for looking at IQ, the leader we have – magnificent Klaus Werner Johannis – we are eons ahead.

The Republicans in America have been through an incredible transformation, and if the Darwin law speaks of evolution, we have here a return of man to the ape stage, close on one hundred million humans are not able to make a basic analysis, to show the elementary capacity of an intelligent being, to see an enemy – it was fight or flight that took us were we are, to some extent, but procrastination, indulgence have dumbed the senses and the ability to identify danger – and they are just about as smart as an orangutan, and incidentally, Bill Maher has said that Trump comes from that species…

To try and end on a more positive note, I think that If works well here –let me fall into the same trap and narcissistic behavior – for in spite of the fact that I am quite banal and belong to the crowd surrounding the Son in Kipling’s If, there has been a mysterious fortune in that I had been the lover of Miss Romania, took part in the Revolution, well, maybe it was in part a coup d’etat, but I was heroic nonetheless, and here is the link to prove it, again http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html