Don't be an Ass: Laugh and Make Others Laugh

The bore is that guy at the dinner party who rips the wings off every conversation as soon as it starts to get off the ground. You're eventually left with no other choice but to stab him with your steak knife.

But you gotta stab him on the left side of his skull, enough to disable the left hemisphere without killing him.

Setting aside the permanent disfigurement of the kind celebrated by self-mutilating Zoomers, you'd be doing him a favor. An unbridled left hemisphere is a terrible master. And the bore is the most pitiful slave: he has no idea that a regular pre-breakfast bull-whipping ain't normal. He knows it sucks, but he doesn't rebel because, well, that's just the way things are.

So the bore plods through life getting whipped by his left hemisphere, deprived of those things the right hemisphere enjoys.

Like humor. Only the right hemisphere gets the point of a joke. Irony, indirection, sarcasm: all things that only the right hemisphere can appreciate. The bore's left hemisphere George-Floyds his right. He doesn't laugh, unless, perhaps, it's the sneer of disgust or disdain, two things the left hemisphere relishes.

Senator Thomas Corwin celebrated Manifest Destiny about as much as a pope (not counting the last one) celebrates paganism. "Manifest Destiny" was an aggressive and ambitious abstraction with overtly tactile implications: conquer the shit out of everything this side of the Pacific . . . and then some (cue the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani by the U.S. Sugar Trust).

The problem is, when such feverish abstract rubber hits tactile road, it rarely goes well. A lot of things die, including young men. Corwin knew it.

It's no surprise that he was more opposed to the Mexican-American War than Hollywood is opposed to a white man playing George Washington in its next blockbuster biopic. Corwin knew the Mexican-American War signalled the end of the Republic as envisioned by the Founders, and he fought the good fight against the fevered left-hemispheric imperial ambitions.

Corwin's principally known today for one of the most famous quotes of the 19th century:

“Never make people laugh. If you would succeed in life, you must be solemn, solemn as an ass. All the great monuments of earth have been built over solemn asses."

The solemn ass with a great monument is the successful bore politician. All politics, all the time, applying the machinations of his robust left hemisphere in that most left-hemispheric institution of all time: centralized government. It's why people for years have observed that we need a president who doesn't want to be president. Only a person with a functioning right hemisphere would decline that job.

A Trump Aside

It's why Trump is refreshing. Sure, he's soaked to his elbows in blood at this point and it's awful, but the guy has a sense of humor, which indicates he has a functioning right hemisphere, even if it's often shunted aside by a robust left hemisphere and even if he's a puppet of left-hemispheric forces (bureaucracy and the deep state are exclusively left-hemispheric . . . rational machines that run on their own rules of logic).

Can I prove Trump has a functioning, albeit hobbled, right hemisphere?

Sure. There's the humor for one.

And second: I can safely predict there ain't no way they're gonna build a great monument over him.