Rule: help each other
when you can, but never harm —
never help the bear

Duff Cooper added: ‘I hope you will forgive me because your friendship, your comradeship and your advice are very, very precious to me.’ Churchill replied on November 22:

Thank you very much for your letter, which I was very glad to get. In the position in which our small band of friends now is, it is a great mistake ever to take points off one another. The only rule is: Help each other when you can, but never harm — Never help the Bear.

Excerpt From: Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (Volume V) (Churchill Biography Book 5) by Martin Gilbert.

Mr. Churchill had quite the career.

Up – down – up again – down again – up – down.

Biographers like to tell the story how Franklin Roosevelt once said is supposed to have said along the lines that Winston has 100 ideas a day but only one will turn out to be good. Which is okay as he will have another 100 ideas tomorrow.

What is usually included with the quip is that Mr. Churchill heard the story and took umbrage and wanted to know when did he ever have a bad idea.

One idea that took with him was that Hitler was a problem without fixing by anything than removal.

While many sought out accommodation, Mr. Churchill maintained a wall of anti-end-Hitler words.

At one point after the Munich Crisis when the France and Great Britain took Czechoslovakia apart, Mr. Churchill called for a vote question the actions of His Majesties Government and he asked for just 50 members of the House of Commons to vote with him to record the fact that there were some folks who objected to such an action.

Mr. Churchill got 2.

Understand that when the House of Commons votes, the members vote by exiting the House chamber through the yes door or the no door and then the group together in the lobby to discuss the vote.

After this vote, Mr. Churchill stood in the lobby for two other men.

Kind of rubs it in.

Still, he kept at it.

This is the time of Mr. Churchill’s career called The Wilderness Years.

On the outside.

Out of step.

Down.

Has been.

About Mr. Churchill, Herman Wouk wrote:

Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and before the war ended they dismissed him. But in his hour he grasped the nature of Hitler, and sensed the way to beat him: that is, by holding fast and pushing him to the assault of the whole world, the morbid German dream of rule or ruin, of dominion or Götterdämmerung. He read his man and he read the strategic situation, and with the words of his mouth he inspired the British people to share his vision. By keeping back the twenty-five squadrons from the lost Battle of France, he acted toughly, wisely, and ungallantly; and he turned the war to the course that ended five long years later, when Hitler killed himself and Nazi Germany fell apart. This deed put Winston Churchill in the company of the rare saviors of countries, and perhaps of civilizations.

I feel the wilderness is where a lot of Americans are today.

Out of it.

Down.

Take heart.

We need to read the man and the situation.

Anyone of us may be in position to be that rare savior of a country.

In the meantime, help each other when you can, but never harm —

And never help the bear.

Never ever, help that bear.

trophy wives don’t work
but it made him happy for a
little while at least

Adapted from the speech that guy made at the U.S. Military Academy’s 2025 commencement ceremony in West Point, N.Y on May 24th, where he said:

He was a man who was admired for real estate all over the world, actually, but all over the country. He built Levit towns. He started as a man who built one house, then he built two, then he built five, then he built 20, then he built 1,000, then he built 2,000 and 3,000 a year. And he got very big, very big.

He was great at what he did. You see them all over the country still, Levit towns, so a long time ago. But he was, uh, the first of the really, really big home builders. And he became very rich, became a very rich man, and then he decided to sell. He was offered a lot of money by a big conglomerate, Gulf and Western, big conglomerate.

They didn’t do real estate, they didn’t know anything about it, but they saw the money he was making; they wanted to take it to a public company. And they gave him a lot of money, tremendous amount of money. More money than he ever thought he’d get. And he sold this company and he had nothing to do. He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife.

Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well. But it doesn’t — And that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives doesn’t work out, but it made him happy for a little while at least. But he found a new wife. He sold his little boat and he got a big yacht.

He had one of the biggest yachts anywhere in the world. He moved for a time to Monte Carlo and he led the good life. And time went by and he got bored. And 15 years later, the company that he sold to called him and they said, “The housing business is not for us.” You have to understand, when Bill Levitt was hot, when he had momentum, he’d go to the job sites every night.

He’d pick up every loose nail, he’d pick up every scrap of wood. If there was a bolt or a screw laying on the ground, he’d pick it up and he’d use it the next day and putting together a house. But now he was spoiled and he was rich, he was really rich. And they called and they said, “This isn’t for us, this business.

We need to do other things. Would you like to buy it back? We’ll sell it back to you cheap.” And they did. He bought it, he bought it. He thought he made a great deal and he was all excited. But it was 15 years later, he lost a lot of momentum. Remember the word momentum, and he lost everything, it just didn’t work, he lost everything.

And I was sitting at a party on Fifth Avenue one night a long time ago, and you had the biggest people in New York, the biggest people in the country, all in that party, and they were all saluting each other, how great they were, they were all telling each other, “I’m greater than you.” It gets to be really, gives you a headache sometimes, but they had all these people telling their own stories about how fantastic.

What does it even mean?

Why after all these years, do I search for meaning?

It was George W. Bush who put it best, and this after the first speech as president this guy ever made.

That’s some weird shit.

I am convinced no one will do anything about it.

I am convinced that no one can do anything about it.

I am convinced that we are all stuck on this ride and all we can do is keep our hands and our feet inside at all times and hope that we come out okay.

What long, strange ride it will be.

makes people sort of
turn away and accept it
as inevitable

Please note this is the 2nd haiku based on this Opinion Piece.

In the NYT Opinion piece, Dance$ With Emolument$, Maureen Dowd writes:

Other foreign leaders got the message that emoluments were welcome. In an Oval Office meeting where Trump continued to relish his role as protector of the white patriarchy, the South African president jokingly told the American president, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (This might be the line that best sums up the Trump presidency in the history books.)

Trump replied breezily: “I wish you did. I’d take it.”

Trump Inc.’s money grabs were taking place against the background of the president pushing through his “big, beautiful bill” extending his obscene tax cut for the rich while slicing billions from programs that help poor people stay alive.

“The guy promised to make American families more prosperous,” David Axelrod said. “He just decided to start with his own.”

In a galaxy long ago and far away, there was shame attached to selling your office. Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, lost his job and ruined his reputation after he accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government.

Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He’s a snatch-and-grab artist.

“I think social media and Donald Trump’s persona have numbed people to the idea that certain forms of behavior are off-limits,” Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, said. “No institution has been able to rein in Donald Trump. He got impeached twice. Didn’t matter, so Congress couldn’t rein him in. He had all sorts of federal and state prosecutions that ended up going nowhere, so law enforcement couldn’t rein him in. The media has been covering him as close as anyone could ever be covered, and the media couldn’t rein him in. I think it makes people just sort of turn away and accept it as inevitable.”

It is that last sentence there.

I think it makes people just sort of turn away and accept it as inevitable.

That is where I am today.

No one will do anything because no one can do anything.

We can only ride it out.

In the book The Caine Mutiny, the ship goes in for a refit that is cut short and the ship is returned to service with Herman Wouk writing: … the Caine was hastily put back together by the yard workmen, none of its parts much the better for the disassembly; and the general hope, as in the case of a clock taken apart by a child, was not that it would perform in an improved manner, but
rather that it might begin ticking again as well as before.

no reputable
reputation to ruin so
snatch-and-grab artist

I would love to get out of my category named A New Dark Age.

This blog is supposed to be about witty word play and not so much about current events but when commentary about the current man in office is using some of the most creative word play, what can I do?

The term ‘A New Dark Age’ is taken from Winston Churchill’s Finest Hour speech where he warned of what could happen if the world saw Germany victorious, saying:

… if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

That New Dark Age is where we are now.

In the NYT Opinion piece, Dance$ With Emolument$, Maureen Dowd writes:

Other foreign leaders got the message that emoluments were welcome. In an Oval Office meeting where Trump continued to relish his role as protector of the white patriarchy, the South African president jokingly told the American president, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (This might be the line that best sums up the Trump presidency in the history books.)

Trump replied breezily: “I wish you did. I’d take it.”

Trump Inc.’s money grabs were taking place against the background of the president pushing through his “big, beautiful bill” extending his obscene tax cut for the rich while slicing billions from programs that help poor people stay alive.

“The guy promised to make American families more prosperous,” David Axelrod said. “He just decided to start with his own.”

In a galaxy long ago and far away, there was shame attached to selling your office. Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, lost his job and ruined his reputation after he accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government.

Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He’s a snatch-and-grab artist.

“I think social media and Donald Trump’s persona have numbed people to the idea that certain forms of behavior are off-limits,” Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, said. “No institution has been able to rein in Donald Trump. He got impeached twice. Didn’t matter, so Congress couldn’t rein him in. He had all sorts of federal and state prosecutions that ended up going nowhere, so law enforcement couldn’t rein him in. The media has been covering him as close as anyone could ever be covered, and the media couldn’t rein him in. I think it makes people just sort of turn away and accept it as inevitable.”

Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He’s a snatch-and-grab artist.

No reputable reputation to ruin.

As Mr. Dylan said, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

We, on the other hand, stand to lose a lot.