A young civilian blew a blast on a bugle, waved a flag aloft, and started running down the street, crying "Forward, comrades!" After running a hundred yards he suddenly discovered that no one was following him. He dropped the flag and sheepishly retreated, even more rapidly than he had charged.A wise reaction to leaders: just ignore them.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, September 01, 2014
A Leader
George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984), Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal (1934; rpt. New York: Time Incorporated, 1965), p. 17 (on the 1930 "September Revolution" in Argentina):