Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  Once when engaging in a question and answer session with some students he was asked, "They say that money isn't everything. Do you think that's true?"

  "It is absolutely true," Nelson Rockefeller replied. "And believe me, because I should know. I have money, and I also have everything."

  Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK's father, was not a very nice fellow. A serial adulterer who made a fortune during prohibition in various nefarious ways, his attitude toward morality and ethics can be surmised from one of his favorite sayings. The original proverb was, "Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes." In Joe Kennedy's version, the saying was, "Always walk a mile in the other man's shoes. Because then he's a mile away, and you have his shoes."

  When in 1960 the Catholic John F. Kennedy was fighting for the Democratic nomination, ex-president Harry Truman, who opposed JFK, was asked if he was concerned about Kennedy's religion and the possible influence Pope John XXIII might have on him. "I'm not worried about the Pope," Truman replied. "I'm worried about the Pop."

  Kennedy himself had a sense of humor about his father's incessant political machinations. At one point in the 1960 primary campaign, just after JFK won the West Virginiaprimary, he told an audience of his supporters, "I just received a telegram from my father. He told me, 'Don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'm not going to pay for a landslide.'" On another occasion JFK said, “Last week I made statement to the effect that contributing financially to my campaign will not guarantee access to the White House once we are elected. Ever since I said that, I haven’t received a dime from my father.”

  Sam Rayburn was a Congressman from Texas who served for forty-eight years, including a cumulative total of seventeen years as Speaker of the House, but in his early life at the beginning of the 20th century life he was a teacher in rural Texas. In those days teachers were regarded as the moral guardians of the community, and were sometimes obligated to engage in what might be called active moral oversight.

  Rayburn was informed by the city fathers that an old Apache Indian living up in the hills was married to three wives. Polygamy was not only illegal, it was immoral; and Rayburn was therefore ordered to confront the old man and resolve the problem. He was also informed that the old man could speak English, but the old women could not.

  Rayburn mounted his horse and road off into the hills. Eventually he found the old man and his women sitting around a campfire outside their teepee. They were four aged, wizened people, wrapped in blankets, sitting cross-legged on the ground. Rayburn dismounted, approached them, identified himself, and explained to them the precise nature of their immoral, illegal behavior. He concluded by telling the old man, "You have to tell two of these women that you are not married to them, that they are not your wives."

  The old Indian looked over at the three old women who had shared their lives with him, with whom he had shared his life, the women who had borne his children, cooked his meals, and treated his wounds. He then turned to Rayburn and said, "You tell 'em!"

  Question: How can you tell if a politician is lying?

  Answer: His lips are moving.

  Huey Long was both governor of and senator from Louisiana in the first third of the 20th century, and one of the unusual qualities of that southern state back then was it contained a large number of Catholics. (The reason for this is obvious. Initial European settlement had been done by the French, who then transferred control to the Spanish in 1763, until they took it back in 1802, after which Jefferson bought it from Napoleon. The French and the Spanish were, and are, both overwhelmingly Catholic.)

  Anyway, Long had to deal with the ubiquitous tension between Catholics and Protestants in his early campaigns for office. He had to appeal to both without alienating either. With that in mind, his public addresses always contained the words, "Why, when I was a boy, I used to hitch the old horse up to the buggy at six in the morning every Sunday, go pick up my Catholic grandparents, and take them to Mass. Then, at eleven in the morning, I'd hitch that old horse back up to the buggy and go pick up my Baptist grandparents and take them to Church."

  This always went over well with audiences. But when a supporter said, "Huey, you been holding back on us. I didn't know you had Catholic grandparents," Long replied, "Don't be a goddamned fool. I didn't even have a goddamned horse!"

  Though today it seems bizarre, a politician who belonged to the Catholic religion was regarded with suspicion by a majority of Americans, until the election of Kennedy in 1960 put the issue to rest. In 1928, Al Smith, Irish-American governor of New York, received the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and his religion figured prominently in the campaign. If Smith were elected, it was maintained by some firebrand preachers, the Pope would move to Washington and would rule the country!

  While campaigning in Louisiana, Smith was approached by a woman who said, “I like you very much, Governor, but I could never vote for a Catholic.”

  “Well,” Smith asked, “did you vote for Governor Simpson?” (Oramel Simpson, governor of Louisiana from 1926 to 1928.)

  “Why, of course I did,” the woman replied. “I always vote for the Democratic candidate.”

  “Ma’am,” Smith said kindly, “Governor Simpson is a Catholic.”

  “Oh, but he is a Roman Catholic,” she pointed out. “You are an Irish Catholic!”

  When the election results came in, Smith learned that he had been soundly defeated by the Republican Herbert Hoover. Smith made a dignified concession speech and then turned to an aide and said in a stage whisper, “Telegraph the Pope. Tell him to unpack.”

  Edward Koch, three time mayor of New York City, was (sorry, your Honor, is) a story teller and raconteur of the highest rank. His ability to react to almost any situation with an appropriate, pithy, and humorous response made him an icon of the press and an idol of the public. (Example: an East River/Hudson River tour boat's captain steered his vessel off course and slammed into a bridge. A section of the bridge collapsed under the impact and crushed a section of the vessel. When the tour boat's owner tried to argue that the bridge's collapse indicated a structural weakness and that therefore the City bore an equal responsibility for the damage, Koch responded simply, "The bridge did not hit the boat.")

  Koch had a private meeting with Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe (or leader of the Chabad-Lubavitcher school of Hasidic Judaism), a man whom many of his followers regarded as the messiah. Before being admitted to the Rebbe's presence, the dozens of young students attending upon the Rebbe shared with Koch accounts of the many other famous and important people who had been granted private interviews by their teacher. George Steinbrenner, they said, spent a private half hour with the Rebbe, and when he emerged from the room he said, "What that man knows about sports ... !" and then shook his head and left, so overwhelmed that he was unable to continue. Leonard Bernstein: "What that man knows about music ... !" Norman Mailer: "What that man knows about literature ... !" Steven Sondheim: "What that knows about Broadway... !" Etc., etc., etc.

  At last Koch was admitted to the presence of the Rebbe, and try as he might, he could not engage the religious leader in a conversation. No matter what Koch said, the Rebbe responded with a cryptic smile, an ambiguous nod, an affable chuckle, or an amused shrug. He said absolutely nothing. After a half hour of this, Koch bid the Rebbe a respectful farewell.

  In the anteroom of the Rebbe's study, Koch was greeted by dozens of bright, eager, enthusiastic faces, all waiting to hear the words of wisdom with which Koch had just been blessed. In recounting the tale, Koch asked rhetorically, "I mean, what could I say? Could I disappoint all those young people? Of course not. So I just said, 'What that man knows about politics... !'"

  The name Susan B. Anthony will be forever associated with the Women's Suffrage movement. In 1872 she appeared at the voters' registration office in Rochester, N.Y., and demanded the right to register on 14th Amendment grounds. (The 14th Amendment, it should be remembered, guarantees to all citizens the equal protec
tion of the laws.) She was allowed to register, voted on Election Day, and was arrested two days later.

  Her "trial" was a farce from beginning to end. She was not allowed to testify or produce witnesses; her attorney was denied the right to argue his case on 14th Amendment grounds: the judge ordered the jury to return a directed verdict of guilty; he refused to comply with the defense motion to have the jury polled; he read her sentence from a statement he had written before the trial began; and he fined her $100. He did make the mistake of asking her, before he pronounced sentence, if she had anything to say. She responded with a spirited defense of her own actions and of women's right to vote, and with an unabashed condemnation of her so-called trial. When the judge levied the fine, she said, "Your honor, I have no intention of paying one cent of your unjust fine." And she never did. The negative publicity attendant upon the trial—and the general sympathy she elicited from the public—led the state government to drop the case.

  Susan B. Anthony did not live to see the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote nationally, go into effect in 1920; but many states and territories had already enacted women's suffrage on their own. Most of these places were in the western part of the country, beginning with Wyoming Territory in 1869, and it was the state of Montana that elected the first woman to Congress a full four years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.

  Her name was Jeanette Rankin, Progressive Republican, elected to the House of Representatives in November of 1916, and taking her seat in January of 1917. She was also a dedicated pacifist, opposed to all wars under all circumstances. She was only four months into her term of office when President Wilson, responding to German submarine attacks upon U.S. shipping, went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war. Though the resolution for war with Germany was passed by an overwhelming majority, Rankin joined forty-nine other members of the House and the Senate in voting against it.

  This seemed to have ended her political career. The Republican leadership tried in vain to pressure her into changing her vote, but she refused. Denied renomination to the House in 1918, she campaigned unsuccessfully to be the Republican nominee for the Senate; and when she ran as an independent Progressive, she finished a very distant third in the general election.

  But she continued to be politically active in both progressive, Republican, and pacifist activities, and with the passage of time her 1917 vote was either forgotten or ignored, and she managed to secure the Republican nomination as candidate for the House of Representatives in 1940. She won, and took her seat in the House in January of 1941.

  Thus it was that Jeanette Rankin, pacifist to the end, was in Congress on December 8th, 1941, to cast the only vote in either house against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Argentine First Lady Eva Duarte Peron ("Evita") died an untimely death which was also an unnecessary one. She was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and was told that a hysterectomy would save her life. She refused. Reasoning that she was the "mother of her country," and that one cannot be a mother without a womb, she refused the surgery, and died.

  The Rev. William Archibald Spooner (d. 1930) was Warden of New College, Oxford, but he is remembered not as a clergyman or an educator. He is remembered for his unfortunate tendency toward metathesis, i.e., the transposition of initial sounds of the words in a sentence. An example of this humor device can be seen in a phrase from a popular song of the 1930s, "No Bout A Doubt It," meaning "no doubt about it."

  Clever, and intentionally amusing. But Rev. Spooner's mistakes, which came to be called spoonerisms, were inadvertent and embarrassed him greatly. Examples:

  Spooner arrived late for church one Sunday to find someone sitting in the pew which was reserved for him. He thereupon said to the usher, "Someone is occupewing my pie. Please sew me to another sheet."

  To a lazy student who had stopped attending lectures, "You hissed my mystery lecture! You have tasted an entire worm."

  In a sermon based on the old hymn, Conquering Kings Their Titles Take: "Kinkering congs their tackles tite." In the same sermon he said, "The Lord is a shoving leopard."

  At a faculty dinner, proposing a toast to Queen Victoria: "Let us glaze our rasses to the queer old dean."

  In another sermon, referring to the murder of Abel by Cain: "He was killed by a blushing crow."

  At a wedding rehearsal: "At this point in the ceremony it is kisstomary to cuss the bride."

  "Go and shake a tower" ... "Who has not had in his mind a half-warmed fish?" ... "It doesn't magnify, but I have lost my signifying glass" ... And so on.

  Spooner was very upset by his growing reputation as an inadvertent comedian. On one occasion, when the crowd that had gathered in his lecture room was unusually large, he said,

  "You haven't come here to hear my lecture. You just want me to say one of those ... things!"

  Tied for first place in the "Stupidest Things Ever Said" contest are the following:

  The Digital Equipment Corp. CEO executive who rejected the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the personal computer industry when he said in 1977 that "No one would want a computer in his home."

  The Decca Records executive who in 1962 declined to sign an unknown rock and roll band named the Beatles to a recording contract on the grounds that "Guitar groups are on the way out."

  JOKES FROM THE PAST

  (Note: These are not jokes about the past. These are jokes from the past, jokes told decades, even centuries ago.)

  Hungarians have a (perhaps undeserved) reputation for arrogance. An ethnic joke in circulation among the Austrian officer corps back in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire went as follows: An evening of carousing in Vienna by Austrian officers and their Hungarian guests ended with the officers retiring to their chambers in the company of "ladies of the evening," as it were. Though the Austrians were the hosts, they had neglected to pay the prostitutes in advance. In the morning one woman said to her Hungarian client, "Und das Gelt? " i.e., "And the money?" The Hungarian replied in thickly accented German, "Magyari offyizer net ernahmen das Gelt.” Hungarian officer not take money.

  Hermann! You have gone too far!

  Hungarians were not the only objects of unkind Austrian mirth. One nasty quip made by Austrians about one of their subject peoples, the Slovaks, was that the Slovak language consisted of a scant 1440 words, of which 800 were words for various agricultural implements and 200 were terms describing different consistencies of manure.

  Soon after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the German government began a program of clandestinely violating the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Privately owned "glider clubs" began to train fighter pilots, for example, and "rifle clubs" began training infantry. Additionally, industries were secretly retooled for military production purposes, which led to this joke, circa 1934:

  A young husband with a pregnant bride was employed by a company that manufactured prams (i.e., strollers, baby carriages.) They could not afford to buy one for their soon-to-be blessed event, so he hit upon a scheme: he would steal a pram a little bit at a time, a wheel here, a screw there, a metal bar here, a handlebar there, until eventually he would have all the parts necessary to construct the pram. When at last he had stolen everything he needed, he went into the basement to put it all together. Hours passed. His wife began to hear agitated and impatient grumblings coming from the basement, until eventually he came upstairs and said angrily, "I give up! I can't do it! I've put the damned thing together five times, and it keeps ending up a machine gun!"

  Ethnic jokes have been around from time immemorial, unfortunately: most of them are nasty, demeaning, and insulting. Some of them are also quite funny. An example is this old joke current in France during the Reign of Terror (c. 1793), making fun of country bumpkins from a region of France called Gascony.

  Beheadings were daily occurrences during the Terror, and a new device, the guillotine, had become the standard means of execution. The guillotine consisted of
a flat platform upon which the condemned would be placed and then slid forward beneath a large rectangular frame. His head would be secured by a brace, and then a large, heavy, slanted blade would be released and would slide down the frame and sever the head from the body.

  One day the executioner was in an expansive mood as three condemned prisoners were brought to him for execution. "Today," he said, "I'm giving the condemned a choice: you can lie on the platform face down as is customary, or face up."

  The first prisoner, a Parisian, said, "I wish to be face down when I die, because I wish to hang my head in shame for the horrible crimes being committed by my country." He was placed on the platform, his head was secured by the brace, and the lever was pulled to release the blade; but as it descended, the blade got stuck in the frame and did not reach the prisoner's neck. The age-old tradition was that it is to be regarded as an act of God if a condemned man survives his execution, and his life must thus be spared. The Parisian was therefore released.

  The next prisoner, a man from Normandy, was brought forward and offered the same option. "I wish to be face up when I die. I am a devout Catholic, and I wish to gaze up a God's blue heaven as my life ends." He was placed upon the platform face up, his head was secured by the brace, the blade was released, and once again it got stuck in the frame. An act of God: the Norman was released.

  The Gascon was now brought forward and was offered the same choice. "First things first," he said. "Fix the damned guillotine!"