Twisted Spinster

…is the way they always gild the lily. They could be content with a simple statement, but no, they have to add something unnecessary and extra that makes you want to punch them in the face. Take Sartre, for example, a dead French guy whose philosophy the hipster set likes to claim they base their lives on. (They don’t, though — at least in this country the actual world view of those who can afford to waste their time pretending they read rambling, incomprehensible nonsense by Derrida and Foucault is based firmly in their staid, butter-on-white-bread Protestant-work-ethic bourgeois upbringing.) But as I was saying, take Sartre, as quoted in this article:

“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.”

Now, see what he did there? That last section, so not needed: “…of what he could have.” Bitch, you already said “the sum of what he does not yet have,” you don’t need to say it again in a slightly different way! Don’t you just want to go back in time, walk up to him where he is sitting at his little café table with his little glass of wine and his cigar or whatever and deck him?

Hey, here’s a new idea for an episode of Doctor Who:

SCENE: It is 1931. a Frenchman sits at a café table on the Champs Elysée. It is Jean-Paul Sartre. He is drinking cognac and reading a French magazine.

(Wheeze wheeze wheeze wheeze VWORP VWORP VWORP VWORP.)

A blue box with the words “POLICE PHONE BOX“ on it materializes in front of Sartre, who is nonplussed. The box is the Tardis. The door of the Tardis opens and a tall, thin man in a long brown coat steps out. It is the Doctor. He is carrying a cricket bat. He approaches Sartre and looks down at him.

DOCTOR: M. Sartre?

SARTRE: Mais oui!

DOCTOR: Jean-Paul Sartre?

SARTRE: (warily) Yes, monsieur, that is my name.

DOCTOR: The Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, the existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, one of the leading Figures in 20th Century French philosophy? (Ed: the Doctor reads Wikipedia.)

SARTRE: (Amazed) I am?

(The Doctor then raises the cricket bat and brings it down on Sartre’s head. Sartre falls out of his chair and sprawls inert on the pavement.)

DOCTOR: Not any more.

(The door to the Tardis opens. A young girl with long brown hair, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with the initials CUNY across the front of it looks out.)

GIRL: Is it done?

DOCTOR: (Looking down at Sartre.) Yup. When he wakes up in the hospital he’ll have forgotten everything he learned at the Sorbonne. He’ll decide to go into chicken farming in Provence. Being and Nothingness will never be written.

GIRL: Thank you, Doctor!

DOCTOR: Now, who’s next on the list… (Still speaking, he and the girl go back into the Tardis and close the door. A few seconds later the Tardis dematerializes.)

************

(Slate article via Kathy Shaidle.)