Pride Before Fall - Learnings from History

Pride Before Fall
Learnings from History

Late one evening, Ginger and I were talking about various issues that concerned us. I love Ginger, but I am also proud of her intellectual abilities. She can process data and then explain it in a logical manner. We talked about some of her canine friends in the neighborhood: Barney, Cali, and Indy. Ginger would love to spend the entire day romping with those three dogs. However, she disses the little wannabe dogs that yap all the time, as if to scare us away while we take our daily walk around the lake.

Ginger said, “If you were to let go of the leash, I could chase those yapping dogs and scare them enough to quit their incessant yapping. As canines, they are as bad as Donald the Dumb and his incessant babbling.” My retort was that I doubt whether the yapping dogs would remember five minutes after we left them after we continue our walk. Some dogs and the fake president, Donald the Dumb, will continue yapping until the cows come home.

That comment caused Ginger to say, “You know that dogs and people are a lot alike. are loving, caring, and fun to be with. Others act as if they are some divine presence in the world. You know that any cursory glance at world history will show you how…pride will result in disaster for both dogs or for people.”

With Ginger’s observation, I went off on Donald the Dumb and his egotistical statement, “You know, I'm, like, a smart person.” Ginger’s retort was, “Intellectually smart people or dogs don’t have to brag about their being smart. People and dogs who talk about being smart do so because they are intellectually inferior to others. Then Ginger went off on Donald the Dumb.

Hey, God, listen to Donald the Dumb.

“You know that Donald the Dumb went to his first National Prayer Breakfast and acted like a fool by dissing his replacement for The Apprentice. He ought to have read some of the Bible even a single sentence like the one from Proverbs 16:18: ‘Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.’ He pushes his intellectual brightness and is obviously living in his dark world of ignorance. Donald the Dumb talks about the multitude of problems facing America and states, ‘I alone can fix it.’ He looks at terrorism and utters, ‘I predicted terrorism because I can feel it. I can feel it like a good location.’ Even that sentence doesn’t make sense.”

My response was only that it won’t take long before Donald the Dumb will have dug himself so deep into a hole from which he can’t climb out.

Ginger than went back to the being smart comment. “The Donald is dumb when it comes to Greeks. All the Greek tragedies are based upon the Greek word, ϋβριϛ. That word is translated into English as hubris or false pride. If he had read Agamemnon, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, or Electra, he wouldn’t be so stupid.

“Actually, Aristotle even wrote in Rhetoric, ‘Hubris consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim…simply for the pleasure of it. Retaliation is not hubris, but revenge….Young men and the rich are hubristic because they think they are better than other people.’”

While I agreed with Ginger, I said that, even if he had read any of the Greek tragedies or Aristotle, I doubted whether it would have changed him. After all, a couple days ago was April Fool’s Day, which is more about his entire life not just one day.