Fun with History
Recently, Will Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody came my way via a donation to the floating book shop. I assumed it was about the present era, so I let it sit despite the intriguing title. When I’d read the three books I’d put aside, I glanced through it. To my surprise, it features historical figures from the distant past, so I decided to give it a shot. The author sets the tone immediately, the first passage, an essay on Cheops, or Khufu: “Egypt has been called the Gift of the Nile. Once every year the river overflows its bank, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil on the parched ground. Then it recedes and soon the whole countryside, as far as the eye can see, is covered with Egyptologists.” The rest of book is just as lively and witty. Cuppy does not spare any of the personages, especially the most murderous. Readers, at least those in the modern western world, are reminded how lucky they are not to have lived back then. My favorite passages come from the profile of one of history’s favorite punching bags: “… In some respects Nero was ahead of his time. He boiled his drinking water to remove the impurities and cooled it with unsanitary ice to put them back again… During his reign of fourteen years, the outlying provinces are said to have prospered. They were farther away… Since Nero’s character leaves much to be desired, we are apt to forget his good side. We should try to remember that he did not murder his mother until he was twenty-one years old. Besides, he only did it to please his sweetheart, Poppaea Sabina, whom he later married and kicked to death while she was with child. It was her own fault, in a way, as she nagged him about coming home late from the races.” I also love the juicy innuendo of this nugget from the profile of Louis XIV: “Versailles contained hundreds of small apartments, and some of the things that happened in them did not get into the books.” Legendary TV personality Edward R. Murrow read from the book on the air. It was published posthumously in 1950 by Fred Felkamp, who sorted through 15,000 note cards. Its 250 pages read like considerably less given the precise prose and the many illustrations of William Steig. 71 customers at Amazon have rated The Decline…, forging to a consensus of 4.6 on a scale of five. It was reissued in 2011 and is still selling reasonably well. Cuppy, a graduate of the University of Chicago, began by writing ad copy, then moved on to book reviews, banging them out from his Greenwich Village apartment. Many of his pieces appeared in the New Yorker. Seven other books bear his name. His note cards and letters are archived at several famous libraries. In ill health, he took a fatal dose of sleeping pills at 65. (Facts from Wiki) Here’s Steig’s drawing of Lucretia Borgia, who may or may not have poisoned a lot of people:
From foxnews.com: A Democratic state senator from Illinois came under fire over the weekend after pictures were posted online showing his supporters at a fundraising event performing a mock assassination on President Trump. He has apologized. Imagine the uproar if Republicans had done something similar regarding one of the socialists running for the highest office in the land. Here’s a pic:
My thanks to Lynn, who donated seven Stephen King novels, and to the young couple who bought four of them: 11/22/’63, Under the Dome, Insomnia and Road Work; and to the woman who purchased a large pictorial on vegetables.
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