Iconoclasm

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Title:     Iconoclasm
Author: Walt Mason [More Titles by Mason]

King Skeptic wears his modern crown, his stern, destructive law prevails; he's tearing all our idols down, disproving all our fav'rite tales. Is there a legend you hold dear, some legend of the long ago? King Skeptic hears it with a sneer, and digs up history to show that things of that sort never chanced, and never could, and never will. "We have," he says, "so much advanced, that fairy tales don't fill the bill. No faked-up tales of knightly acts, no Robin Hood romance for me; the only things worth while are Facts, Statistics, and the Rule of Three."

With diagrams he shows full well that old-time tales are things to scorn; that such a man as William Tell, in liklihood, was never born. If Gessler lived and had a hat, he didn't hang it on a pole; the rules of Euclid show us that--so goes King Skeptic's rigmarole. But, granting that he had a lid, and hung it on a pole awhile, and granting that the people did bow down to reverence that tile, this does not prove that William shot an apple through an apple's core, and so the anecdote is rot--don't let us hear it any more.

One-eyed Horatius never held the bridge beside his comrades bold, while Sextus and his foemen yelled--because there was no bridge to hold. With Fact King Skeptic pounds your head, and prods you with it to the hilt, and shows Horatius had been dead ten years before the bridge was built. "He fell not in the Tiber's foam, performed no feats of arms sublime. I know! The city clerk of Rome sent me the records of that time!"

Mazeppa's ride was all a joke, as all the statisticians know; the horse he rode was city broke, and stopped whene'er he whispered "whoa." Most luckily, the village vet wrote down the facts with rugged power; Mazeppa simply made a bet the horse could go three miles an hour; he wasn't strapped upon its back, no perils dire did him befall; he rode around a kite-shaped track, and lost his bet, and that was all.

And so it goes; you can't relate a legend of heroic acts but that the Skeptic then will state objections based on Deadly Facts. Romance is but a total loss, and all the joy of life departs; we've nothing left but Charlie Ross, and he'll turn up, to break our hearts.

[The end]
Walt Mason's poem: Iconoclasm

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