Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (17 page)

"Why?" Boris asks. "Where are you going?"

"To the Kremlin," Ivan says angrily. "I'm going to assassinate Brezhnev, Kosygin,
Gromyko, and the entire Politburo."

Ivan leaves, Boris stays in line. An hour later a depressed and unhappy Ivan returns.
"What happened?" Boris asks.

"Nothing happened," Ivan replies. "There was a long line."

 

Referring to a similar economic failure, disgruntled workers in Poland in the late 1980's
were paid in worthless currency to spend in empty stores, providing very little incentive to do their jobs. A comment from Poland circa 1987: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay
us."

 

Two jokes that have survived from the ancient world.

From Greece: A man's wife has died, and a funeral procession is preceding the
cremation. A passerby asks the widower, "Who is at rest?"

The widower replies, "I am."

From Rome: A little boy sees a footrace being held and asks his father what the young men are doing. "They are running because they want to win a golden cup."

"Who will get the
cup?" the boy asks.

"Why, the one in front, of course," his father replies.

Confused, the boy asks,
"Then why are the others running?"

Okay, okay, so they're not very funny. But they certainly are very old, at least.

 

One of the unforeseen results of the spread of Enlightenment ideas through Europe was the emancipation of the Jews. Once confined in ghettoes in Western Europe and in the Pale of
Settlement in Eastern Europe, they now began to participate in the civic and social lives of the countries where they lived.

This dramatic change in their status led some Jews to begin a reform movement which resulted in an eponymous new form of Judaism, Reform Judaism. The arguments betweenReform Jews and traditional (i.e., Orthodox) Jews was very bitter, and to a degree it remains that way to this day. A central point of contention involved strict adherence to the dietary laws, which
the Reformed regarded as antiquated and unnecessary but the Orthodox regarded as a
fundamental component of Jewish tradition. This joke was told by Reform Jews in 19
^th
century
Britain.
(Warning: if the reader is an Orthodox Jew, he or she will probably find this joke
offensive.)

Moses is on Mt. Sinai talking with God. "Moses," God says, "tell the people not to boil a baby goat in its mother's milk." So Moses goes down and tells the people not to boil a baby goat
in its mother's milk. "We see," say the people. "So we should not combine dairy products with
meat products, right?" Moses goes back up the mountain and tells God what the people said. God
is annoyed. "That's not what I said! Tell them again, and tell them to pay attention. Don't boil a baby goat in its mother's milk. It's not that complicated."

So Moses goes back down the mountain again and repeats the commandment not to boil
a baby goat in its mother's milk. "We see," say the people. "So we should maintain separate plates and dishes and pots and pans for dairy products and meat products, right?" Moses goes back up the mountain and tells God what the people said, and God gets angry. "What are they, stupid? Are you speaking to them in Babylonian or something? Tell them again, tell them to
listen to what you're saying, speak slowly and clearly:
don't boil a baby goat in its mother's
milk!"

So Moses goes back down the mountain yet again and yet again tells the people not to boil a baby goat in its mother's milk. "We see," say the people. "So there should be ritual acts ofpurification and a rabbinical supervision of the way in which animals are raised and slaughtered,
right?" Moses goes back up the mountain and tells God what the people said. God is outraged and flabbergasted.
"Tell them ... tell them
..." Then He stops sputtering and sighs. "Oh, tell them to do whatever the hell they want."

The story of the Christmas Truce is quite well known, but well worth retelling.

The Pope had made efforts to arrange a formal truce on Christmas Day in 1914, the first
year of the Great War, to no avail. None of the governments involved—Catholic, Protestant, or
Orthodox—had any interest in it. A few instances of spontaneous Christmas greetings across the
lines did occur, but they were condemned and, where possible, punished.

But on Christmas Eve, 1915, the Germans in their trenches began singing Christmas
hymns, including the venerable
Stille
Nacht
,
Heilige
Nacht
.
The British in their trenches listened to the Germans
appreciatively, and then responded with the English version of the same hymn,
Silent Night, Holy Night.
At
dawn on Christmas Day, the German and British soldiers, tentatively at first, and then in throngs,
climbed out of their trenches and met in the middle of no-man's land. They spent hours talking
and laughing, exchanged names and family stories, and then someone somehow found a soccer ball. (Seriously! A soccer ball lying about on a World War One battlefield!) The ensuing soccer
game was more melee than match, with no goal posts or scores, but the young men enjoyed themselves immensely. They then went back to their respective trenches and, after a few hours,
resumed slaughtering each other.

The Christmas Truce has been the basis of films, songs, artwork, and memoir, including a music video made by, and starring, Paul McCartney. The last
participant in the Truce, an Englishman named Alfred Anderson, died in 2005 at the age of 109.

 

Nursery rhymes often have interesting origins.

When the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, which proclaimed the king to be head of the Church of England and severed all connections with the Papacy, it became clear to many of the abbots of many of the monasteries in England, Ireland, and Wales that their vast
holdings of land and villages were soon to be in jeopardy. One farsighted abbot, hoping to forestall a royal seizure of the abbey's property, decided to offer Henry VIII one half of the
abbey's property in the hopes that because of this act of loyalty, obedience, and self-sacrifice
they could keep the other half. The offer was to be made in the form of deeds.

A deed in 16
^th
century England described in detail the property in question, not the
identity of the owner. There were no attorneys, title searches, or anything even vaguely similar to what property ownership is today. If you physically had the deed in your hands, properly notarized and sealed with an official stamp, you owned the property, and that was that. So the abbot decided to deliver to the king the deeds for half the abbey's holdings.

The problem was that the royal dignity would be outraged by a public bribe. A secret,
private bribe would be fine, of course. So the abbot hit upon a strategy: he would send the king a
Christmas confectionary as a gift from the abbey's bakery, and he wound insert the deeds, wrapped up in moisture resistant velum, into the dessert with no comments made or questions
asked.

A novice (that is to say, a boy in the monastery who would become a monk but who had
not yet taken vows) was dispatched to the palace with the gift. But instead of delivering it, he snuck away into an alley and ate it. Imagine his surprise when he discovered the deeds. They conferred upon him ownership of hundreds of acres of rich farmland, which he promptly
claimed, and he became very wealthy very quickly.

 

 

Oh, what a good boy am I!

 

The boy's name was John Horner. Hence the nursery rhyme:

 

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner

Eating his Christmas pie.

He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum

And said, “What a good boy am I!”

The deeds, of course, were the "plumb."

 

We have all heard the expression "passing the buck," meaning trying to blame things on
other people, and it is also generally known that on the president's desk in the Oval Office is a plaque placed there by Harry Truman saying "The buck stops here." What is less generally known is what exactly the "buck" was and what passing it originally meant.

In the old Northwest Territories (the area bounded by the Canadian border, the Ohio
River, and the Mississippi), there were very few white people back in the 18
^th
century, and most
of them were fur trappers, mostly Anglo-Americans with a heavy component
of
Quebecois.
There were very few settled communities, as trappers were an itinerant lot who spent most of the
year in the back woods, setting and checking traps, skinning animals, and curing pelts.

Once each year the trappers would gather at a predetermined location for what they called
a "Rendezvous," which they pronounced "
ren-dez-voos
." There they would meet in make-shift cabins with merchants from the scattered towns to sell pelts for coin and trade pelts for supplies.
Some
entrepreneuring
merchants would throw a few planks across a few barrels, thus creating an
ersatz bar, and would sell cups of homemade whiskey to the trappers. A few tables and chairs were an invitation to card games, and so a splendid time was had by all.

 

The problem, however, is that there is an irrevocable law of human relations that can be phrased as an equation: men + whiskey + gambling = violence. Accusations of cheating,
whether true r not, frequently led to fights. So as to minimize the potential for outright murder, all weapons were prohibited in these cabins, with only one exception: whoever was dealing the cards was allowed to have a hunting knife on the table in front of him, and with it the responsibility to maintain order.
A hunting knife in those days was not something purchased in sporting goods stores, which of course did not exist. The hunter would purchase a blade with an extended haft from a
blacksmith, and would then take a long strip of leather, soak it in water until soft and pliable, and wrap it tightly around the haft. When it dried, it formed the handle of the knife. Another word for
leather is "buckskin," and the knife was thus called a buck-knife, or, for short, a buck.

Thus the buck was the peace-keeping weapon at the gaming table in the cabins at the
Rendezvous; and when the dealer got sick and tired of having to keep Zeke from attacking Caleb,
he would say words to the effect of "I ain't
agonna
do this no more!" and would then pass the buck to someone else. It was now somebody else's problem.

A brief coda to this story: a hundred years later paddle-wheel steamboats cruised up and down the Mississippi carrying both cargo and passengers, and every large steamboat had what
was called a saloon (from the French
salon),
a lounge which served alcohol and hosted games of
chance. As is true whenever men mix liquor with gambling, violent outbursts were not unusual, but unlike the old Rendezvous with its trappers and pelts, the steamboat had women, children, the elderly, and valuable cargo onboard. So to further minimize the possibility of violence, not even the knife was permitted at the gaming table, nor was any real money permitted to change
hands in the saloon. Instead of money, small colored pieces of wood called "chips" were purchased at the bar and could be redeemed for cash when the gambler left the saloon. The only piece of real
money in the saloon was a single silver dollar that took the place of the knife, and that coin
remained in front of the dealer to indicate who was in charge of the table.

This is why, of course,
we still to this day call a dollar a "buck."

 

The "pirates of the
Caribbean
" of the 18
^th
century have been the subjects of a great many stories and films, with the pirate chief usually depicted as a lovable, romantic rogue. Errol
Flynn's Captain Blood,
Yul
Brynner's
Jean Lafitte, Johnny
Depp's
Jack Sparrow—lovable
rogues all.