{"id":31085,"date":"2024-11-04T05:00:07","date_gmt":"2024-11-04T10:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=31085"},"modified":"2024-11-03T23:35:55","modified_gmt":"2024-11-04T04:35:55","slug":"penny-portraits-in-the-crowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/04\/penny-portraits-in-the-crowd\/","title":{"rendered":"Penny Portraits in the Crowd"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the best of times. It was the worst of times.\u201d\u00a0 That Dickens had a way with words.\u00a0 He could turn a phrase that people are still using a century and a half later.\u00a0 And the characters he created; Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mr. Micawber, The Ghost of Christmas Present, Uriah Heep, Wackford Squeers, Jacob Marley and all the rest.\u00a0 Some fully fleshed out and some mere pencil sketches but all highly evocative of the world that Dickens created from his London and the world view he imagined within it.<\/p>\n

I could really use his gifts right now.\u00a0 I have about three days of awfulness ahead of me and really nothing to write about.\u00a0 Or rather my brains are too scrambled to produce a coherent essay from the experiences I\u2019m immersed in.\u00a0 And there are all kinds of characters.\u00a0 Some would make fine character sketches, with their stereotypical behavior and odd tics.<\/p>\n

Today I briefly met people of all stripes.\u00a0 Young and old; rich and poor; Left and Right; apparently normal and obviously insane.\u00a0 Like a kaleidoscope, they flashed by with just enough time to reveal some small facet of their personalities.\u00a0 And consistently, the most interesting people are in the middle.\u00a0 They\u2019re not the weirdest or the best dressed.\u00a0 But they\u2019re always the easiest to talk to.\u00a0 They\u2019re the most American.\u00a0 And they\u2019re the easiest to deal with.\u00a0 The elites are always disconcerted when they have to deal with other people one on one.\u00a0 It\u2019s all such a bore.\u00a0 They just want to pay someone else, \u201cto take care of all that.\u201d\u00a0 And the opposite pole; the broken people are all over the field.\u00a0 They\u2019re angry or crazy or just too confused to be understood.\u00a0 You can pity them and wish they could be helped but at this point we can barely help our own.<\/p>\n

Probably the most pleasant moment was when a young woman with two children came in.\u00a0 A boy and a girl, respectively six and five years old.\u00a0 The kids were engaged in a low-level battle that you could tell must have been their continuous state.\u00a0 The mom just grabbed each of them with one of her arms and carried them along like two bundles of firewood as they still tried to reach each other to battle.\u00a0 I said to her, \u201cThose are both good ages.\u201d\u00a0 And she laughed but nodded her head and said, \u201cYeah they make my day fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

A little while later a very well-dressed man came in pushing some kind of very expensive looking wagon that contained two little boys.\u00a0 They were somewhere in the age range of four to six years old.\u00a0 The two boys spent every minute throwing things out of the wagon onto the ground.\u00a0 And the father dutifully retrieved this jetsam almost continuously.\u00a0 Finally in utter exasperation he started yelling and threatening to withhold their toys.\u00a0 But they ignored his threats and continued to toss these items overboard.\u00a0 And completely defeated he handed back the ejected items with an expression of utter resignation.<\/p>\n

And then there was the freak show.\u00a0 Blue hair, large metal rings drooping down from the nose and various other facial piercings.\u00a0 There was a lot of weird squawking and involuntary noises along with strangely discordant singing.\u00a0 There were parents with grown children who seemed to just accept whatever weirdness escaped from their progeny.\u00a0 And then there were even cases of multi-generational weirdness.<\/p>\n

When you look at a cross-section of our society it\u2019s easy to see that things have changed for the worse.\u00a0 But it\u2019s also clear who will survive and who isn\u2019t going to make it.\u00a0 What Dickens could have done with this crew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt was the best of times. It was the worst of times.\u201d\u00a0 That Dickens had a way with words.\u00a0 He could turn a phrase that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[1469,1010,3341],"class_list":["post-31085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-american-identity","tag-charles-dickens","tag-dunwich"],"yoast_head":"\nPenny Portraits in the Crowd - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/04\/penny-portraits-in-the-crowd\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Penny Portraits in the Crowd - Orion's Cold Fire\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cIt was the best of times. 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