No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Greek box mirror, fourth century BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Is

Eudo, tricked by the Devil, “left no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded."—Gualterius Mappus, De nugis curialium (twelfth century CE)*

I

Eudo (Odo), Walter says, deceived by Satan,

got his morality back to front

punishing good deeds, wherever found, rewarding bad—

though naturally we must believe, so Aquinas tells us,

that it’s the other way around that’s sound.

But what if the duke of Aquitaine, not Saint Thomas, had it right?

Perhaps Satan rules our world, and suffering’s what earns its GPP.†

Rewarding good would then make scant sense economically.

That also seems to be the policy of today's GOP.

Its brains are doubtless better tuned‡ than those of you and me!

*Walter Map (1130 – ca. 1210), De nugis curialium [Of the trifles of courtiers], trans. Monague R.  James, ed. E. Sidney Hartland,  Cymmrodorion Record Series, no. 9, 181.

†Gross Planetary Product.

‡Some parapsychologists speculate that a “non-local force," received by the brain, but not generated by it, “pervades the universe, like electromagnetism” (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/02/new-science-of-death-brain-activity-consciousness-near-death-experience).

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

"You can't cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break."—W. C. Fields

A century later he might have been diagnosed as autistic or ADHD.

A very shy person,

he found it difficult to deal with people.

What, he asked himself, would Vladimir Ilyich have have done?

But the great man lay silent in his tomb up there,

never missing the best of all possible opportunities to shut up.

“Why do you want my life, Koba?” Bukharin had written him.

And Kamenev had pleaded for his sons. What had they done, after all?

Oh, God, it was so embarrassing! And nobody understood.

He simply didn’t know what to do.

Well, there was always that . . .

First, I’ll watch the new comedy from America, he thought—

great title: You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.

You had to admit it—they made wonderful pictures.

Then maybe Beloved Enemy again?

Or perhaps Dark Victory. Although that always made him tear up.

Time before bed, though, he must sign that stack of warrants Yezhov had put on his desk.

All those names. Hundreds of them. But it had to be done.

Damn Yezhov! He’d have to do something about him, too, soon.

It was all so unpleasant!

Why couldn’t life be more like a Hollywood movie!

Ursula and Attila

Hans Memling, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1489)

Little Bear and her Eleven Thousand Virgins,

abandoning Britain, concatenate at Köln.

There, Memling finds them playing at martyrdom.

Provoking Attila the Hun

's plate-armored ponces' naughty thoughts

pretending to pierce Ursula with his arrow a dandy bowman sports

a splendid six-foot sash.

It's fun!

Caravaggio, six score and and one years on,

depicts a very different scene:

Attila's become a kind of cacodemon,

Ursula nurses a wound in her poitrine.

The world's grown dark in the long sixteenth eon,

or perhaps it's just that art itself's gone mean.

Ten dozen years or so ago,

things were all different for us, too.

Don't like to whine,

but Kaiser Bill was a gentleman compared to Stalin, Putin, and Herr Hitler.

Summer 1914 was a grateful time.

Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610)