Fraud, or, if you will, Humbug--

I weary, I worry my grave, responsible transcendant inner self by puzzling at its ubiquity--being quite of a mind with Thomas Love Peacock that most of what the world is serious about is utter, non-starting horse shit. Let us go back to epicycles, so dear to the pre-Copernican astronomer as the likeliest explanation of planetary retrogression, and, by implication, of the wheels-within-wheels, clockwork complexity of the Universe itself. No wonder the pious Medieval "Astronomer" clung to them, and willingly burnt people at the stake for disbelieving in them. Let us then advance to the Science of Phrenology--how much it explained! And, when phrenology somehow, suddenly started embarrassing everybody and was summarily discarded--how avidly the world leapt upon the morbid and nasty fantasies of late 19th century Viennese Jewish medical doctors, and of a certain early 20th century Swiss Nazi, as the virtual "open sesame" of "depth psychology." Is it really any wonder that tone-row serialism was "discovered," or that James Joyce's prolix, whumsical Irish coprophilia, and Jackson Pollock's trivial drippings were hailed as sheer, perfect genius? Or, now that planetissimals have been reasonably hypothesized as part of the early developmental stages of the concretion of suns and planets, the inference of things' having gone bang! smack into one another is now thought (perhaps I should say believed) to account for things as various as the retrograde rotation of venus, the Moon-like once-a-year rotation of Mercury, and the creation (I think we might call it) of the Earth's moon? Really, we haven't got all that far from epicycles.