Bill's Tin Ear

Oskar’s tin drum may disrupt rallies, turn every march into a waltz and some waltzes into the Charleston; but that does not make him part of the Resistance − he admits as much. He is rather “merely a somewhat eccentric fellow who, for private and also aesthetic reasons of his own . . . ” does what he does. This is what he does:

"In those days [the mid-1930s] you could get the better of people on and in front of a grandstand with a paltry tin drum . . . . I didn’t just drum down rallies in brown. Oskar sat under the grandstands of Reds and Blacks, of Boy Scouts and the spinach shirts of the PX, of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Kyllhäuser Bund, of vegetarians and the Polish Youth Fresh Air Movement. Whatever they had to sing, to blow, to pray, to proclaim: my drum knew better.

     "Thus my task was destruction."

That’s not my task here.  Oskar's drum may know better − I have my doubts − but I don’t. Still, I admire anyone devoted to disrupting the songs or orations or prayers [cant­ūs / orationēs / orarionēs] of shirts, whatever the shirts’ colors – brown, red, black, tan, spinach green, stuffed with bombast.  [See “The Ambiguities” for 2/18/14 – “Heraclitus’ GPS.”]*

          I am imagining for myself, for this tiny, unattended space, something much quieter than Oskar's drumming, though I am aware that you can’t get Bill O’Reilly, or Bill Maher, to shut up by interrupting in a whisper. You can no longer − if ever you could − gain the floor by speaking softly, not unless you have first bludgeoned all opposing idiocy senseless with your big stick. Only then can you begin reaching in the shirts and picking out the padding.

          So the quiet Antic enterprise is doomed to failure.  But, it didn’t expect anything else . . . except, perversely, it had hoped for an audience.

Today’s definition of antic - merry in spite of it all.

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*In which I defined bombast, originally the cotton or other material used to pad clothing  as “pretentious pomposerosity.”

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Quite the reverse of bombast:

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