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The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown Winthrop Grumman and A. J. N. Calder in the Royal Contrarian Society’s performance of Die Schweizer Heulsuse, 1926. In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

TRIAGO: There! That! Didst thou see ’t?
The card-sharp’s fumbling misdirect?
That tell-tale grin or worldly wink that
Cracks heav’n apart and for a twinkling
Throws rude light upon perfidious conjury!
Spy the dark-clad stage boy! How he flies
Yet bolts a trice too late to beat the curtain’s rise.

Enter HERCULIO, eating an apple.

HERCULIO: How now, sweet Triago. What sorrow?
TRIAGO: A browful, sir. In foreign paper, densely ink’d.
HERCULIO: Pray tell. (Aside) I would pray there were a choice
Had my prayers a hope of answer.
TRIAGO: See here, Herculio. ’Tis a slip. Behold the oily wires.
O, Trickery! O, Falsity! Mark the cagey fingers
Cross’d behind thy back!
O, my career! My toil! My dreary occupation!
Has it all been but a prank, Herculio?
This long and wretched shift: just some saucy jape?
HERCULIO: All well-meant, good Triago. Be not sour —
These are not grapes.
TRIAGO: Indeed not sir: rather, scrapes.
And scars and knocks — the job-lot doggedly sustained.
HERCULIO: (Aside) Some more than others. The odd one feigned.
But come, Sir Tig: what unrests you here?
TRIAGO (waving paper): A tract from a brother clerk in America.
HERCULIO: Cripes abroad. Grim tidings?
TRIAGO: Forsooth: it wears the colours of a fight.
A word-scape stain’d with tightly kernèd face
And girded round with fontish weaponry.
HERCULIO (inspecting the document): Verily, convenantry this dark
Speaks of litiginous untrust.
Wherefore such cruel indemnities?
Wherefore so dry a want of fun?
A merchant wrapp’d with better sense
Would just as soon injunct th’orbiting sun.
What is this pact, Triago? Who demands
Such fearsome consequence?
TRIAGO: An entente of secrecy, no more.
HERCULIO: Secrecy? Do my deceitful ears mislead?
Say it again, my friend: secrecy, didst thou say?
TRIAGO: I did, my Lord, I did. A trifling confi. An N.D.A.

—Büchstein, Die Schweizer Heulsuse

Once in a long while you see a giveaway. A tell: a knowing look, a sly wink, fingers crossed behind the back, a stray wire, a stage-hand scampering away a moment too late to beat the rising curtain — just enough to wonder: is this whole thing, secretly, a gigantic have? Are we stooges? Have we all been fitted up, Truman Burbank-style, in some epochal, multi-decade-long Game For A Laugh? Is the benign creator playing with us, for sport, like flies to wanton boys?

One of those moments arrived recently, in the shape of an eight-page, tightly-kerned, ten-point slab-style American tract: The kind of writing that suffocates you: it permits no breath, there being no punctuation nor artful use of space to break up the diatribe: girded-about with the weaponry of mistrust — indemnities, the mutual contemplation of equitable injunctions, covenants to destroy information utterly and salt the barren Earth.

It was a confidentiality agreement — the saucier parts of financial servery have not yet made their peace with OneNDA, so this does still happen, tiresome though it is — but what gave the game away was not the weaponry and ordnance with which it was armed, but its purpose: not a client list, sensitive KYC material, a sample trade portfolio or trade secrets, but a newsletter.

The JC’s ever-so-occasional newsletter

We gave up on doing our own desk-top published Newsletter, which took months and use now sub-stack, which also takes months. It's here: https://jollycontrarian.substack.com/

See also

• Game For A Laugh