"Flattery (also called adulation or blandishment) is the act of giving excessive compliments..."

"... generally for the purpose of ingratiating oneself with the subject....  Historically, flattery has been used as a standard form of discourse when addressing a king or queen. In the Renaissance, it was a common practice among writers to flatter the reigning monarch, as Edmund Spenser flattered Queen Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare flattered King James I in Macbeth and Niccolò Machiavelli flattered Lorenzo II de' Medici in The Prince.... In the Divine Comedy, Dante depicts flatterers wading in human excrement, stating that their words were the equivalent of excrement, in the second bolgia of 8th Circle of Hell.... Plutarch wrote an essay on ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend.’ Julius Caesar was notorious for his flattery. In his In Praise of Folly, Erasmus commended flattery because it 'raises downcast spirits, comforts the sad, rouses the apathetic, stirs up the stolid, cheers the sick, restrains the headstrong, brings lovers together and keeps them united.'"

From the Wikipedia article, "Flattery."

I'm reading that because I was looking up "Flatter!," which I'm doing because I'm getting rid of the piano, and, emptying out the piano bench, I found this:

"In the first week after the new rules we literally had customers with calculators out. It was a real novelty. And for the first two to three weeks..."

"... people would opt for the lighter dishes. For instance, orders for our mother butter chicken dish fell but orders for our lower-calorie agra chicken dish rose. But after about three weeks everyone got fatigued with it and we are now back to normal. It hasn’t made any difference to sales at all."

Said restaurant owner Nisha Katona, quoted in a London Times article about the calorie counts that have been required in the U.K. since last month.

The article cites a study of American restaurants with calorie counts that "in the first month, diners opted for dishes with an average of 60 fewer calories but after a year, the average reduction had fallen to 23 calories." And, we're told, the main difference is that people are taking more time to figure out what to order.

And here's another article on fatness in the London Times today: "Ancients believed in survival of the fattest/For most of human history food was precious and plumpness was something to be proud of, but then fashions changed" by Ben Macintyre:

Thrifty genotypes among the hunter-gatherers, who could store fat efficiently, were favoured by evolution.... The traditional desirability of excess flesh was reflected in social habits, politics, literature and arts, from Rubens to Shakespeare to Dickens. Scrooge is thin, in contrast to Joe in The Pickwick Papers, “a wonderfully fat boy”.

“Let me have men about me that are fat,” Shakespeare’s Caesar declares, while the dangerous Cassius “has a lean and hungry look”. Falstaff, the most famous fat man in literature, is loveable and trustworthy because he is stout....

There were exceptions: the Spartans ostracised fat men; Socrates danced every morning to keep himself trim; Hippocrates correctly warned that “Corpulence is not only a disease itself, but the harbinger of others”...

So! Socrates danced every morning?

But what dance did he do? 

"For most of the last year, we have seen endless hand-wringing in the news media about how crude Donald Trump is..."

"But it seems obvious to me that it is Trump’s enemies, far more than Trump, who have gone into the gutter and, to a degree that may be unprecedented, coarsened our political life," writes John Hinderaker at Power Line, on the occasion of that naked Donald Trump statues that stood in 5 American cities yesterday. "When it comes to crude, beyond the pale attacks, Donald Trump is far more often the victim than the aggressor," Hinderaker concludes.

I agree that there is more crudeness in the attacks on Trump than coming from Trump himself. However:

1. Parallelism seems to demand that we compare what Trump himself says to what the another candidate says. If we want to look at what people other than candidates are saying about Trump, we should compare it not just to what Trump says, but to what his supporters say and to what everyone who hates Hillary says — including speech in the form of sculpture and drawings and paintings. There's some pretty crude stuff out there.

2. And shouldn't there be crude attacks on political candidates, in words and in graphic depictions? This is a grand tradition! I celebrate it. I'm thinking of Daumier's Gargantua...



Daumier went to prison for that. And I'm thinking of David Levine's Henry Kissinger.

3. The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on "Crossfire" in 1986:



"[Brutality] is already in politics. I think if you use the so-called strong words, you get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words?" (And note that Donald Trump just yesterday was defending his style of speech as a way to save time: The important thing is to get to the truth and being too careful and polite "takes far too much time.")