The case has been made in an article by John Welford (https://owlcation.com/humanities/Did-King-Henry-VIII-Have-A-Genetic-Abnormality) that English King Henry the VIII may have suffered from a genetic disorder commonly known as “having Kell blood” which may have made having a living male heir almost impossible with his first two wives. The disorder causes frequent miscarriages in the children sired, something that happened to Henry seven times in the quest for a living male heir. If you think about it, if Henry did not have this particular physical conflict at the root of his dynasty, he might’ve fathered a male heir with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Then there would’ve been no opening for the machinations of Anne Boleyn. It follows that Elizabeth would not have been born. Then no Elizabethan Age; no sir Francis Drake, Spain might’ve landed their armada, no Church of England, possibly no William Shakespeare, and then Mickey would never have gotten castigated by scholars of English literature for daring to state in this blog that the actor who came from Stratford on Avon and misspelled his own name numerous times was not the author of Shakespeare’s plays.
History would’ve been very different. One might even say “sucky”. Especially if one is the clown who thinks Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.
Conflict and struggle is necessary to the grand procession of History. If things are too easy and conflict is not necessary, lots of what we call “invention” and “progress” will not happen. Society is not advanced by its quiet dignity and static graces. It is advanced and transformed by its revolutions, its wars, its seemingly unconquerable problems… its conflicts.
1962
Similarly, a novel, a story, a piece of fiction is no earthly good if it is static and without conflict. A happy story about a puppy and the children who love him eating healthy snacks and hugging each other and taking naps is NOT A STORY. It is the plot of a sappy greeting card that never leaves the shelf in the Walmart stationary-and-office-supplies section. Dick and Jane stories had a lot of seeing in them. But they never taught me anything about reading until the alligator ate Spot, and Dick drowned while trying to pry the gator’s jaws apart and get the dog back. And Jane killed the alligator with her bare hands and teeth at the start of what would become a lifelong obsession with alligator wrestling. And yes, I know that never actually happened in a Dick and Jane book, except in the evil imagination of a bored child who was learning to be a story-teller himself in Ms. Ketchum’s 1st Grade Class in 1962.
Yes, I admit to drawing in Ms. Ketchum’s set of first-grade reading books. I was a bad kid in some ways.
But the point is, no story, even if it happens to have a “live happily ever after” at the end of it, can be only about happiness. There must be conflict to overcome.
There are no heroes in stories that have no villains whom the heroes can shoot the guns out of the hands of. Luke Skywalker wouldn’t exist without Darth Vader, even though we didn’t learn that until the second movie… or is it the fifth movie? I forget. And James Bond needs a disposable villain that he can kill at the end of the movie, preferably a stupid one who monologues about his evil plan of writing in Ms. Ketchum’s textbooks, before allowing Bond to escape from the table he is tied down to while surrounded by pencil-drawn alligators in the margins of the page.
We actually learn by failing at things, by getting hurt by the biplanes of an angry difficult life. If we could just get away with eating all the Faye Wrays we wanted and never have a conflict, never have to pay a price, how would we ever learn the life-lesson that you can’t eat Faye Wray, even if you go to the top of the Empire State Building to be alone with her. Of course, that lesson didn’t last for Kong much beyond hitting the Manhattan pavement. But life is like that. Not all stories have a happy ending. Conflicts are not always resolved in a satisfying manner. A life with no challenges is not a life worth living.
So, my title today is “Conflict is Essential“. And that is an inescapable truth. Those who boldly face each new conflict the day brings will probably end up saying bad words quite a lot, and fail at things a lot, and even get in trouble for drawing in their textbooks, but they will fare far better than those who are afraid and hang back. (I do not know for sure that this is true. I really just wanted to say “fare far” in a sentence because it is a palindrome. But I accept that such a sentence may cause far more criticism and backlash than it is worth. But that is conflict and sorta proves my point too.)
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
Catch a Falling Star 
Don’t Do What I Say…
If you tell a middle-school child not to do something, do you know what the only thing they are thinking about doing is? Yes, you know it. The thing you told them not to do is the only thing they desire to do. Republicans in general, old white guys with lots of money, and everybody who follows their lead will be exactly the same. If you want to see middle-school kids try coming to school naked, tell them the dress code specifically requires them to wear clothes. And it won’t be the pretty ones, the smart ones, or the poor ones who try to become in-school nudists. It will be the fat, ugly, wealthy ones. In fact, it is the reason private schools for the rich concentrate on telling them what they must wear, like ascots, diamond cufflinks, and polo shirts in school colors. And they never have a rule that states, “You must wear clothes.”
So, let’s see if we can really confuse the disobedient and contrary masses of the world by telling them not to do what we really want them to do. But don’t tell them we want them to do what we are telling them not to do. Make them figure it out for themselves. It’s the only way to get them to do what you want. Make them think it’s not what you want and forbid it.
Let’s start with the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSaniflush. Do not vote him out of office. Only support those ideas that benefit his political career no matter how badly they will hurt the people of Florida. Happily pay the extra tax burden he has laid on Florida residents because he rescinded the special deal Disney has as a major employer and corporate entity in the Orlando area. The Disney corporation is guilty of a terrible thing, not wishing to demean any of its LGBTQ employees by following his “Don’t Say Gay” law, and don’t deserve to have the special deal where they have the right to maintain their own roads and county services in the Disney World region of Florida. Those Floridians need to assert their rights by paying for those same maintenance and service issues with their own tax burden. That will show those Mickey-on-Pluto-going-at-it perverts.
Get what I really mean? Listen very carefully. Some of those words are dog-whistles and bell-ringers, and Floridians are too stupid to figure out what we really want them to do. They will never prove us wrong. Am I right?
This honorable gentleman, current Emperor of Texas, Greg “Gunslinger” Abbott, also should never be voted out of office. After all, he is the anointed successor to the former Emperor of Texas, Rick “I’m Smarter With My Glasses On” Perry. You don’t become Emperor of Texas by being voted in, but, rather, by preventing certain people from possibly voting against you.
You see, what Emperor Abbott wants to protect us from is something called Critical Race Theory. This is an evil cloud of educational ideas intended to make innocent white children, specifically rich innocent white children, feel guilty and ashamed by knowing about things like civil rights abuses, inequality, slavery, racially-motivated lynchings, the South losing the Civil War, and Jim Crow laws not being about birds. This will be achieved by accusing and firing teachers and principals, especially teachers and principals of color, for promoting CRT through books like the ones about Ruby Bridges.
Here are the kinds of books CRT police want to ban;
For the good of white children in America, regardless of how children of color will feel about it, you should not buy these books to read them and risk liking the story of how young Ruby passed the test as a kindergartner in 1959 that allowed her to integrate William Franz Elementary as a first-grader, the only black child in her first-grade class in the previously all-white school, escorted to and from school every day by four U.S. Marshals and her mother, running a gauntlet of foul-mouthed racist protesters that threatened her, and attended an empty classroom where white children had been removed by their white parents in order to break the color barrier in Southern schools as a sort of heroine for the ages at seven years old. No, you should only buy these books to use as evidence against teachers or to burn them in a public display of CRT contempt.
So, here are the things you should not be doing. (And remember, you are not supposed to do what I say in this article.)
So, these are the things I am saying when I say, “Don’t Do What I Say.” So, now you should go out and NOT do them.
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