Step right up, ladies and gents, and see Aome's Amazing Circle of Quotations!

Mae West once said, "Flattery will get you everywhere." Since, according to someone (I've heard it was Charles Caleb Colton), "imitation is the sincerest flattery," I guess that aping those who have already made their way might be the best way for me to achieve my goals. It makes sense, right? Why should my road to the top be an original, newly-forged path through the wilderness when others have already hacked down the underbrush with their machetes and cleared the way for me?

Of course, proof otherwise is all over the place--just look at the relative failure of all those nameless boy bands who came and went after the heyday of the Backstreet Boys and N Sync. The limited success of these clones seems more to shore up Emerson's view--that "imitation is suicide."

Maybe Daniel Webster knows the motivation behind these cookie-cutter imitators--he says that "Suicide is confession." I could see that--I'm inclined to believe the back-door boys might really all be Confessionists in the starts-with-a-capital-letter sense, like all those competitively suicidal Confessionist authors--Plath, Sexton, and the like--writing poetry (read: suicide notes) and racing to the finish line (read: grave).

Unfortunately, no Pollock-miming splatterer or second-rate Sinatra spills his collective soul with the same grace and poetic sensibility as Anne or Sylvia or Frank or Jackson. Dorothy Dix aptly surmises that "confession is always weakness"--at least (and I speak out of context here) for all those copycats.

Unfortunately, the copycats don't seem to know anything about Jacque Benigne Bossuet's theory that "the greatest weakness of all is the great fear of appearing weak"--the fear that probably made them want to emulate their betters in the first place. If they were smart, they'd listen to Bossuet--if only they knew who the heck he was--and they'd stop flattering or imitating or killing themselves or confessing, because they'd realize how weak and scared it made them look. But most of them probably don't have a clue, so, as Emerson tells us, their "fear always springs from ignorance." Oh, and they're not ignorant in that innocent, naive way--they're bad to the bone--because, according to Socrates, "the only evil is ignorance."

At least they're close to God, though--well, Phillip James Bailey thinks so. He says, “Evil and Good are God’s right hand and left.” Does this mean the unique, original, unflattering people are the good ones? And how the hell am I supposed to know which one's on which side anyway? Is it Evil on the right and Good on the left, or the other way around?

It might depend on who's going to the Super Bowl, because Heywood Broun told me yesterday that, “God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side with the best football coach.” Then again, I'm not sure I should trust Broun's anonymous cynic, because of what Oscar Wilde told me today: "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” That cynic couldn't possibly know which side has the best coach--an obviously intrinsic value--when he's only worried about digging through his pockets for the market price of a concession-monger's beer for sale.

Actually, I don't think the cynic wouldn't be drinking beer at the stadium at all, because he'd be so flustered over paying the five-dollar price of a warm, flat, piss-poor excuse for beer like Bud Light when he could buy a whole, cold six-pack of good beer at the store for a couple of dollars more. He doesn't realize Bud Light's worth more if you drink it out of a plastic cup with your ass on a hard stadium seat, because (just like Warren Buffet says) "Price is what you pay, and value is what you get."

The stadium beer problem might also be what Spike Milligan was getting at when he said, “Money can't buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy.” I'd sure consider a five-dollar Bud Light to be my enemy, and I'd sure rather pay a little more for a Guinness or a Killians, even if it will make me equally miserable the next day. That Bud Light is so bad, it ought to feel sorry for itself--and then Helen Keller could gloat, because “Self-pity is our worst enemy”--even worse than cheap beer.

According to Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Self-pity gets you nowhere"--kind of like drinking bad beer or pretending to be Justin Timberlake. But if you want to get all philosophical about it, some French dude (Marcus Valerius Martialis) said that “A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere"--so really, they're both the same place.

Wait. Let me get this straight:

Flattery will get you everywhere, self-pity gets you nowhere, and in the end it’s all the same anyway?