Fatal Eagerness To Please Poem by gershon hepner

With fatal eagerness to please,
the fittest of the monkeys
descend with flattery from trees
evolving into flunkeys,
for apes to men cannot evolve,
establishing the species,
unless they learn to problem-solve
by favoring the feces
of those who fear them as a rival,
and are prepared to tell
the ones determining survival
their feces do not smell.


Michael Ignatieff writes about Sir Isaiah Berlin (quoted by Alan Ryan, NYR, 'Wise Man, ' December 17,1998) :

One of the paradoxes of his temperament was to wish that he had been one of life's noble intransigents––those who did not bend, but made others submit to their will. Not one of them was a nice, grass-eating, accommodating liberal. They were all hard, 'impossible' characters––Toscanini, Churchill, Weizmann––men whose vices he excused because they did not include a fatal eagerness to please.


12/5/98