"The world owes me a living."

A phrase from an old Disney cartoon song came to mind as we were talking about the pretty face in the previous post. I don't know anything about the real Hunter Park, the unusually handsome young man who was arrested over threats to "shoot every black person I see" at the University of Missouri. I don't even know whether he is the author of the threat. But we got to talking about the psychology of unusually good-looking people who squander their beauty endowment. No sooner do we see the face than we must despise it. What goes on in the mind of a person with such a nice endowment? Does the beauty itself deceive him into thinking that the world owes him a living?

I went looking for the old song, and here it is, in a tremendously enjoyable cartoon of "The Grasshopper and the Ants."



If you watch the whole thing — which you will not regret — you'll probably want to talk about politics. What's left-wing and right-wing here? But maybe you'll be like me if: 1. You observe, early on, that the grasshopper is working, as a musician, and then feel richly rewarded at a later plot point, and 2. You're quite touched by the charity of the ants, and 3. You're cracked up by how happy the insects are when they're happy, and 4. You love the brilliance of the depiction of the seasons changing and think the image of ants' home in the snow looks like a Thomas Kinkade painting.

Hey! I just realized this post gets one of my favorite tags: Insect Politics!

"A panhandler outside Grand Central Terminal says he rakes in up to $200 an hour from kind-hearted New Yorkers."

It might be the dog and it might be the location (Grand Central):

“People are more generous because I have a dog, 100 percent. They throw me a dollar and say, ‘That’s for the dog,’ ’’ Andersen said...

Another beggar, working the northeast corner of West 35th Street and Seventh Avenue near Penn Station, said that just like everything else in the city, it’s all about location for vagrants. “There are other spots where people get hundred-dollar bills. I could go over to Fifth Avenue and make $150 before lunch.... But I don’t want to deal with the hassle,’’ he said. “There’s people that bully you to get out of the good spots.’’

By the way, the headline uses the word "bum"...



... which we were just talking about in connection with Halloween costumes. I'd said that circa 1960 the go-to costumes were "bum and gypsy." I used the word "bum" (and "gypsy") because those were the words back then, not that I hadn't moved on to more respectful terminology. I got some (comic) pushback in the comments: "Hey, hey, hey, I'm gonna need a trigger warning if you're gonna use words like bum and gypsy."

The Post is using the word "bum" to rile readers, but I think "bum" is the wrong would for a person who is engaged in remunerative labor. You may disapprove of his money-making scheme, but he's not a bum. He's a beggar. But if you think "beggar" is too mean, I would call him a Provider of Charity Opportunities.

Or is "bum" the best word? The verb "to bum" can mean to beg, as in "He looked so immaculately frightful/As he bummed a cigarette/Then he went off sniffing drainpipes/And reciting the alphabet...."