How To Show Them All
If I knew how to find such things out, I’m sure I’d uncover some scientific paper that conveys just how few people who vow to ‘show you all’ actually go on to honour that petulant contract.
The trouble is that, by the time we’ve reached the stage where those words are called for, we’ve rarely accumulated much evidence with which to show anyone anything. The first thing to do is to make sure that, as these words are travelling towards the doubters and betrayers with whom you’ve somehow enfolded yourself, your physical person is travelling in a different direction, namely toward the exit. In these heated moments one can find oneself on the pavement without coat, hat, bag, dog or children. Alas, if you are ever truly to fulfil your pledge to ‘show them all’ it is impossible for you to retrieve, with dignity, any of these items, either now or at a later date. Spare a moment to remember the fond times you had together, and then dismiss it all from your mind.
Now, having set out on the righteous path towards vindication, it’s just a small matter of actually vindicating yourself. A common mistake here is to examine your own point of view too closely — let me assure you the cold light of day is far more unforgiving than the blistering heat of sanctimony. I cannot tell you the amount of people I know who have vowed to ‘show you all’ only to later discover they are in complete agreement with the very people they’d been intending to show. No, the time for self-reflection past the moment a micro-bead of your spittle landed on your brother-in-law’s pretentious spectacles, and the public expression of your commitment to ‘show them’ disbars you from any sort of introspection whatsoever.
This is no bad thing. Many of the world’s most successful people became just so because they had stormed out of a party (or, more usually, a meeting to discuss the unequivocal termination of their employment) with threats of proving their contemporaries humiliatingly wrong. From that moment, every cent they piled atop their mountainous accumulation of wealth is, in their minds, just another small, coppery kick to the genitals of the unbelievers. Presidents have been elected, bishops canonised and athletes hired for lucrative shaving commercials purely on their ability to abandon the sense that they may be anything other than entirely right.
Yet confidence in your ability to ‘show them’ — and wilful ignorance of any of the ways in which they may, in fact, ‘show you’ — is not enough itself to carry the day. What you truly need to prove you are, indeed, the victor intellectus are cronies.
These days, no one person — however righteous or, worse still, right — can possibly win over a hostile crowd without having first recruited a larger and more hostile crowd of their own. It may cost money to wrangle a sufficient assembly of sycophants, although I have seen it done by simply finding out what outrages such people and then pretending it outrages you too.
Once you have this knot of toadies at your back, the game is yours. Your victory may not have been technically proven, but it turns out that never actually mattered too much in the first place. And while the people you vowed to ‘show’ may insist you’re yet to do any such thing, you now have a loyal following who will noisily and menacingly beg to differ on your behalf.
Shakespeare wrote ‘my tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break’ and I believe he was referring to the many occasions on which he himself vowed to ‘show’ the Elizabethan equivalent of your Thursday night trivia team. You may disagree with me on that point, but I certainly wouldn’t advise it.
If you enjoyed this nonsense then do feel free to treat yourself, your friends, your neighbours and any colleagues you don’t mind too much to my book.
