The Land of Pomposity is a planet unto itself that somehow finds itself sharing space with Earth. Its inhabitants — the Pompous Population — live by their own rules, their own regulations and often by their own code of ethics. One walks a certain way, talks a certain way with the overarching aim to appear disdainful. This naturally requires practice if one is not from the Land of Pomposity and can often be spotted as fake and fraud a mile off, but it comes naturally to those with pomposity in their genes.
It consists of holding the head at a certain angle, tilted up at a prescribed degree so that the eyes are just barely, fractionally connected with the ground one walks upon, mainly for the purpose of spotting in the nick of time an open manhole, a banana skin, or one of those stumble-bumps that the Envious Ones are prone to tossing in their attempt at a trip-up. As for the Envious Ones themselves, the glance down the Pompous nose should be so angled as to render them invisible. One sees a manhole, one mustn’t at any cost see a man. It is demeaning, it is a form of stooping and the Pompous Population never stoops; the backbone is not structured for stooping.
Minions stoop, subordinates stoop, menials stoop. The Pompous People stand erect, unbending.
William C. Crochet-Shears is one of them. His head is so high up in the stratosphere it takes a good while before his orders trickle down the chain of command and are received at ‘street level’ by the humble ones. He is a person whose views it would appear have been sharpened on the whetstone of early Bollywood film songs — that is, they change as rapidly as the costumes worn by the heroine.
His moods have been trained in a park where the swings are of high quality so you can be on Cloud Nine one minute and skimming the gutter the next. Static is boring. He runs a school. That is, he doesn’t teach but pulls everybody’s strings. A Pompous Puppeteer one might call him. Occasionally, the strings get tangled.
One time he ordered only his final name to be used in addressing him. Mr Shears. This is because a lot of the humble, unstudied ones didn’t quite grasp the French-ness of his other name, the pronunciation of it, the crow-shay of it and not the crotch-it of it! Later he was advised that a double-barrel surname carried with it a certain prestige that a single surname couldn’t hope to match. So the order trickled down that he was forever and hereafter to be referred to as Mr Crochet-Shears and never mind the mispronunciation.
The sophistication of the initial
Then one day he watched a John C. Reilly film and got to thinking of great people with middle names that were only initials: Arthur C. Clarke, Billy J. Kramer, Jeannie C. Riley, and the clincher, John F. Kennedy. Overnight his form of address became Mr. William C. Crochet-Shears. His humble secretary, a clown in the garb of subservient slave informed him one morning that it was deemed bad luck to be referred to by a mere initial, especially one in the middle.
“Drop it,” ordered Mr W.C. C-S. And he wasn’t meaning drop the humour.
In the backrooms, after the Pompous One had passed by the humble ones had their day, riding on his coat tails fuelled by the comedy he unwittingly provided. To quote Shelley Duvall, ‘Take events in your life seriously, take work seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously or you’ll become affected, pompous and boring.’
Author’s note: This is a satire on a fictional Mr Crochet-Shears. But we have all met a pompous one or two in our lifetime and I have in fact quite recently. May their numbers survive only for the entertainment value they provide the humble ones who are smart enough to allow them their space in the clouds so that laughter may reign below.
Credit: Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.