The term “cut to the chase” is currently understood to mean get to the heart of the matter. Originally, it was down-home wisdom from the film-editing room. It meant this: When the movie is winding down, and you’ve run out of plot (when you can’t figure out what to do next), cut back to the chase sequence. Here the bad guy is pursuing, or being pursued by, the good, and, as this is active, you might recapture the audience’s attention and hope you don’t get caught before you roll the credits.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial concludes with our hero pursued by Bad Guys. If he succeeds in running to his spaceship he is saved. But his strength is waning. We root for his success but have forgotten that the little tyke knows how to fly. Perhaps he has forgotten, too. The screenwriters certainly did.

Who else knew how to fly? The Salem witches.

They had been observed by their accusers, flying all around. And, accused, had to pay with their lives. But, as they could fly, what restrained them from flying away from their executioners? And why did no one ask?

See also Bruno Hauptmann, convicted of the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. On the eve of his execution he was offered the alternative of life in prison, if he would simply confess to the crime. He maintained his innocence and died.

Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sent for life to Devil’s Island on the testimony of a handwriting expert. This scientist examined the famous “bordereau,” the note supposedly written by Dreyfus, conveying French military secrets to the Germans.

He testified that the note was not in Dreyfus’s handwriting, and was, therefore, written in a disguised hand; and why would Dreyfus disguise his handwriting except from guilty fear of apprehension? Who but a traitor would do so?

Sir Roger Tichborne was a wealthy Victorian baronet. He disappeared at sea in 1854. Ten years later a fellow showed up in Australia claiming to be Tichborne.

He was backed in his claim by various Australian lawyers who signed on for a piece of the pie due upon his restoration to his rightful state.

They bundled him back to England, where the case was in and out of the courts for ten years. It is the longest British case on record.

The Tichborne claimant was supported in the main by proletarians and their newspapers. They understood his cause as “soaking the rich.”

But how, one asks, could his cause be an affront to the rich if his claim were true? In that case, he would always have been rich. There could be merit and satisfaction in the proles’ case only if they understood he was a fraud.

Photographs of the real Sir Roger show a slight, thin-faced, and rather elegant young man of perhaps 140 pounds. The claimant ranged from 350 to over 400 pounds.

The actual Sir Roger was raised in France, but the claimant knew no French. His supporters explained he had, of course, forgotten it, in the horrors of the shipwreck. Further, the 1854 photo shows the baronet’s earlobes attached. Those of the claimant were unattached. How could they be the same man? Enter the alienists (Victorian headshrinkers) who testified that severe trauma may cause earlobes to grow.

O. J. Simpson was acquitted of the murder of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman; but what law-enforcement agency continued a search for the killer after his apprehension?

Clearly there are differing understandings of “Truth,” and the vehemence of our asseveration may be in direct proportion to our knowledge of its absurdity.

The woke Left insists that men can have babies, but prior to our day did the enlightened insist that women can do so?

We humans deal with our knowledge of our confusion in various ways.

We know of religion, and its stepdaughter, drama. Drama, perfectly, is a syllogism, its terms represented by and embodied in two or more antagonists. The good drama may, and the perfect drama must, be reducible to a schematic, or formula, known as a plot.

The plot is an outline, noting just those points at which the antagonists must change their tactics in order to achieve their goals. Each character, scene by scene, has a swell idea of how to get what he wants. The scene ends when and because he was proved wrong and must, now, start again, balked of his desires, but with the new information gained in his momentary failure.

Hamlet comes home because his father died, and he must assume an adult responsibility and office unprepared. Difficult enough. And then he finds his mother married to a swine, after a mere afternoon’s mourning — a circumstance, but not a plot point. How do we know? It is not relevant to the objective we’ve chosen for him: to learn to accept the burdens of office. However, he now finds that the wretch murdered his father. Ah. That’s on his flight plan. He may kvetch about his mother, but as a prince and heir, he must determine how to deal with his father’s murder.

If we understand this difference (the mother is part of the story, the uncle is part of the plot), we are well on the way to a practical view of dramaturgy.

In this we were fairly advanced already, all unbeknownst to ourselves. For we all understand jokes, and in the joke we see the operation of plot. A joke is just plot: “I want to die in my sleep like my father, not screaming in terror like the passengers in the bus he was driving.”

What do we learn from the joke? We learn nothing about the father (we’re told nothing about him and don’t miss it). We learn nothing about the bus, or its riders, or traffic safety; there are no lessons, no indictments, no admonitions, no protestations. We learn only one thing, and we experience it not as a catechism but as a blessed relief. We learn, once again, that we are stupid.

The joke and the drama exist to absolve us from our shame at our own hypocrisy. Absolved, we are less likely to project our self-loathing onto others. What are the grand jokes of the last year? And what, the greater horror, of the replacement of ad hoc watercooler humor by the exchange and elaboration of approved hatreds?

The Bolsheviks chastised party members who pointed out inconsistencies in doctrine and practice. The recreants were schooled that such complaints were “mechanistic,” which is to say that they were irrefutable; and those who preferred truth to doctrine were free to be shot.

When we are frightened of assessing cause and effect we forfeit the sole capacity distinguishing us from the beasts. What wonder that we, then, act like beasts? Where does the record run to the contrary? The very first reported acts of humankind in the Bible (our creation myth) are Eve’s sin against God, and Adam’s denunciation of his wife.

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The perplexed or depraved, propounding an argument, an equation, a plot, or a political proposition that they cannot honestly resolve, may distract by an appeal to emotions — the original meaning of cutting to the chase.

The Bolsheviks called a request for clarity mechanistic, deviationist, and Trotskyite; today’s Left denounces it by many words ending in “ism.”

Is there such a thing as Truth?

Here’s the Boy Scout test: How can one be sure the campfire is out? Pick up the ashes.