Meiosis (mei-o’-sis): Reference to something with a name disproportionately lesser than its nature (a kind of litotes). This term is equivalent to tapinosis.
“He may be tall, but he’s small. That’s why we call him ‘Little Man’—a man with a shrunken soul.” That was an insult I had to endure because it was true. I was a tall bastard, a son-of-a-bitch, and a dickhead all rolled into one. I was proud of it. When I walked down the street, I hoped a homeless person would come up to me ask for money so I could push them down into the gutter where they belonged. I kept a record of my “push downs” on my cellphone. In the six months since I started keeping track, I’ve got 18. I go to the places where homeless people hang out so I can build my numbers. When a victim hits the gutter, I take a picture and post it to “Scrooge’s Circle” a social club with an ant-social agenda—Ha! Ha!
“Scrooge’s Circle” was founded in the 19th century soon after Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was published—a smarmy, ham-fisted story of Scrooge’s redemption. A perfect capitalist, he goes through a series of bullshit fairytale visitations from sniveling Christmas spirits, ending with the grim reaper scaring the shit out of him and making him into a compassionate human being—the opposite of what he was before. He’s been castrated by Christmas and converted by his own hallucinations.
When I saw “A Christmas Carol” for the first time, as a child, I LOVED the early unrepentant Scrooge. He didn’t give a damn about cripples and orphans—or crippled orphans: blind orphans or orphans with one foot or no hands. He didn’t give a rat’s ass if his employees froze to death at their desks as long as he could save money on coal to heat their workplace. He loved to evict his tenants during the holiday season to compound their grief. He also enjoyed watching penniless starving widows walk up and down the street looking for “dates” with cheating husbands so they can feed the family their husband left behind by dying or running off.
Then, the Christmas Eve disaster happened and he was transformed. He bought a giant goose for his office manager Bob Cratchet and paid off the mortgage on Bob’s hovel. He made a huge donation to the widows and orphans fund. He bought seeing eye dogs for all the blind orphans and found decent jobs for all the widows. He agitated for women suffrage and the abolition of slavery. He worked tirelessly to bring an end to child labor. What a loser!
I really felt betrayed by the changed Scrooge. He went from my idea of “The Perfect Man” to a back-stabbing ninny-nanny nambi-pambi bleeding heart weakling. He became shamelessly kind and charitable, anathema to the Capitalist ethos of British social order. Selfishness is the primal virtue along with survival of the fittest. I am not a nursemaid to the weak and feckless! I am a general, calling on my troops to beat the competition into the ground, to trample the weak and chide the helpless—to tell them to shut up if they’re whining, and to “put a stopper in it” if they’re crying. There are only winners and loser in this world. Let the losers lose!
“Scrooge’s Circle” meets once a year on Christmas Eve. We watch the first part of “A Christmas Carol” before Scrooge is wimpified. We turn off the TV and share our favorite “early Scrooge” things we’ve done over the course of the preceding year. For me, it was stealing a homeless man’s shoes. He had foolishly left them outside his cardboard box while he slept. They had a note leaning against them saying: “Put donations in shoes.” One shoe had $2.00 in it. I took the $2.00 and put it in my wallet, and then, threw both of the shoes in the Hudson River. Also, I bribed an OSHA inspector, and then, blackmailed him for taking the bribe. I got this idea from an episode of “Columbo.” I was toasted by my fellow “Circle” members. I felt good about being a greedy, uncaring, lying, cheating, morally bankrupt wildly successful businessman. Go ahead and call me “Little Man.” Maybe I’ll have you evicted—it’s almost Christmas.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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