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SAGES, PUNDITS, AND SPINNERS by James Ward Lee  O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre And be the singing masters of my soul. That quotation from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” has nothing to do with what follows. I only preface my remarks with it to show that I went to college. My students never believed that I did. Now to the business at hand: Sages, Pundits, and Spinners. Kent Biffle once called my old partner A. C. Greene the “Sage of Salado.” A. C. was no sage, had no pretentions to sagacity, never uttered but one maxim in his life. He said, “Everybody loves a hit parade.” And one sagacity does not a sage make. A. C. was a pundit and a spinner, and I will surely come back to A. C. later. Somebody once said that John Graves was the sage of Glen Rose, but Graves is no sage. Sages make up maxims that fit on bumper stickers or refrigerator magnets. What Graves does is to try to make you see how wonderful it is to buy a patch of sorry land and have a goated community. His books made me move from Denton to Fort Worth to get as far away from hardscrabble land as possible. I grew up on land so poor it took two men to raise an umbrella on it. In my home county, land was so bad it took ten years to rust a nail. So I was not spun in by Graves. After all, “My bones denounce the buckboard bounce and the cactus hurts my toes.” There is another quotation that has no bearing on what follows. I don’t think it is from Yeats, but it may be. Sages are omphaloskeptics. They spend a lot of time contemplating their navels and finding them good. That would be all right, but then they have to tell everybody about it. And most of 193 them tell it in words we can’t understand. Byron got it right about that famous doper Coleridge. He said, “And there is Coleridge proclaiming metaphysics to the nation / I wish he would explain his explanation.” Samuel Taylor was the puzzling, Delphic sort of sage, but not all are. Take Dr. Phil, for instance, the guy who is always threatening to open up a big old can of Whoopass. He is another reason I left Denton. I found out that my school had awarded him a degree. Now all they need to do is award an honorary degree to Dr. Joyce Brothers and a doctorate in law to Judge Judy. So, I moved to Fort Worth where the divinity school is just about to honor the preacher who says “God damn America” is in the Bible. I have started looking for it, but I can’t find it. Of course, I am only up to Deuteronomy, and he may be referring to the book of Jeremiah. Am I digressing here? I will get back to sages in a minute. Have you figured out that organization is not my strong point? Here is the dictionary definition of pundits: Pundits are knowit -alls. You could look it up. Turn on your TV. That medium is eaten up with pundits. There is Lou Dobbs, who is from Quanah or Chillicothe or Clarendon or somewhere up on the Red River, and he has driven himself mad worrying about building a fence along the Mexican border. People from Chillicothe or Quanah or Clarendon often become pundits; people from Matador or Roscoe or Jacksboro almost never do. And thank God for that. Pundit is a Sanskrit word that means know-it-all, and if you go into an Indian railway station there is always a pundit there who will tell you when the next train to Bombay or Mumbai or the Malabar Coast leaves. At least they tell you something that will do you some good. I am telling the truth about these railway pundits. I read it in a novel about India, so I am an expert. A pundit more or less. India produces lots of sages and pundits and very few spinners. The most famous pundit from India is Dr. Sanje Gupta, who knows every medical term ever invented, from hemorrhoids to hemophilia, from restless leg syndrome to rectal dislocation. But you must know by now that there is no such person as Dr. Sanje...

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