In her 11 Nov 2004 New York Times review of Wodehouse, a new biography by Robert McCrumb, Janet Maslin writes of P. G. Wodehouse's collaboration with the Nazis during WWII, when he made upbeat radio broadcasts from a German prison camp:

... Though Wodehouse was viciously excoriated at the time of the broadcasts, this book takes the revisionist view (shared by George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and John Le Carré among others) that stupidity, however colossal, is not evil. ...

That thought — "stupidity, however colossal, is not evil" — offers profound hope. Everybody who's human acts like an idiot, at least some of the time. It's good to cut some slack for one another ...

(see also PretenseAndLackThereof (11 Oct 1999), MuddlingThrough (21 Aug 2002), GoodRecovery (29 Jan 2004), ...)

TopicLife - TopicLiterature - 2004-11-14

(correlates: RegressionToTheMean, FourHoursDaily, NoSweat, ...)