The Clever Underdog
A common theme in many folkloric farytales of the medieval and renaissance ages is the clever underdog. The wily hero or heroin who outsmarts the larger, stronger, and inevitably evil force or personage. This emphasis on wit and shrewd cognition have proven thoroughly entertaining throughout the many intervening years, finding their way into pop culture references such as Bugs Bunny vs. Yosemite Sam & Elmer Fudd & several miscellaneous members of the cast of villains.
This has also lead, of course, to the farcical idiocy of those same evil-doers. Apparently much of the true entertainment value is the ridicule of those who would do harm, thus resulting in just desserts of their own concoction. But this begins to water down my point for writing about this in the first place so I’m going back to my original thought.
I am fortunate enough to have gainful employment based around those same qualities. Albeit largely formalized into bureaucratic structures and hierarchies of communication, rules for process and process management, etc.; but this is just the Dilbertian environment. The end result is still the achievement of scenarios in which a long-term gauge of success is “How clever can I be?”
I suppose this is true of any information age professional where any creative problem solving is involved. I don’t believe though that this commonality derides the potential manifestation of that beloved archetype. I’m also quite certain that this post is mostly contrived in order to give my blog a small shot of CPR in hopes of some systolic momentum to simulate vitality before I have to walk away and ignore it for a while again. In that sense, have I outwitted myself? Against the forces of entropy, probably not. Have I succeeded in confusing the reader?
I just may be the bumbling villain. I need to get off the night shift.
Um, the clever underdog was also a theme in the American 19th Century (Brer Rabbit) and lives on today (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story).
Oh, and I still hate your blog.