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LOS ANGELES, CA — As Hurricane Hilary prepares to make landfall in Southern California, the World Meteorological Organization has announced that all deaths resulting from the storm will be ruled as suicides.

“We are seeing Hilary continue to weaken as it approaches the West Coast, so we have high hopes that it will not cause any, um… suicides,” said meteorologist Fritz McBeely to reporters. “But we must be aware, this storm is highly unpredictable and could potentially suicide anyone foolish enough to stand in its way.”

Local authorities in Los Angeles have warned their people to board up windows, stack sandbags, and refuse to testify against the hurricane in a court of law in order to avoid being suicided. “The threat is real,” warned McBeely.

At publishing time, several weather sources had confirmed that they are struggling to track the storm as their weather prediction servers were mysteriously drenched in bleach and smashed with a hammer overnight.

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What happened, however, was that huge numbers of people sought power as the only transcendent good; and given the normal distribution of most human qualities such as talent, it was inevitable that most people who sought (and achieved) power were mediocrities.

Theodore Dalrymple

When someone is said to be lacking in ambition, it is usually meant as a criticism, as if people had a transcendent moral duty to be ambitious. How else but by ambition will mankind advance?

I grant that ambition is sometimes, or often, necessary, but it is a virtue, like bravery, that is not self-standing. To be brave in a bad cause is worse than to be cowardly in the same cause. And it hardly takes much historical knowledge to realize that ambition can be the closest ally of monstrous evil.

If everyone were ambitious, what a terrible world it would be! The constitution of human society requires people of very different qualities, the unambitious as much as the ambitious. In some respects, the unambitious, those who are not driven to achieve anything, are fortunate: They are not tortured by the idea that they must improve on what they have already done, that they must forever go onwards and upwards. They can be content with their lot in a way that the ambitious never can be.

Of course, such contentment has not had good press; but that is because writing is always done by the ambitious, as history is usually written by the victors. The dilemma is posed in the following fashion: Is it better to be a discontented man or a contented pig? The “correct” answer is contained in the way the question is phrased; for who would say it is better to be a pig than a man? (I leave aside the question of the pig’s actual level of intelligence and self-consciousness.)

The ambitious tend to regard the unambitious as wallowing in the swill and mud of ordinary existence. They have the contempt for the unambitious that the intellectual often has for those who’ve never read a book. No doubt this picture is sometimes true: One meets people whose steel-plated complacency repels. But this complacency is far from confined to the unambitious; it is found among the ambitious who have succeeded triumphantly without any particular talent. It is often written on their faces, as unmistakably as hardship is written on other faces.

My thoughts turned to the question of ambition when I considered our gardener in France, who comes twice a week. He is a man in his 50s who has always lived alone and who refuses all payment more than 50 percent higher than the minimum wage, though we would be prepared to pay him more.

To see him work is a rare pleasure. He obviously loves what he does. He works fast, efficiently, and with an aesthetic sense. You soon realize that supervision of his work would be an impertinence. Seeing him from the corner of your eye, however, you see that he never lets up. If he says he has worked three hours, he has worked three hours, with no time off for mooning or coffee breaks.

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Babylon Bee

U.S. — According to sources, a plane carrying emergency supplies and $10 Billion in disaster relief flew over the Hawaiian island of Maui on its way to Ukraine.

Island residents were at first delighted to see the disaster relief plane on the horizon until they saw it adjust its course to avoid the heavy smoke. “Where are you going?! Help us!” said a mother of four who had become homeless overnight when the fires took her home.

Upon seeing the chaos below, the aircraft’s pilot reportedly muttered to himself. “Hmm, I wonder why we aren’t going there. Oh well! Ukraine, here we come!”

The crew aboard the disaster relief plane reportedly took exciting photos of the Hawaiian destruction that they agree will make for a great addition to their disaster scrapbook.

At publishing time, the pilot had been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for expertly navigating the plane around the pillar of smoke that rose up from the smoldering ruins of Maui like a furnace, saving the aircraft from being covered in soot.

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