Time & Perspective Quote by Craig Bruce

A mock-heroic trumpet call that immediately yanks the rug out from under heroism. Craig Bruce takes the familiar typing-practice chestnut - "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" - and swaps civic virtue for self-preservation. The joke lands because it parasitizes a sentence that once trained fingers for earnestness and turns it into a survival reflex. It is less a punchline than a diagnosis: when institutions go rancid, "good men" become the first casualties of staying put.

The specific intent is to satirize the expectation that decency automatically requires participation. Bruce suggests that there are moments when the moral act isn't to charge forward but to exit, fast. The phrase "all good men" is doing double duty, too. It flatters the reader into the category of the righteous, then implies that righteousness is precisely what makes you a target in a corrupt system. "Run like hell" is vulgar, urgent, bodily; it refuses the polished language of duty and replaces it with animal panic. That's the subtext: the world can demand a kind of noble compliance that is really just consent to be sacrificed.

Context matters because Bruce, as a contemporary genre writer, is steeped in noir logic: the smart move in a rigged game is not courage but escape. Underneath the humor sits a bleak, modern cynicism about public calls to "stand firm" - slogans that often benefit leaders, not the led. The line works because it grants permission to choose life over performance, and it does so with a grin sharp enough to cut.