Chautauqua

Okay. Maybe it’s not an indication of the imminent demise of Western Civilization. But like Oprah, Real Housewives, American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, Hell’s Kitchen, Survivor, Real World, and any other of the myriad “reality” TV programs through which we obtain surrogate alternatives to getting a life, our voyeuristic fascination with Jon and Kate Plus Eight teeters on the scale between perversion and obscenity. If our ratings-boom fascination with the lunacy-inducing fame of these two self-absorbed nitwit parents of twins and sextuplets is not the end of something, it’s the beginning of the end, and I don’t mean their marriage.

Do we think about this at all? We’ve made big business out of television programming that panders to the notion that we can feel better about ourselves — or at least distract ourselves from thinking about ourselves — by watching people who almost certainly turn out to be more maladjusted than we are, in some way or other.  We can judge, goof, laugh, disdain, and celebrate our superiority over the poor saps. To what constructive end? After Jon got his free hair-replacement treatments – and as we watch him struggle to cope with eight children, without a wife, in the $1.1 million home he’ll now be co-opting with his soon-to-be-ex, and trying to figure out what’s left in it for him – what will we have accomplished? After Kate got her free tummy-tuck and boob-job – and as we watch her struggle to cope with eight children, without a husband, in the same home, trying to also figure out how to share notoriety with her ex-husband and still get all of the attention to which we’ve now taught her she’s entitled – how will we have bettered ourselves?

And if we’re tempted to feel any kind of faux sympathy for these narcissistic nincompoops, let’s save it, shall we? There are eight other people – perilously young and vulnerable – in the midst of this mess, who’ll need the real thing.  They’ll need all the support, counseling, and balance they can find, along with all of the patience and forgiveness they can muster for their celebrity-seduced parents. Chances are they’ll become latter-day Danny Bonaduces: bundles of hostile energy without direction or senses of self, wreaking havoc on a world that wrung them out, exploited their innocence, and left them to fend for themselves in lives suddenly bereft of unsolicited popular adulation. Respect? Earn it? Huh?

I have a recurring dream, in which I’m sitting in a Starbuck’s in Richmond with Thomas Jefferson. He’s been tabbed by Congress to write a proposal for declaring the colonies’ independence from Britain. He’s been appointed to a committee that includes John Adams, Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Bob Livingston. But Ben took sick, and the rest have golf dates. So, Tom has to draft the thing himself. He’s okay with that, since he fancies himself a writer and the rest of the group a bunch of hacks. But one thing’s bugging him. He’s cribbed a line from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written by George Mason. It says this:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Tom’s version says this:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Since he’s gotten the notion from somewhere that brevity is the soul of wit, he likes his version better because it’s shorter; although, he isn’t sure it’s all that witty. What chafes him is whether he should offer a tighter definition of the pursuit of Happiness. I tell him it’s a matter of timing: if he kicks the bucket before television is invented, it won’t be his problem. Tom says, “Say what?” I tell him never mind, pick up the tab for the coffee, and send him an invoice for my consulting services.

That dream leaves me with the notion that we might get better senses of ourselves – and perhaps pursue a tad more happiness – if we limited our television-watching to C-SPAN. But those senses of self are likely to be scarier because they’re weaker in the face of reality, as opposed to celebrity – and they might make us contemplate the necessity of doing something, as opposed to the luxury of doing nothing.

Hey! What time does The Bachelorette come on?

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies. (George Eliot, Janet’s Repentance, 1857)

Do we have the vaguest idea why incidents of adultery among the political elite make the news anymore? It’s not news. It’s not new. It’s not even uncommon. This week, South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford, confesses to chasing a skirt all the way to Argentina for a romantic affair. (He claimed it was to end affair. This, after claiming he was going to Appalachia to work on a book. Well, it many never get to be book-length, but he certainly was working on a story.) We all go bananas because he left his wife and four sons cooling their jets at home. We feign particular indignation because he conducted the tryst over Father’s Day weekend. (The monster!) Then he comes back to business as usual: making a sorry political apology for being a sorry bonehead. We make a show of being up in arms about it, even though he made his move hot on the heels of a similar announcement from Nevada Senator, John Ensign, who conceded his own inamorata was a staffer in his Senate office. (It’s not as exciting as a Latin lover. But it has a more familiar … uh … feel.) Ensign fesses up with practiced political penitence. We again take our cue, act appalled, and life goes on. Next! On top of all that, both of these bozos turn out to have been prospective presidential candidates. Ladies and gentlemen, one need not be a purveyor of perspicacity to know: this is no surprise.

These banal boneheads are doing nothing but following the example set by one William Jefferson Clinton, remember him? We deemed it wholly acceptable when he was engaging in White House dalliances with everyone but the First Lady. We had the smoking gun. We had the stained garments. We had the parade of debauched damsels. We elected him twice, and even his wife stuck around. He was impeached by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate. Coquetry in the White House was condoned. Why, then, the constant news reports? Why, then the outrage? These two lightweight Lotharios didn’t even make it to the Presidential campaign trail, let alone the White House. And we wouldn’t care if they did.

Why should we? This is modern-day, relative-scale, go-for-baroque America. We’ve long ago separated behavior from judgement. (”Well, yeah, he was playing sex games in the Oval Office while we were paying his salary – and paying for the Oval Office. But that didn’t keep him from being a good President.”) We’ve long ago conceded the rule, as children do with parents, of do as I say, not as I do. We wouldn’t know what to do with a moral compass, even if we found ours. And we couldn’t put ourselves back on the path of self-respect with a GPS. We’re not looking for direction. We’re looking for sensation, for puerile titillation, for every there-but-for-grace-of-God fall of others who lead less fortunate, more public lives than our own. After that, we’re looking to forget everything for the chance to do it all over again. It’s only a year since our outrage caused Eliot Spitzer to resign as Governor of New York.  But as another famous New Yorker said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Errant Eliot will be back. We’ll love him for it. And we’ll be counting the seconds until he does something for which we can turn on him – again – as long as there are neither cameras nor mirrors pointed in our direction.

The late Hunter S. Thompson characterized another Washington wolf, Gary Hart, this way, after the erstwhile Presidential hopeful was caught aboard the yacht, Monkey Business (I’m not making that up), with one Donna Rice. In so doing, Thompson summed politicians’ predilections for prurient peccadilloes for the ages:

When it comes to “womanizing” in Washington, Hart is an amateur. Four generations of Kennedys have roamed naked and crazy like satyrs on Capitol Hill, and Wilbur Mills wallowed and howled like a rhino in the Tidal Pool with a mainline stripper from Boston named Fanny Fox … but nobody called them perverts, and only a few people called the police.

So, step right this way folks. The show’s been running forever. Today’s performance was pretty good. You can be sure it’ll run again tomorrow – and for as long as we remain a loyal audience, faithfully and willfully suspending our disbelief as the folks we elect and pay to take our spears bleed publicly and melodramatically.  Just one favor: remind me again who the boneheads are.

After watching our commander-in-chief’s bravura performance of the famous political play, Glib Obliqueness, which he staged in lieu of a press conference yesterday, a little snooping seemed in order. After all, if he’s presently using more smoke and mirrors than a Kiss concert to conceal the fact that the preponderance of his plans – from car care to healthcare – constitute open-ended promises with closed-ended funding, the buck has to stop somewhere, right? It does, indeed. And it cashes out in a simple question:

If you had something to give and it were taken from you, would you give more?

If your answer to the question is no, should this be surprising? The fact that charitable giving is down is not the result of a lack of means or a suddenly hardened spirit. It’s a matter of vocabulary and psychology. If people give what they choose to give, that’s called giving. When they see the positive results of their giving, they incline to give more. If people have taken from them what they otherwise would have chosen to give, that’s called stealing. When they feel the corresponding senses of indignation and violation, they incline to be protective of whatever they might have left. Having what otherwise would have been your charitable contributions taken by the government is the rough equivalent of having your paper-route earnings stolen by larcenous parents, then having them tell you to cough up some money for the collection plate in church so others can be helped – and to cover their share while you’re at it. If someone’s getting the free ride, it may as well be them. After all, they’re the adults in this relationship. And yesterday’s rendering of Glib Obliqueness was about nothing, if not parentally arbitrary condescension.

This comment from the article cited above warrants particular note:

Most charities were faring adequately in 2008 until the final quarter of the year – traditionally the quarter that brings the most donations, said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The downward trend has continued into 2009, Palmer said, “and that means a lot of groups are doing pretty badly.”

No mystery there. At the height of the 2008 election season, the panic was on. Belts tightened. They became tourniquets after Inauguration Day when our new commander-in-chief showed no reluctance whatever at putting both of his hands in our pockets and telling us he had better ideas for their contents than we did. Then he let us know he’d not only be propping up failing businesses with our money, we’d better be ready to support unions when they passed the plates, just to make sure the fix not only was in but that those failed businesses remained corrupt.

While we’re on the subject of picked pockets, you won’t want to forget vocabulary when it comes to the healthcare our commander-in-chief is going to provide for us (at the expense of an indefinite number of subsequent generations). An admonition apropos of business and politics says, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.” And we’re getting proof aplenty from the administrations minions that Obama Care (under the guise of Kennedy Care) is going to cost us plenty. This lady contends Dr. Barack’s cure will never take public money. Right. She seems disarmingly careful not to define her terms. The definition of never is self-evident. Precisely what she means by public is a little more squishy. And this shameless shaman of chicanery contends that whatever it is that’s actually going on (he didn’t say) constitutes buzzwords. Buzzwords? If the money for a government-created “public healthcare option” is NOT going to come from public funds (taxes), where will it come from? Christina Romer’s not saying. My guess is we won’t get a straight answer from our friend the Mortgage Man, either.

But the tab may be coming due for all the free lunches, and our commander-in-chief’s rhetorical flights of fancy may be coming home to roost. Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” You’d think somewhere, sometime in his schooling – between classes in law and theatrical pyrotechnics – Papa Barack would have had time to learn that one. He didn’t. Fooling 17,869,542 people in the 2008 popular election only emboldened him and made him ignore Honest Abe’s advice all the more.

You can be sure there’s trouble brewing when The New York Times comes out in opposition to anything on the Democratic agenda. Given the prospects of going out of business, perhaps The Gray Lady has opted to be objective for a change, or – dare I say it? – to publish some semblance of truth, especially since they don’t have George Bush to kick around anymore? Nah! More likely this is an errant attack of common sense that happened to slip by the editorial board. We probably can look forward to news of David Brooks being pilloried in an upcoming edition. And if our commander-in-chief’s poll numbers are really tanking by then, they’ll probably pin the decline on Brooks. After all, what good is barnyard reporting, if you don’t have a goat around?

But I digress. The point is it would take some truly perverse spin on Stockholm Syndrome to make us continue our loyal adulation for a presidential pilferer who wants to tell us that emptying our pockets at the point of a figurative gun will create more jobs, give us better healthcare, and allow us to contribute more charitably to the greater societal good. The Giving USA Foundation knows better. The polls know better. Even The New York Times knows better. The test will be to see if voters have learned better, beginning with the 2010 mid-terms.

See you at the polls.

You really have to wonder if gullibility can be epidemic. You have to wonder if our desperation to abdicate personal responsibility and to be “taken care of” is so profound that we’ll abide anything, even the complicity of the media on which we ostensibly rely to keep us informed (unless we’ve abdicated even our responsibility to be informed). You have to wonder if we’re so willing to be placated that we’ll accept the packaging of political agendas as moral pronouncements without question or logic. And you have to wonder why The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times chose not to quote “moral imperative” in their headlines, to say nothing of why they buried the story.

Let’s take a critical look at some terminology, shall we? Taking care of ourselves is a responsibility. Taking care of each other might be a moral imperative – but only if there’s a cultural consensus to do so. That’s what morality is: a cultural agreement to do this, but not that. Helping our neighbor is a good thing.  Rolling a grenade under his door is not. We’re pretty much in agreement on cut-and-dried things like that. But not everything is quite so clear, especially when viewed through the clouded lenses of political promises, entitlements, and rights. Providing health care as a government mandate might be a cultural imperative – not a moral one – if it doesn’t precipitate the economic ruin of the culture. (”The operation was a success, but the patient died.”) But insurance is positively not a moral imperative. It’s a voluntary financial transaction based on The Law of Large Numbers: the small contributions of the many protect against the large losses of the few. And health insurance most certainly should not be a commercial imperative imposed by the federal government.

Do we honestly believe that if Ted Kennedy had ever worked a private-sector second in his life – or if he ever founded a business – he’d be prescribing this? How many would-be entrepreneurs – private-sector job creators – are likely to go for this deal?

Yeah, you can start a business. But you have to insure your employees medically, even if they have pre-existing conditions. Wait. There’s more. You can’t refuse to hire people because of those conditions because that’s discrimination. To make things even more interesting, we’re going to tax the business to Kingdom Come just because we can. This is not knee-capping, we promise; but if you make more than we think you should (Barney Frank’s working on that), we’re going to take that, too. Finally, if there’s any of it left after we get through creating government programs and government jobs – no, not private-sector jobs and certainly not wealth – we’re going to spread it around. Okay?

Right. Sign me up.

By the same logic – or the utter lack thereof – do we think that if Barney Frank had ever worked a private-sector second in his life, he would have avoided these questions, let alone consented to the provisions he’s trying to defend, or stormed out of the interview in a self-righteous snit? A government agency overseeing the executive compensation of commercial enterprises? If those enterprises took TARP money, that’s one thing (setting aside the reprehensibility of TARP). But purporting to act in the interest of shareholders in private-sector businesses when you’ve never worked in one? Is that anything other than a shameless power grab? Have we really gotten to the point at which it’s more important to count our perceived slights (”Why should she make that much money when I don’t?”) than it is to strive for our own opportunities? Have we actually concluded it’s better to depend on the government to define our opportunities and give them to us? Has any government, anywhere, been able to do that? Why do we believe it’s different this time? How did we lose our pride in earning our own keep?

A long time ago, in a land far, far way, we used to go to war over things like taxation without representation. We used to take umbrage when what belonged to us was taken. We used to think self-reliance was a good thing. We used to think boot-strapping, risk and reward, and equal opportunity were things to which we should aspire. Now we’ve succumbed to career politicians, paid to create more power for themselves, telling us what’s good for us when they’ve never actually done what we do, attempting to legislate equality (not equal opportunity), and wanting to take more of our money for the privilege of sustaining their pomposity and their ostensible intellectual superiorty. On the final frontier, they understand clearly why that’s a bad idea.

There are differences between rose-colored glasses, self-induced blindness, and the unwitting acceptance of opacity. In turning a blithe eye to the media’s political predilections for the first, let’s not contract the second. And let’s be careful we don’t have the third imposed on us, however unwittingly.

For those who don’t know his work, Frederick Exley’s passing seventeen years ago (June 17, 1992) will be as the great preponderance of the world’s myriad events – unknown, unseen, unremarked. For those of us who know and love his work, his passing marked the loss of trusted eyes; of a keen and long-suffering intellect; of a voice as plaintive and hopeful as our own; of a painfully courageous honesty that even transience, alcohol, and loneliness could not extinguish; of an excruciating insight that would not have let him live or die any other way. Now that he no longer watches the world for me, I take comfort in knowing his books still hold his vision.

Aside from the occasional article and periodic piece, the body of Exley’s work comprises a novelistic trilogy. Billed by the author as “autobiographical fiction”, A Fan’s Notes, Pages From A Cold Island, and Last Notes From Home traverse the fuzzy line between reality and fantasy, observation and imagination, history and lies. And they draw an unsparing depiction of, as Exley characterizes it in the epigraph to A Fan’s Notes, “that long malaise, my life”.

That life was, and Exley’s work reflects, an abiding struggle – eminently noble, abjectly futile, ultimately existential – to come to terms with an America so full of obscene abundance and corrupt opportunity it rendered any meaningful choosing of one’s options unimaginable, and any thought of personal fulfillment absurd. In Exley’s America, captured in all its confounding, contradicting complexity in Last Notes From Home, “if nuclear arsenals had eliminated one’s need to ponder a possibly nonexistent future, they had also eliminated the need to encumber oneself with literature, history, art, music, all those things we lump together under the sweeping banner of culture”. All one can do in a place so devoid of the cultural languages that define and connect us is what Exley – both man and narrative persona – did so bravely: never quit, in the hope that coping can be an acquired skill.

But my affinity for and connection with Exley is best captured in another passage from Last Notes From Home. It describes my reasons for self-preoccupation; for bouts with depression and psychotherapy; for the often tireless need to write, to cry, to scream into keys, paper, and ink. And it explains why, for all the progress he made, Frederick Exley never mastered the skills of coping:

There is a hateful, baleful, alienating darkness in all good writers that can never be disguised by a Brooks Brothers suit, and whenever I see a good writer so got up, he always seems to me to exude the notion of soiled undergarments and fouled socks.

This sentence sums the difference between good writing and bad; that is, seasoned versus sophomoric, informed versus pretentious or superficial, visceral versus mechanical. The argument can surely be made that good writers hate nothing and no one quite so much as themselves, hence their relentless compulsion to write, to get themselves off their own chests. But good writers measure and test us, challenge our complacencies, and remind us that peace is the province of those without critical faculties, or those who choose not to use them.

With his own acute faculties, his vigilant distrust of even the most innocuous (or necessary) complacencies, and his ceaseless desire to write and be recognized for it, Exley never tested anyone as severely as he tested himself. He recognized in A Fan’s Notes, “Though it is indeed best to keep one’s devils within, one still has to learn to live with them”. For him, writing seemed to be a means of pulling those devils from his guts, hauling them out into the light where their hideousness might diminish, where they might be more thoroughly tested, tolerated, and perhaps transcended.

While he struggled to the end to learn to live with those devils, he seemed to hold even that learning at bay, lest lessons learned precipitate complacency. Though he longed for the world to hail him as a “good writer”, he seemed to fear even that acclaim, contemplating later in the same novel, “how fantastically inventive life was, how terrifying really in that it sometimes does give substance to our airy dreams. And really, what good are dreams if they come true?”

Finally, for all the compulsive passion in his writing, though he could no more prevent his writing than he could force it, he never admitted to its being his calling. For this, too, A Fan’s Notes has an explanation, one that kept Exley forever in the category of fan, never pushing him over the line into the dreaded realm of the participant, never causing him to commit to anything that might later prove mundane or unworthy:

If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one’s call might not come for years. If it doesn’t, he remarks it as only a reflection in the universe’s faith in one’s abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret. And if, moreover, one is unable to do the world’s work, sell its murderous missiles or cigarettes, as a poised, mute, and motionless man, one need not propagate the world’s lies.

In the light, then, of his alienating darkness – got up in my Brooks Brothers suit and wondering if it disguises my airy and unfulfilled dreams any better than it hides my soiled undergarments and fouled socks, as unwilling to propagate the world’s lies today as I was at 18 – I write these notes as a fan of Frederick Exley.

And as I reflect on his work, as I ponder the relationships between dreams and self-defeat, as I search vainly for direction signs in the frozen limbo between choices in which Exley also lived, as I wonder at my own calling, I think of him often … and watch the world alone.

Though most of the Middle East’s headlines were commandeered by our commander-in-chief in the first week of June – and most of our emotion is, or should be, invested in the fact that our tax dollars have become seed money for the government’s foray into the car business – Iraq managed to sneak up on us again; although, it seems not to have made it all the way into the news. According to this report, issued on June 3, “ … given the management weaknesses in State’s PRDC program [Provincial Reconstruction Development Committee], including a lack of an overall program manager, measures of effectiveness, and a lack of a focus on capacity building, it is unclear if the program is achieving its objectives.”

Imagine that. A bureaucratic report that takes a full 105 pages to reach the conclusion that a government program is unclear and that it lacks adequate management, measurement, and focus. It makes you long for the time in the not-too-distant future at which the government takes over health care, doesn’t it?

The entire enterprise is dismaying. The misguidance in power, purpose, and peccancy would be troubling in any case. But the report is troubling beyond the waste of money because it’s another illustration of the extent to which we’ve lost our way. And it rubs our noses in the difficulty of finding the truth of the matter – or any matter for that matter.

To be sure, there is a short list of truths: Governments waste. Power and politics corrupt. Bureaucracies fumble. War is horrible. The chaos of war creates more waste, corruption, fumbling, and horror. Beyond those truths, we’ll never get an objective view. Our President isn’t coming clean. He’s proving to be more adept at glossing over problems – obfuscating them with rhetoric or throwing money at them with his right hand while sticking his left in our pockets … again – than he is at fixing them. And we’re surely not going to get a fair shake from the mainstream media.

If we’ve done anything noble in Iraq, if we’ve achieved anything positive for any human beings, are we likely to find out about it from our local or network news? Probably not. Regardless of your stance on the war in Iraq, chances are you’ve never seen this from the actor, Gary Sinise:

The kids I saw were loving our soldiers and were so grateful to them for having liberated them from Saddam Hussein. It was a tremendous feeling to see these children hugging and kissing our soldiers, cheering them with the thumbs-up sign and in broken English saying, ‘I love you’. Good things are happening over there. On the nightly news it looks like all hell is breaking loose. But I know, from being over there, there’s another side to the story.

It should be surprising that we didn’t see that because Gary Sinise is a celebrity. Come on. He even played the sympathetic, anti-war, Vietnam-vet, double- amputee, Lieutenant Dan, in Forrest Gump, for goodness sake. And celebrities are authority figures, aren’t they? But we didn’t see it because Gary Sinise falls on the other side of the mainstream slant. We will, however, hear every lunatic rant from Rosie O’Donnell, Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Sheryl Crow, Bono, et al., because they’re … well … you know … famous.

Clarity and objectivity become increasingly difficult to achieve in a U.S. society that liberalizes itself beyond multi-ethnicity (and common causes) and adopts multi-culturalism (and individual causes of politics and entitlement). They become impossible when that national disunity is exacerbated by circumstances in which, as Ayman El-Amir wrote in Al-Ahram, “the national debate surrendered to the power of government … a messianic sense of mission [stifled] public scrutiny … [and we were] blinded to the edicts of a higher moral order by transient military might.”

That’s why – regardless of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the wars – we’re fighting in Iraq the same way we fought in Korea and Viet Nam. It’s a vicious circle: Powerful governments, seduced by military might and senses of mission precipitate wars. National disunity and political grandstanding lead to “limited engagement”. Limited engagement protracts wars. Protracted wars take more time and kill more people. More time and death breed more disunity and public outcry. The media exploit the public outcry because disunited people love to be told they have “rights”. Politicians exploit the media because disunited people who love to be told they have “rights” love to have powerful governments promise them more “rights”. Consequently, we’re rallied to arms for a little while after a few thousand of us who made the mistake of going to work one sunny Tuesday morning in September 2001 are killed. We want blood. But then we discover our “right” NOT to be protected from being killed like that again. On it goes.

And after all that, we still don’t know the truth of the matter. Or maybe it’s so simple we just hate to face it: War is an inevitable human eventuality because stupidity is an inescapable human characteristic. And so, we have waste, corruption, fumbling, horror, and very short memories.

In his book, Language as Symbolic Action, the late Kenneth Burke wrote this:

The ultimate origins of language seem as seem to me as mysterious as the origins of the universe itself. One must view it, I feel, simply as “the given.” But once an animal comes into being that does happen to have this particular aptitude, the various tribal idioms are unquestionably developed by their use as instruments in the tribe’s way of living (the practical role of symbolism in what the anthropologist, Malinowski, has called “context of situation”) … Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must also function as a deflection of reality.

So, then, what must our dear Canadian friends be thinking about this? If they know Kenneth Burke, they’re thinking we Yanks are as mysterious as the origins of language. They’re wondering at our tribal idioms and trying to imagine the way of living those idioms symbolize. They’re trying to imagine the context of a situation in which more than 3,000 of our tribesmen would be blown away in a single September act, thousands more would be killed in the resulting war, we’d round up affiliated killers and cohorts and detain them offshore, the chief of our tribe would decide to release them, and then we’d try to get another country to take them when we won’t allow them in our own. They’re trying to fathom the nature of the realities we’re reflecting, selecting, and deflecting. And they’re no doubt trying to plumb the depths of the stupidity we must attribute to their own tribe.

Is it possible that righteousness can cause blindness? Can it induce audacity, even if unwitting? The reality being deflected is clear: we’re desperately trying to deflect the fact that we’re desperately trying to fulfill a domestic political promise that can’t be fulfilled without palpable domestic risk. In the face of that self-imposed risk, as our commander-in-chief is wont to do with our earnings, we’re trying to “spread it around”. The reality being reflected is fuzzy but clear enough to be terrifying: we’re reflecting the impression that we’re arrogant enough to think others will blithely take our bitter pill – or we’re reflecting our assumption that others are so ignorant they won’t recognize the taste or discern the poison.  But what kind of reality is being selected in which we would actually ask a nation with which we share a continent to take people so potentially dangerous we won’t have them here? How dizzying are the heights of arrogance – how deep the valleys of ignorance – that we would attempt to sicken another tribe with a “cure” our own tribesmen refuse to self-administer?

Grandpa O’Brien was taken as humorous when he used to say, “Strange things are happening.” He wasn’t joking. And he didn’t know the half of it.  We don’t, either. The rest of the world is learning. Albert Einstein, who’s almost as famous as Grandpa O’Brien, said: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the former.” For the latter, there is an ample and growing body of evidence. And we certainly seem determined to validate and add to that body of evidence, just as we seem determined to symbolize our contemptible actions through our constant efforts to exploit and abuse language, at the expense of others, while ignoring its symbolic action.