Thursday, September 1, 2016

Minor Meanderings



It has been my misfortune to be born this time around into a country obsessively focused on the future and driven by its passion for unrelenting progress toward that future. I say misfortune because, given my nature, I seem so often consigned to the unhappy role of curmudgeon, of wet blanket. There is no help for it. Swept along with all the rest toward that inescapable future, I cannot shake the equally inescapable certainty that no matter the velocity of our progress the past is nonetheless close behind. And gaining. Rapidly.

While it may be true that capitalism is the preferred economic system of democracy, it is less certain that democracy is the preferred political system of capitalism.

Persistent observation of the ways in which money moves within our political system makes reasonable the conclusion that we have permitted our politicians to transform their profession from a vocation to a business, its aim less service than self-aggrandizement.  Is it any great wonder then that a businessman should at some point be proposed as its chief executive?

Home ownership is actually the more benign form of house arrest.

Absent the certainty of revelation, I am confined by the cogito and can know no more than the anecdote of my own existence.

“Ever love’s militant, I spring awake each morning to the sound of reverie: This is the day the Lord has made.”  ~ Alexander Burnbridge.

It is possible to think of some of our leaders as belonging to a subset of the religious, unofficial clerics disdainful of mendicancy and therefore self-ordained into an order of friars mendacious.

The lexicographer’s cautionary: any word ending in “ist” or “ism” is best considered as suspect of being antithetical to actual thought.

It is a grave error --- and a common American one --- to consider wealth as ipso facto evidence of virtue.

Robocalls: as with the fellow who invented hard plastic blister packaging, the fellow who first conceived of using the telephone call as an advertising medium deserves a very special place in hell, perhaps even the right hand chair to Lucifer himself.

It is the function of conscience to perfect the imagination. It is the function of the imagination to structure the creation of the material world. The perfection of conscience is therefore the prime duty of thought.