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.