fissure fracture tensile tendril chasm

Since I started this blog, several years ago, with an inaugural column about excess and consumption, haven't we as a society become ever more fractured and fissured, with the tensile tendrils of chaos causing more chasms?

Icelandic dreams

Iceland. The thought during a balmy winter beckons me. Go north, and then north of there. Go to the planet's true north, its northernmost capital. While others go to the Cayman Islands (as I once did) or Belize or Puerto Rico or Mexico, you name it, to a warmer clime, I am fantasizing doing deeper, going into the cold, mine and Nature's. solo. And why not. Just the name of the country invites stoic challenge, though geothermal springs dispel those notions, as do stories of all-night revellers and Nordic, guilt-free abandon. Why not. Having flown to Ireland and Germany and seen the in-flight map of Transatlantic flight progress displayed on the screen on the back of the seat in front of me, and in those instances flying over Iceland, and thinking, wow, we are almost there, in Europe (though not quite; is Iceland in Europe?), I am thinking, Let's skip the continental Europe part and see what Iceland offers, even if no ice is there, literally or metaphorically.

commonweal

Commonweal. No, not commonwealth. Forget the wealth part of it. Remember the common element. Have we lost a sense of commonweal? The common well-being, the body politic. A shared welfare (another word whose shades of meaning are often shrouded).

Commonweal.

A Secular Prayer

Would that we could summon, or have someone, or something, summon unto us, for our own behalf, the solidarity of community, not riven by solipsism or divided by dissonance. Would that we could respect and honor our very own commonweal, even if by not trashing the land we traverse, or by unlittering the litter strewn before our averted or blinded eyes. Amen.

albatross of euphemism

Here's a good clue as to where something fits in the moral labyrinth (or firmament): is it called by what it is? or do its users use a euphemism?

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" is torture. We can debate whether torture is moral or permissible or odiously necessary or an evil choice among other evils in wartime (or peacetime), blah blah, and so forth, but it is still torture.

If you have to resort to a euphemism, what is that telling us?


I salute commentary at the blog Orange Crate Art in this regard.

Of course, the military has a long history of employing euphemisms, as do governments.

worth asking

Last night, having viewed the movie "The Railway Man" I encountered a "fearful symmetry" a day or so after the Senate released a report five years in the making (which I have not read) on "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e., torture.

Don't people (a nation, a community) (don't I, don't you) have both a right and an obligation to ask:

What are we? What do we espouse? What do we stand for? What defines us?

I do not pretend these are simple questions evoking simple answers. Nor do I pretend to speak with authority, as I type this in a comfortable chair in a public cafe in a free society. (Allow a digression: are you "free" if you are cajoled, motivated, nudged, coerced every day by forces you do not recognize or acknowledge? I'm not talking conspiracy or paranoiac whisperings. I am referring to the relentless onslaught of consumerist stimulation that tickles our fancies and enslaves our wallets.)

I propose the asking (and potentially answering) of these and like-minded difficult but profound questions as part of our civic discourse  -- beyond pieties, cliches, jingoism, chauvinism, and bromides.

As G.K. Chesteron said, " 'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' "

freedom democracy and all that

We hear our politicians and pundits toss around words like "freedom," "democracy," and similar charged diction.

Really?

In the United States, "land of the free," more than 70 million people who are eligible to vote do not vote.

That amount comprises how many countries?

Of the number who register to vote (a group that is smaller than the universe of potential voters in America), a small percentage actually votes. This year, 2014, it was about 36% of eligible voters who voted. Remember, that 70 million is missing in action.

So we have a minuscule number of people voting compared to the number who could be voting.

I rarely miss a chance to vote, even in primaries.

Freedom.

Democracy.

Do the math.

garbage

Is it just the word? Garbage. Who likes that? As for junk or refuse (an intriguing word in its own right) or waste or disposed-of goods or detritus or trash or debris or rubbish or crud or crap or effluvium, take your pick of the litter. It's all there for the taking. And this is the season for these trash pickups, these communal spring cleanings, the feel-good pick-me-ups loosely or closely connected to Earth Day. Nothing wrong with these bursts of civic pride. Nothing amiss with these well intentioned forays into beautification (or tidiness, at the least). But lately I've come to a reluctant if tentative conclusion: the people who litter -- those who are filled with careless disregard or self-loathing or appalling civic indifference --  are not the folks who are manning the cleanups. I can't prove this. I have no evidence, not exactly. Yet, to my meager mind it stands to reason: no one who picks this crap up wants to add to it again, flippantly, the next day or the next week. Wouldn't you think: why litter in the first place? Sadly, I suspect such thoughts do not invade the brain pan of the litter-perpetrators, the litter-perps, the LPs.

Another thought: those who brandish patriotism or jingoism or American exceptionalism like a bald eagle's talons are loath to admit this: we Americans are a pretty sloppy lot, often filthy, frequently just-plain dirty. Look around. No, I don't mean some scenic Grand Canyon vista. Look down at your feet. (It's regional, you say? Naw. I've seen how ubiquitous litter is in many locales, in many regions.) Oh. You say, it was not I who littered? That might be true. But if you were the one who walked by the pack of Newports or the McDonald's wrapper or plastic bag and just "let it be," what's the difference?

Garbage, by any other name.