The lunatics, as they say, have taken over the asylum for the last eight years. Let's hope the new crew has more common sense, if nothing else.
H.L. Mencken, an acidic but often funny guy, claimed There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public. But there's no underestimating the stupidity of the greedsters running the show, either. (Another Mencken quip: A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.)
Are we merely the sport of the Gods from top to bottom? Is this Purgatory, a crazy penal colony called Earth?
Who would believe that Bernard Madoff was anything but a shyster (or scheister, as some prefer, or even better, a barmy piece of shite)? Who would believe George Bush was anything but an idiot? Apparently plenty on both counts. Boo hoo for the rest of us.
Henry Ford claimed History is more or less bunk. Try that line in Detroit these days, see how it goes.
About the time of the Russo-Japanese War, George Santayana noted "when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
History repeats, but with a few nasty new tricks. Keeps the old timers on their toes, I guess. As for the young in America, they know nothing anyway, but you have to start somewhere. A field trip to Gaza or Haiti might be enlightening.
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
6 comments:
I have always tried to learn from my mistakes in order to "grow". G.S says it much better, though.
P.S. Are those mermaids?
I keep thinking, of late, about The Wicker Man, the original with Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. The people on the isolated island have tried and failed to sustain tropical crops in a northern Atlantic environment. When the crop strains fail, they don't learn from the mistake, they decide it's time to sacrifice a virgin. I guess the moral of that story is some people never learn. Hopefully that's not true of this nation as a whole.
Mayhaps we'd be better off if history and the recording of it was restricted to oral histories passed down from generation to generation until tradition arises from where no one remembers the who, what, why...and spin.
I do have to admit, learning from my own history has not always been easy.
Thanks all, for the coments! Jodi, those are indeed mermaids ;-> I've had that book since I was fourteen. Hard to resist a mermaid sometimes, or the sirens or the Lorelei . . .
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