“It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.”

–Gertrude Stein

I would like to note the announcement of the cancellation of The West Wing, my all time favorite TV show.  Well, to be candid, it’s one of my top three favorites, along with M*A*S*H* and Northern Exposure.  

We’ve known it was coming; in fact, I’ve called for it on this blog.  No one wants to see something they care about go on too long, on life support.  Still … for now, I’ll reserve further comment.  Let’s see, first, how it ends.  

"Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day."

— Emil Cioran

Reading some poetry tonight, I came across the name Emil Cioran, with whom I wasn’t familiar. Apparently, the Philosophy Department of my university didn’t think his work noteworthy, and others have a different opinion. What struck me in reading about him wasn’t so much himself but this quote:

William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as a agony, reason as disease.”

Gass did come up at the good ol’ alma mater, and I still keep Omensetter’s Luck handy for inspiration. And “awareness as a agony” – the torture of consciousness – is a more recent theme in my own, as yet unpublished, work. Small world, y’all, in which Gass’ 1954 dissertation at Cornell was entitled “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor.”

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought

a poem, which I recommend, ostensibly about a pig, and which begins:

Please help me get this pig, dear Lord, into my truck.

But I think we can say it might be a metaphor.

Ah, I did it again, didn’t I?  I said I wasn’t going to blog about the war anymore, that I was going to stick to the stuff I know a little about.  But I got sucked back into the surreal vortex of absurdity.  Sorry about that, you guys.  I’m trying.

The ‘War on Terror’ is like a war on dandruff. It’s a metaphor, it’s nothing. The Civil War was real.

— Gore Vidal, in the currently-running History Channel documentary, “Lincoln.”

This statement is getting lots of space on the blogs tonight, and it made me do a double-take at the old TV.

Of course, one wouldn’t dare say such a thing in the face of one of men and women who’ve been injured in this misbegotten atrocity, or in the face of one of their mothers, fathers, children, spouses …. They know damn well that death and suffering are not nothing; dandruff doesn’t claim lives and limbs. But it is the kind of head-shaker that gets one’s attention, and the kind of thing one would expect from an iconoclast like Vidal. Nontheless, it begs the kind of questions I’ve been asking here for three years.

How do you kill a tactic? How do you know when you’ve won? How does it know when it has lost? (Must we kill every person who harbors such a willingness in his heart?) And how does this tactic surrender to US, and how, and when, and where?

Finally, how who we kill a tactic that lives in lesser proportion in the impurity of our own deeds. For no man lives and does not sin, but all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God.

I’m going to step up and join my voice to those “privacy experts” who are speaking out against yet still again another affront to civil rights and liberties on the part of the BushCheney juggernaut. Not only do I not think the government has a right to demand anybody’s records of anything without a warrant, and really resent those companies who kowtowed and turned them over without a fight, I don’t believe for one minute their search has anything to do with protecting children. That’s just a soft song to keep the herd passive. Information is power and these guys in Washington are totally drunk on power. They won’t stop with spying on just a few of us, for a good reason; like an alcoholic, one is too many and a thousand is never enough.

I realize they claim this was general data only, and no personal information was included, so it’s not technically a violation of privacy. But it is, you bet your bippy. Check out what Blue Collar Politics blog has to say:

If the fact that, somewhere in our nation, a child molester might use Google to look for a pervert friendly website, and we allow our government to flaunt our right to privacy by getting info from an Internet service we use, then why can’t the government enter 1,000,000 homes, without individual warrants, to search for a child who might be in danger of being molested. Or, why not allow the police to randomly enter homes in the hope that they might catch a child abuser, serial killer or someone smoking a joint?

It’s a random search. For incriminating evidence. Without a warrant. Would it be admissible? No! But it doesn’t matter, because Bush believes with all his Big as Texas heart that he has the authority to throw your cute keester in prison without charges, without a lawyer or a trial, for the rest of your natural life. It doesn’t matter because They have just gone wandering off to the autocratic zoo. It gives me the creeps, no kidding.

Of course we need to protect children from harm, of all kinds. That’s why we have police, who can get warrants from judges. And as much as we need to protect children from abuse, we need to protect them from the wholesale degradation of the American system of justice and liberty. This is not about porn, people. It’s about due process and the checks and balances of power.

Have you not met the renowned author of kids books — such as Holes — Louis Sachar? Well don’t say I never hooked you up, ’cause here’s your chance.

PC World magazine published it’s list of the 100 best products of 2005 in July. I missed it, because I let my subscription lapse. Busy, busy, busy. But I’m intrigued that I’m using the top 2 to write this post to you. #1 is the Mozilla Firefox web browser, in which I’m composing an e-mail to my blog with Google’s gmail .

Ain’t modern life cool? We’re having so much more fun than our ancestors.

Of course, there are drawbacks. For example, see that epigraph at the top, “It is what has not happened …”? It’s supposed to be two lines, broken in the middle, justified right. If you see it that way, you’re using Internet Explorer. If you see one long line, Mozilla. If you’re seeing something else, I can’t help your ass. 🙂
I can’t get it to work right in Mozilla. Suggestions?

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

-William Butler Yeats, writer, Nobel laureate (1865-1939)

Excerpts from the speech made by former Vice President Gore on constitutional issues, January 16, 2006. [Washington Post]

For example, as you know, the president has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that notwithstanding his American citizenship that person in prison has no right to talk with a lawyer, even if he wants to argue that the president or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

The president claims that he can imprison that American citizen — any American citizen he chooses — indefinitely, for the rest of his life, without even an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

No such right exists in the America that you and I know and love. It is foreign to our Constitution.

…

“The executive branch has also claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture and have plainly constituted torture — in a widespread pattern that has been extensively documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by executive branch interrogators. Many more have been broken and humiliated. And, in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were completely innocent of any criminal charges whatsoever.

This is a shameful exercise of power that overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General George Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War. They have been observed by every president since then until now.

They violate the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture and our own laws against torture.”