I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.
-Pietro Aretino, satirist and dramatist (1492-1556)


That one never has worked for me. It’s the kind of reverse psychology thing that backfires every time. Speaking of which, whatever you do don’t leave a comment on this post, so that some human dialog might take place. I would rather have you keep silent than tell me the truth, and thereby burst the insegrievious soapbubble of my solitude.

Heh heh heh, that’ll get ’em.

Yeah, bwahaha-shnerk. Oh man, soapbubbles up my nose.

Let me tell you a secret, folks.  The Amish are interesting people, and one can be tempted to admire their Spartan lifestyle, pacifistic demeanor and close-knit sense of community.  But when it comes to caring for their animals, these people are assholes.  You read it here first.  Lancaster County PA may be picturesque, but you don’t want to see the killing fields behind their barns.  Perhaps second only to Missouri for puppy mills.

Is it so much to ask, in the name of the God who is so gentle with us, that we be kind and gentle to those most vulnerable?  Can’t we be compassionate with animals, children, and the old and sick?  Does everybody who thinks God is on his side, and he’s living a righteous life, have to be such a stick up the ass, arrogant prick?

So here’s a little justice , for the voiceless little ones.  An Amish man off to jail for a month, on charges including animal cruelty.  It’s a start.  And ooh look – the judge was a woman.  Bet that got his goat.  Don’t drop the soap, Jebediah.  

“It’s pretty clear what you’re operating is a factory – for dogs,” [Judge] Butts told Lapp as she pronounced sentence. “If you need to grow something to sell it, don’t grow animals, grow vegetables.
“If this is the way life is over the mountain, it’s going to stop,” the judge added. “There’s a way you treat animals and this isn’t it.”

[Please excuse my harsh language, folks.  It’s out of character for this blog, but this sort of thing just gripes my cookies.]

Do you feel like a little music and a nice slide show?  

This is very cool.

a few disjointed thoughts on thought…

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

-Gore Vidal, writer

Do actions still speak louder than words? Or have we become a culture of rhetoric, of double speak and crimethought? I think we have changed, because clearly we have voted, repeatedly, against our own social, economic, and moral interests.

Carl Sandburg said, “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” What would that take? What would it take, generally, for us all to stop listening to the lies and the lying liars who tell them? Can you think of any prominent public figure who doesn’t automatically get attention?

I know I’m rambling here a little, but it’s late. Let me try again.

We are deeply in love with our sources and means of distraction: Internet, TV, wireless, radio, etc. We can’t get enough. We’ve become passive receptors of every signal and feed, incapable of discernment or critical judgment. We simply absorb at an overwhelming and ever-increasing rate and volume. It’s in the paper, it must be important, it must apply to me. The President said it, that settles it. It never occurs to the average consumer of information to simply say Wait, hold on, let’s stop and think about this a minute. The government has obliterated privacy and now controls much of the media of communication. Something’s wrong.

Oh, it’s a matter of perspective. I says what’s coming through this screen at you right now, and what’s pounded out at you from the Ministry of Truth is not reality. No. Reality is that heat behind your eyes, that feeling in your chest when I say Grandmother.

The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages. – Richard Bach

So if the world is not reality, and everyone is free to lie – truth being relative and matter made of nothing – then what does it matter if we listen to people like Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld? Because we are creatures of mind; our thoughts and our free will are all we really have. And love. We can’t allow anyone to control our thoughts, or hijack our free will, any more than we would thoughtlessly allow somehow to beat our physical body with a baseball bat. It’s not that they’re lying that’s the problem. It’s that we’re conditioned to believe. So either we mute the bastards, or we don’t show up with they give the war.

I saw this guy on TV tonight — CNN I think.  He’s been compiling a list of cheats to get around automated phone systems, and get a human on the line, at many major companies.  Check it out. And here’s his blog.

“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.