Getting Started

I am just getting started now, having been on vacation, as it were, shovelling snow and dealing with being unemployed and arguing with fellow board members of the homeowners association of a semi-failed housing community. Sometimes we feel as if we are all poster kids for Disaster America, but it passes. I shall be getting to my comments. In my absence, 3 comments have accumulated, which number is a bloody tsunami for me. Most of my old school chums that read the blog apparently have taken vows of silence, only giving voice to a few syllables when they stumbled into choir of an early morning in Xmastide, and sing "Ierusalem Gaude!" My first order of business is to set the tone. Notice I have removed the picture of the ancien regime rejoicing in the removal of habeas corpus that used to grace the right sidebar, along with a quote from Cromwell. No more about that bunch. After all, the torture was for our well being and welfare. And I say, if a little torture may make the US of A a safer place, we are certainly worth it. I was reading the NY Times Book Review from last week about the number of slaughters of the innocents committed in Vietnam; many, many, many, not just a few "bad cookies" or "rotten apples" having a My Lai bash, but an absolute flood of abuse. Oh, well. It is not for us to judge, nor condemn, for we have no conception of Right and Wrong. I mean, if present day American society had the merest glimmer of the meaning of Right and Wrong, would we be where we are today? Economically? Spiritually? Department of Defensively? There will probably be no official inquiries of a serious nature into war crimes under the new administration, and this is probably due to an effort to soothe the political emotions of the nation. That's fine. However, there will never be accountability for anything anymore, because the USA does not have the stomach for facing its moral corruption: it does not know Right from Wrong, Good from Evil. The only evil that exists today is some focus of obsession; for the right wing, it appears to be abortion; for the left wing, it used to be Bush. How convenient to wrap up evil into such a small package - a mere bagatelle! - and be done with it. In Bloomberg today, we read: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aDjmuEpDoctc&refer=us Saving Capitalism No Sure Thing as Statism Undermines Economy By Simon Kennedy, Matthew Benjamin and Rich Miller "... Even Bush, who ran for the U.S. presidency espousing smaller government, agrees. He told a CNN interviewer last week he has “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” The contradiction of abandoning free market principles to save the free market is grotesque. Yet, it will not dawn on the political and opinion leaders that this is not some bizarre exception that is the proof of the rule of free markets...it is something far different. We cannot see even that which is in front of our faces, for we are so enslaved to the idols of the past that we cannot be free. We live a sham life by following rules we never question and filling roles that were written for other people of other times. Each person must find God. Each person must create their own philosophy. Each person must go on their own quest for a vision, and when they have achieved that vision, they must not abdicate their responsibility to interpret it and speak of it to the hands of some authority figure who has written a best-selling book about it. It's like me and music; I must create the mix of music that penetrates my being. I use a lot of scraps and rags from music types, because I am musically illiterate. But my music, no matter how poor and tattered, is mine. Within the past 6 years I suddenly developed a love for Opera. In the season of 2006-2007 I saw The Barber of Seville live from the Met and cried at the end of Act I. I have not been enslaved to one type of music, nor to someone else's dictates about what I should like. So also do not let people say that you do not have the theology, or the philosophy, or the logic, or the writing skills to create and delineate and define your worldview. They are lying when they tell you that. They wish to keep you enslaved and dependent on them. If you see God, there is no bloody rule that says you have to talk about it at all, much less talk about it in a way that I or someone else approves. It's like me and music; I don't quite keep silent, but I hum the most awful doggerel and sing disjointed snips of hymns in a hideously cracked voice, yet it is all good. This is what I shall write about.