Back in the day the Greeks were nothing but a bunch of nothingburgers (nothinggyros?), they lived on this crappy rocky little peninsula where they couldn't hardly grow anything and made their living principally as pirates. They had gods, like everybody else in the neighborhood, maybe a little more lively than most, getting drunk, and fornicating, and fucking with the humans from time to time on those hot summer evenings on Mount Olympus.
But there were some thinkers among them, and it occurred to them, these gods, nobody has ever seen them, and isn't it kind of complicated? Maybe there is some other reason why water falls from the sky than that Hera is weeping over that unfaithful Zeus, or whatever the explanation was. Anyway those Greeks got to thinking, taking nothing for granted, using only what they know, like Descartes a couple thousand years later, realizing he could think therefore he was.
They were great in math and logic, pretty good in philosophy, but not so hot in science. They thought that they should be able to think everything out in their heads and didn't want to get their tunics dirty kneeling on muddy riverbanks to see if frogs arose spontaneously from mud. But still pretty good thinkers, which didn't help them much when those doers, the Romans, came knocking down their door. The Romans liked gods, the more the merrier, everyone they conquered they let their gods into the pantheon. They welcomed the Christians in along with the Jews, but the Jews were stand-offish, and the Christians did not play well with the other religions, saying they were all going to hell, and they didn't stop till they took over the empire, which fell to the barbarians, but the Christians destroyed the gods of the barbarians.
Well I've gone on too far, history is like that, it's all one thing leading to another. The point I was trying to make was that believing in all those gods who nobody has ever seen is like believing in Them, who Beagles cannot name any individuals, nor does he know what their aims are, nor how powerful they are because sometimes they lose, or maybe they just want you to think they lose. and the main thing they do is start wars that they want to lose for some reason. Remember the wolf chasing the rabbit, and usually the rabbit outruns the wolf because the wolf is running for dinner but the rabbit is running for his life? How about Vietnam was for most Americans some speculative little game halfway across the world, while for the Vietnamese it was their lives and the land they lived on? Isn't that simpler and easier to understand why we lost, than that some shadowy Them who nobody has ever seen doing things nobody knows why? Isn't it easier to believe that the air can only hold so much water and releases it in little drops every now and then than to think Hera is crying when hell, Zeus does this shit all the time, and it's not like Hera never drives her little red chariot to the cheating side of town? Occam's Razor.
This Trump/athlete thing is some crazy thing. I remember how when I first heard about it, the first taking of the knee it was in reaction to police shootings of black kids. Well I thought, how does that knee dipping do anything to solve the problem? But then some hotheads on the right got all upset because they interpreted it as dissing the armed services. It's just a knee. Maybe the guy is doing it to protest Zeus's fooling around on Hera. Anyway most football fans just want to see their team win the game, if their quarterback is a commie or an asshole they don't care they just want him to lead their team to victory, so this whole taking the knee thing was a little sideshow that nobody paid any attention to. And then Trump, ostensibly stumping for his candidate in the Alabama primary, takes up, God knows why (No He doesn't, nobody does), this little Sunday sideshow, and yesterday my talking heads where all chattering about it, and then the talk shows were over and the pregames were beginning and they were all talking about the same damn thing.
Crazy man crazy. Maybe more on this tomorrow.
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