The Cubs survived to play one more game so my singular mass hysteria will continue for another night. It will be tougher because last night I knew only despair, and tonight I will have that pesky worm of hope slithering through my innards. But these games are slow, the pitchers take their good old sweet time between pitches and that prompts the batsman to step out of the batting box and make sure his batting gloves are properly aligned for the hundredth time, and towards the end there are pitching changes every other batter and conferences on the mound, and time just drags.
Which gave me an opportunity to peruse the oligarchy article. I don't know, I wasn't that impressed, doesn't everybody already know all this? One sentence in particular struck me and I had a hard time continuing after that. The challenge in seeing how oligarchy works, Winters says, is that we don’t normally think about the realms of politics and economics as fused together. I mean isn't that like the first rule of oligarchy? Don't rich and powerful go together like bread and butter? Who wouldn't use their power to get rich? What rich guy doesn't buy power?
I guess maybe the guy was thinking more of a closed system of oligarchy, which maybe we had in olden times and maybe even today in like those 'Stans south of Russia where no outsiders are allowed into the inner circle, but mostly anymore we have the warring oligarchs with some falling from their perch and others rising to take the perch away. And isn't this just another of those things, like the poor, that we will always have among us? If we knock them down, won't they just reform? Though I guess knocking them down gives the guys who knocked them down a chance to be the new oligarchs. Meet the new boss. Wasn't there a song about that?
I don't like those yes or no questions. They appear to give a decisive answer, black or white, but of course the world is grey and not always amenable to yes or no. If you ask the guy if he was at such and such a hotel at 6PM on October 17, 2014, that can be answered yes or no, but if you ask him if he hates his wife, that is more complicated. And another thing I hate is I don't answer hypotheticals, usually said a tone like, the guy is too pure to do that. Bullshit. We speak in hypothericals all the time. That response should not be allowed. How about the response, "If I were to produce a hammer and aim it at your knuckles, then would you be more inclined to speak in hypotheticals?" This would be a good place of a yes or no response.
Heard a lot of that from Jeff Sessions yesterday, what a dottering old fool, worse, a cagey dottering old fool, worse a dottering old fool who thinks he is cagey, but is just in a high place of power and can't be touched. Legally I think he was required to answer those questions about his conversations with Trump, but he just didn't, and there is nothing anybody can do about it because only the republicans can do anything about it and they are protecting their own, even if there own is a snake who would just as soon bite them as their enemy.
Yar, as soon as I heard Beagles speak of Plato's homosexuality, my fingers were itching to type out my disagreement. I guess you could call him bisexual but it was more complicated than that. They fucked boys, and were fucked when they were boys, but then they married women and fucked them too of course and had children, but they didn't think much of women as worthy companions, and were inclined to fall in love with each other, though not to fuck each other, maybe they fucked boys together. And the thing is, that's what everybody did.
But I don't know about Plato being a big suck. Certainly his hero Socrates was a radical.
I was going to expand on the following but the morning grows late. Whether those football players take the knee or not, it will not effect racial inequality or increase or decrease respect for, or the condition of the troops. Whether or not the prez calls a gold star mother her son will remain dead. But the dismay of fans tuning into the game on Sunday and seeing the players take the knee, seems a small thing in the face of a gold star mother waiting for a phone call that never comes.
No comments:
Post a Comment