When the human waste of politics gets to piling up so deep you want to run screaming into the night, a good remedy is to fall back to the powerful historical minds and immerse yourself in some great writing. I ran into this dilemma last Sunday, after a morning of reading The New York Times about the continuing blackmail antics of Rep. John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell and their merry band of Teabag Republican cutthroats.
As backdrop to the Boehner/McConnell farce, there were stories in The Times of floods, a religious bombing in Pakistan, persistent corruption in the Shiite-ruled government of US occupied Iraq, and lunatic Islamists in Afghanistan wanting to stone to death a teenage couple out of Romeo and Juliet whose romance crossed ethnic lines and offended arranged marriage customs. Finally, maybe the most sobering story of all [1], an equally lunatic Hasidic Jew from New York had connived with well-connected, post-9/11 security operatives to disseminate draft legislation for state and local governments across the United States to outlaw anything smacking of Islamic Shariah Law; this man's legislation is apparently taking root in many localities and will no doubt sweep away a host of civil liberties in its flood waters, as it exacerbates a growing state of religious war in America.
The only bright spot in the Sunday Times [2] was the story from Turkey about how a moderate Muslim government [3] has effectively, slowly castrated an entrenched and corrupt military institution. Now there's a positive story to keep an eye on. Turkey seems to be on a course of becoming a model for what a moderate Muslim government looks like. Egyptians are, no doubt, taking notes.
The military-civilian relationship in the United States is going the other way and is more like Guatemala or Egypt; like them, we're a nation with a fig leaf of civilian democratic elections. In the US, the incredible military monster is sacrosanct -- a huge sacred cow munching away contentedly on tax resources and driving the debt ever higher and higher as politicians of both parties cravenly kowtow and throw money at it, all the time decrying the debt. President Barack Obama has shown himself to be a number one shining example of this cravenness, a man who has become quite comfortable solidifying his power by resorting to international homicide with flying robots and special operations assassin teams. Meanwhile, he and his VP Joe Biden have pretty much given away the economic store to a rapacious right wing.
[[NIET]
]All the above left me in state of the darkest gloom. With all this demoralization splashing around in my mind, I set off on some mundane Sunday missions. First, I stopped off at Target to pick up a sewing kit to repair a belt loop on a pair of jeans. As I walked into the giant box store mobbed with shoppers, I was suddenly plagued with a mysterious, shooting pain in my groin that came and went and made my walking at times quite painful and slow. At 64, this is par for the course, but I dreaded the thought of a doctor's visit and whatever that might lead to, since all these expenses would fall under the $5,000 deductible in the policy I pay unbelievable gobs of money for to some criminal syndicate. I sometimes almost hope to get hit by the proverbial bus so I might actually get a real health benefit from all the money I hose out to this extortion racket. But, then, I'm sure if I were hit by a bus I'd be made aware of some loophole. Then, like Joseph K at the end of The Trial, maybe they'd just take me out and shoot me.
Next, it was on to the grocery store to pick up some supplies to sustain life. I planned to buy a nice piece of fish and a nice bottle of wine to share with my wife that evening. On the way to the grocery store, since it was such a blazing hot day, I decide to step into Starbucks for an iced coffee.
In my back pocket I had stuck a copy of On Truth and Untruth, a little book of newly translated essays by Friedrich Nietzsche [4]. Sipping my tasty coffee, I chose an 1871 essay called "On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense," a beautiful piece of writing done when the German philosopher was 29-years-old. The essay is said by some to be "a keystone in his thought." Nietzsche was noted for a life-long focus on "primordial creativity, joy in existence and ultimate truth." As Nietzsche's works often do, the essay starts out in the realm of parable:
"In some remote corner of the sprawling universe, twinkling among the countless solar systems, there was a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant, most mendacious minute in "world history,' but it was only a minute. After nature caught its breath a little, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die."
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