Saturday, May 15, 2010

Imprimis

Another blog? Well may you ask, dear reader: why another amidst hundreds of thousands, if not millions? The answer, though not easy to find, still less perhaps to admit. One answer, though, given 400 years ago by old Robert Burton himself, in that gigantic book that would surely have been a blog if blogs then were: I write of melancholy, said he, to avoid melancholy. That is as much as to say, as they often say about the mountain, because it is there. Or, to be philosophical, since man is the rational animal and his reason is most perfectly expressed in speech, in writing, to speak, to write, to put into words our ideas is to be most rational, most human. And so whether some readers or none or few do hang upon this blog that shakes against the folly of this world, I am happy to think or try to think and then to try to put such thought into words.

And speaking of the folly of this world, our Supreme Executive in Chief, the esteemed President of the United States, said yesterday that he finds unacceptable the finger pointing among those other executives, the ones responsible in whole or in part for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It boggles the mind that the President who at least in speech has done little more for the first year and a half of his administration than point the finger at George W. Bush should be upset at those who blame others for the circumstances they are in. Indeed, in pointing the finger at these executives, the President (who blames President Bush for not being immediately on the scene just after Katrina swept the Gulf Coast) is himself blaming them for the current disaster, for which, if we press his logic in regard to President Bush, he bears some of the blame. This is postmodernism at what would be its most entertaining if there were not so much at stake, both in the livelihoods of many on the Gulf Coast and in the political discourse of our nation.

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