White Light Black Light

By Gary Corseri

9/5/07

“Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other.”

–Henry David Thoreau

“It is better to be almost right than precisely wrong.”

–Warren Buffet

“Can we all just get along?”

–Rodney King

How well Thoreau, our best philosopher and political thinker, would have “gotten along” with Buffet, our Empire’s investor-sans pareil, is a matter for speculative fiction, but I suspect the open-minded Naturalist would have endorsed the financier’s caveat against overweening pride in one’s own judgment. Not only must we look before we leap, but, once sure-footed on the other side, we must also look behind to inspect the ground we’ve covered, and to assure ourselves we’re not about to topple backwards.

We are fast approaching one of those “benchmark” moments of back-looking which are becoming noisome, ritualistic affairs of hearty self-congratulation, vacuous critiques, and paralytic inaction. The Empire has lost its rudder in the quicksand of Iraq, and neither General Petraeus’s upcoming, indubitably rosy, assessments nor the General Accounting Office’s countervailing grade of “F” will extricate that rudder any time soon. Congress will balk, Cheney will snarl, and the “dogs of war” we unleashed nearly five years ago will continue to ravage that once-prosperous land that had the misfortune to fall for a dictator we supported.

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// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 06, 2007