Of Big Fish...and Taking the Bait

Posted by Cardozo

Fiction served as my childhood drug of choice. Because I didn’t know what to do with my frustrations and desires, I inhaled books one after the next. The books contained vicarious adventures, a commanding narrative voice, and an internal order that I could rely on.

Sometime in high school I began to put my books away, gleefully realizing that my life could have adventure, order and a strong narrative voice, if I became the author of my own destiny and if I dared to confront, rather than run from, life’s shades of grey.

Thanks to you, Bush, I’m in need of escape again. Escape from a world of American unilateralism and preventive war; a world in which outcomes are pounded into submission and the enemy is always wrong; a world I feel powerless to change. True, this world over which you preside is as simple as black and white…but what have you done with all the grey, Bush? I miss the grey, which exists, and has for a long time, only in fictional worlds.

Have you read Moby Dick? (I admit I am only reading it now for the first time). The whaleman, Ishmael, finds himself forced to share a bed with Queequeg, an ominous looking, cannibalistic island native who he nevertheless befriends and for whom he develops profound respect. In Melville’s world, what we do not understand is subject for fierce curiosity, not for knee-jerk condemnation and “preventive” slaughter. What kind of world could Melville portray if Ishmael had decided simply to kill Queequeg for being a cannibal? In fact, Melville did not need to portray that world because it already existed. When he lifted his pen to stare out of his window in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the America he saw was in the process of ritually slaughtering its Native American population. Just like in our time, Bush, our leaders lacked the imagination to see beyond culture to our common humanity, and to our common flaws.

That color-blind worldview leads us continually down the path of violence, with no exit strategy. Once you’ve proclaimed an evil, Bush, you cannot “alter your strategy” until that evil is fully extinguished.

So, because you cannot see the shades of grey that color our world, it is past time for you to step down. We are in need of a new President: someone capable of seeing beyond good and evil and who knows (from personal experience) the pain of having his humanity overlooked. So much the better if he be a shade of grey himself – perhaps not quite black and not quite white (as is true, when you think about it, of all of us.)

I can only hold out hope that this man will invent a new kind of politics that presumes and teases out the goodness in humanity, and therefore that does not rely on annihilation as a first response. I can only hope that he is that man, and that he takes the bait that a world starving for real leadership is holding out to him.

Until then, Bush, let’s both of us get lost in a few great books.

and... Vanity of Vanities
Posted by PeterAtLarge

I woke up this morning with Ecclesiastes on my mind: Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. All is vanity. Amazing words. An amazing text. I hear it in my father's voice, resounding from the lectern... I'm not sure why it should have come to mind, but it seems curiously in tune with Cardozo's thoughts, above.

My own thoughts, in addition to the preacher's: Strong words from the lips of a weak man inevitably ring hollow. Threats from the mouth of one who is demonstrably unable to back them up with deeds are empty of meaning. Promises from one who has repeatedly broken those he has given in the past are not to be trusted. Assertions from one who has repeatedly deceived are not to be taken as the truth. As the preacher said: That which is crooked cannot be made straight.