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I’n in bed with my first wife. It’s not very exciting, which is why she has a number.
We are reading. See, I have little formal education, so I try and keep up with Esquire (it’s the sixties) and a dictionary. Out of this practice my vocabulary, such as it is, evolves.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
My beta is reading a mystery. She asks out of nowhere: "What’s `invidious’ mean?"
And I very cavalierly reply, "Likely to cause resentment, due most often to false comparison."
She says nothing. Were she impressed, we were alrady to the stage where she wouldn’t show it.
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
- Wittgenstein
It is the most remarkable coincidence of my life. See, I had myself not moments before come across that very term, and had looked it up. Had she asked in a week, I maybe would have fumbled the test.
Comparisons are odious.
- Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–1476)
And then, like static cling, incidents adhere. Here we are years down the road, and here is an office coworker, Cheryl, hired by a simpleton boss, and she presents very obvious mental instability. Conflicts quite naturally arise, to which the boss feels unequal. He hired her, and is defensive about his choice. He tries the soverign recourse of those without many; equivalency. He suggests a tool offerred by the personnel department to volley the problem away from his desk: Conflict Resoution.
Nope, we say. The only conflict is between the ears of Miss Cheryl.
Move along. Nothing else to see here.
Here is a stodgy politician, stained forever green. He sniffs at the national offering of the two parties that year, and sneers, there’s no difference between ‘em. He is talking about one who negotiated for our team for the Kyoto Treaty and has written books on the topic, and a sock puppet for the oil industry who cannot even read them.
It represents only another Nader of equivalency, and 95,000 lambent lemmings vote for the megalomaniac in Florida, which brings the choice fruit low enough for the Repugnants to steal, ably abetted by the five fixers on the formerly high court. We became a banana republic which must import bananas (a description by a Russian oligarch on his own country) in 2000, and it’s would simply not have been possible without false equivalency.
And so now we have a faux-contest between Pox Noise, a Repugnant propaganda platform, and MSNBC, plus the White House. Campbell Brown, she of No Bias, No Bull, presents a segment on this scale of news sources. One mushes the mob of morons with lies and slander, and the other points out the facts in defense of the rest of us. This model of equivalency, and Ms Brown’s base, CNN, can be rebutted with two words: Lou Dobbs.
And in a newsweekly we have a contrast between a screaching meme who shrieks birther death panel census conspiracy gibberish and an outspoken and courageous Congressman from Florida. The sad fact for Repugnants and those who carry water for them (remember all corporate entites are aware the bilge barnacles might earn lower incomes but it’s so easy to take it from them) is that there is no equivalent for Limbo or Pox Noise nor Bachman’s overdrive nor Crybaby Glenn on our side of the equation.
Invidious, I calls it.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
- Sonnet 130
[reposted from Yucca Flats]
6 Comments
“It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)“
Well it certainly takes some brass ones to still pretend there’s a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans considering the last few years in politics.
Just to recap we just had eight years of Bush who was hailed as the worst president evaaar (I know, I know — it’s hard to recall he was that bad now isn’t it? we didn’t know how lucky we were). We then elected the Obamessiah who is the best president ever, or was supposed to be. The only problem with this contrast of night and day is that it turns out the worst the Republicans have to offer and the best of the Democrats are actually more or less identical.
Nader was and remains entirely correct.
Invidious, indeed.
Nice work as always, Clovis.
Clovis, love love love your writing and its sensibility. I suspect some of it is lost on me, but it makes me stretch every time.
But Nader gets my respect. I do appreciate how his ex-Raiders clap their hands against their faces in total exasperation in trying to explain the love/hate they feel for him having worked with him individually.
Was Gore a mensch back then or was he a crony with potential of going mensch but not taking that small but mighty and significant step of challenge to the “team”?
And the catch-22, if you are strong enough to challenge the game players, you can’t get into the game.
Ah, the mighty wringer of the Party to make someone sacrifice his moment with the faux promise the support will be there down the road re Gore and even Kerry, probably.
Nader does his homework and he speaks truth to power. And he puts principle above personality. And he is brave
Many of the Dems can’t forgive Nader for Gore loss. Much of country can never forgive Nader for being an iconoclast and a messenger. The media will never put the mike under his chin. The political handlers will never let him mop up the floor with anyone in a debate. The Jewish lobby will never let him get serious air time or near a political role.
I wish Obama would call him up. Would call Edwards up. Have lunch with those with a track record for good and with ideas. Will call up the bright people with reforming ideas and solicit their advice. Obama would do that if he were more person than personality, sadly. Maybe Obama is a crony with potential to be a mensch but what good is that doing us now?
He’ll be a sadder but wiser man eventually, maybe, but what suffering and dying during what seems like a too slow beginning of the learning curve. What lack of pushback from him to the oh so very rotten status quo.
The pattern with US presidents seems to be that when they leave office they can afford to be less of a total asshole.
Hi, Libby! Thanks for your kind words, and I’m a follower of yours as well.
You’re probably too young to remember Harold Stassen, but the first I ever heard of him was a joke on the old Jackie Gleason show, among others. He was a perrenial candidate for high office, including the presidency. He was an outrider at first, then eventually he became a Don Quixote joke.
There is an continuous circle in all unsuccessful campaigns. They cannot gather enough air time because they are insufficiently popular to warrant it because they cannot gather enough air time because they are insufficiently popular to warrant it because …
As far as noble stands, Custer made one, and I don’t know what anybody gained from it. It is irrational to claim the Crawford Cretin, who inherited a budget surplus and peace and prosperity and turned it into a gaping deficit and the greatest recession since the thirties and two wars with upwards of a hundred thousand dead and wiretaps and “extraordinary renditions” and an intense loathing internationally for anything relating to US, was synomymous with Gore, but that’s what Nader had to do to legitimize his campaign to the radical left. Remember that without Don Quixote in places like Florida, there would’ve been no Dohbya, no Iraq war, no drifting disaster to the environment.
Later, Nader claimed that the cause of the environment might be sparked by a couple of terms under the mismanagement of the Cretin. A pretty wasteful ploy, that.
And he did it all for him. I’m only thankful he’s now Harold Stassen, and won’t usher in any more Dohbyas.