Stop the Stupid, I Want to Get Off

Sometimes our discourse is so stupid that it takes the energy right out of me. I can’t take another minute of debate over how many days it took Bush or Obama to respond to a Christmas time failed attack on an airplane. Bush attacked the wrong country for made-up reasons and got over 4,000 of our soldiers killed in the process. It takes a tremendous amount of gall (a vat of gall, really) to criticize the president for his response to terrorism when you have the record on that issue that Republicans have.

9 Comments

Real History Lisa on January 7, 2010 at 1:17 pm

I’m hoping it will backfire on Republicans. The more outlandish they are, the more they hurt their chances with reasonable people.

My fear is the pool of reasonable people in this country has dramatically shrunk over time, however…

Hurria on January 7, 2010 at 1:28 pm

I am thinking about spending the rest of my life walking through the U.S. with a lamp looking for a reasonable person.
- BooMan on January 7, 2010 at 1:31 pm
  
  THE MADMAN—-Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed
  
  The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
  
  “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”
  
  Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.
  
  It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”
  Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]
  - Dongi 2 on January 7, 2010 at 1:57 pm
    
    Nietzsche, as always, is awesome. Thanks for posting.
    - BooMan on January 7, 2010 at 2:22 pm
      
      Perhaps more topical:
      
      My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli’s Il Principe are most closely related to me by the unconditional will not to delude oneself, but to see reason in reality — not in “reason,” still less in “morality.” For that wretched distortion of the Greeks into a cultural ideal, which the “classically educated” youth carries into life as a reward for all his classroom lessons, there is no more complete cure than Thucydides. One must follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines. With him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression — this inestimable movement amid the moralistic and idealistic swindle set loose on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy: the decadence of the Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive with the older Greeks. In the end, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from a man like Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things.
      
      link
    - Real History Lisa on January 7, 2010 at 2:54 pm
      
      Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal ….
      
      Sound familiar? 😉
    - BooMan on January 7, 2010 at 3:05 pm
      
      I thought so.
      
      Been a while since I thought about Nietzsche,