[Beautiful morning here, south of San Juan Bautista, California, in this long, deep canyon where my wife's brother and his wife have retired to the horse-ranch life.]
Yesterday I wrote that lost candy doesn't much signify....
[It's evening now, and we are back in Mountain View after our San Juan Bautista hosts' annual pumpkin party.]
This morning, alas, I tried to write (and thought for a while that I had written) a defensible statement about the loss of innocence by Americans who voted for George W. Bush and Dick Cheenie in 2000—or didn't vote for them but weren't sure that it made any difference....
But by this evening, what I wrote (and left posted for the better part of the day) had come to seem to "need some work." I think that the problem with my essay was that it wasn't clear what "innocence" could mean in this context. I tried to equate it to the unconscious (and self-delusional) state of believing the argument that, because it's inconceivable that the president of a civilized, enlightened country like the United States of America could send Americans to die for anything less than a good and necessary cause, therefore George W. Bush must not have done so....
But unconsciously (and "self-delusionally"!) believing such a syllogism seems to me now as much a pathological condition as any kind of "innocence," and an appropriate development of this position must await a fresh new day...and a fresher me.
No comments:
Post a Comment