Thursday, October 24, 2013

Bluff & Bluster over the Broken Pottery Rule

Bluff & Bluster over the Broken Pottery Rule
Beyond reform is your predicament,
It's time you venture forth a better way!
Nor tears of bitterness, nor mute lament
Can free you from your own captivity!
That captors are your very native sons
Is but insult added to injury
And no excuse for patient tolerance
Nor cause to languish in your misery.
With debtors' need false leaders agonize,
For credits, they may make your people bleed;
Bleeding, you may yet seek to galvanize
To life true leaders of a bolder breed:
By visionary men are nations built
Thy lack of vision is this nation's guilt!!

When the Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Tuscany, properly constituted authorities sought to indict neither the navigator nor the purser for the tragedy.  Nor was the incident explained away by any distractive activities on board the vessel or the nefarious alignment of the stars that imposed the Friday-the-13th date and all the evil influences attributed thereto from superstitious antiquity.

Despite well documented attempts to pass the blame to the helmsman, Capt. Francesco Schettino, was held accountable both by the state authorities and the established media, traditionally the advocate for and custodian of the truth in chronicling momentous events, especially ones with tragic consequences.
The Pottery Barn Rule is as old, if not older, an Americanism as the Declaration of Independence itself.  It was most recently notably popularized by then State Secretary Colin Powell in the run up to the Iraqi War.  But if Juan Williams and his usual-suspects cohorts of self-anointed Obama Acolyte Apologists have their way, that Americanism too soon shall be vanished from the National Lexicon, along with any notion of accountability.

Short of appointing a Scapegoat-in-chief as a cabinet post, the Obama Regime has done every conceivable thing in the sun to buttress the firewall insulating his Regime from any and all untoward unintended consequences that could possibly tarnish his Regime’s legacy.   A prominent aspect of that legacy is the successful damning down and draining out of traditional sensibilities from the long-chronically dyslexic American soul.

When the national landscape is finally drained off of the quagmire that is the Obama Legacy, only the fatalism of Omar Khayyam would be appropriate to pay tribute to the national folly of installing twice, by Affirmative Action, a blatant incompetent as President:

LXVIII 
We are no other than a moving row 
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go 
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held 
In Midnight by the
Master of the Show.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Calibrating Entitlement Expectations

I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being in the right place at the right time.
--Namit Arora, What Do We Deserve?

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
We are the ones we have been waiting for

Growing up in a farming/fishing village, where the nearest neighbor was three bends of the meandering creek away, or three hilltops on the mountain path away, or a decent downwind blow of the conch horn on a fair and sunny day, your first lessons on the wherefores of it all inevitably came from your parents.  By “all” I mean the incessant beginning and ending of life all around you, if you happen to be in a flourishing farm environment.
This would put you at a distinct disadvantage.  As a sentient and observant being, you knew that you as a child had been under the protective custody of your parents.  Your needs were being provided for by them.  You were sheltered from potential harm and the pain it usually entailed.  You were being taken care of by them.  Providing for your well-being was, prima facie, their utmost concern in life.
It however, begs one important question: what if you were not particularly thrilled at being alive?  What if you don’t particularly enjoy your lot in life?
I assert, contend and maintain that every person in this God’s Great Creation is legitimately entitled to only one thing, namely, why without being first consulted, you were brought into being?  Every parent owes it to his/her child at least an attempt at a coherent explanation.  Or, in the more esoteric formulation of Omar Khayyam,
XXIX 
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing 
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. 


XXX 
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence? 
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence! 
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine 
Must drown the memory of that insolence! 

Above and beyond that one question, everything else is governed by societal mores, more subject to generational nuance than being cast in marble.  Admittedly, if we as a generation had created entitlement expectations much more than what we can reasonably deliver upon, then we as a generation had failed in our duty to hand down a world much better than we found and inherited from our parents.