Babel On
What is the point and price of
The tower of words and thoughts?
High and fine
To reach higher and finer.
Was God protective,
Jealous even,
Of the secret word
That would reveal all
And make him redundant,
Obsolete, inferior?
Or was it a sign
We couldn’t read
That in the clouds,
On the moon,
Mars, the stars
We would find nothing but ourselves
Still babbling
Traveling
Going nowhere?
Hillary Clinton: Magic mirror on the wall, who won the Iowa caucus?
Magic Mirror: Over the seven jeweled hills, beyond the seventh fall, in New Hampshire campaigns Bernie Sanders, the winner in Iowa.
Hillary Clinton: I won Iowa. Bernie Sanders is dead. Behold the results.
Magic Mirror: Bernie Sanders still lives. You failed to vanquish him.
Hillary Clinton: Then I’ve been tricked.
With sincere apologies to Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, and Webb Smith, the writers of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). And to the Brothers Grimm.
Chicago reported the most January homicides since 2000. This is a symptom and not just in Chicago. A number of American cities are seeing similar increases.
This is a symptom of a socio-economic underclass with little hope of moving up on any significant scale. And now for the first time in the post-World War 2 era, we have a socio-economic middle class also seeing and believing that upward movement is beyond expectations and aspirations. This is expressed in the current level of nonpartisan political dissatisfaction.
These symptoms require hard and unsparing self-awareness as a nation. Whatever the underlying conditions are, the treatments being prescribed have not worked. It is dangerous folly to think that just because a person has been relatively healthy over a pretty long time, with the occasional ups and downs, the standard remedies are bound to work for any conditions. Not to mention that some treatments once lauded turned out to be ignorant and deadly. Consider that bloodletting—cutting blood vessels or attaching leeches to extract the disease—was once the height of medicine (and why barber poles are striped red and white).
According to some experts, there is a tiny chance we may fall back into a 2008-style recession. There is also a chance that in some cities we might see a summer of 2016 that looks a little like the hot summers of the 1960s. However small those chances are, we might not want to be waiting around to see if these and other symptoms go away on their own. Sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t.
Bob Schwartz 