Whose Bones?

While teaching short poems, notably Catullus 85, I'm fond of saying that if you to put forth a mere two lines of poetry, they ought to be good. Well today in my Twitter feed I saw the image to the right. Putting aside policy, what does it mean?

First I thought he meant that we individually define ourselves as a nation of immigrants, but that can't be so because I don't define myself as a nation. So then I realized that the president must mean that we collectively define ourselves as a nation, and a nation of immigrants at that. Fine. We're too far into this administration's tenure for such a statement to up my libertarian dander.

How does that sentiment, though, gel with the second sentence? Bones are pretty individual things, to start, so the image of us collectively having bones is awkward. Does the image of "national bones" resonate with anyone? Or are we the bones? Either way we still have our own, actual bones, so when he says "bones," which set of bones is he talking about? Either way, are we a nation of immigrants in our bones, or are we people who define ourselves as a nation of immigrants in the bones? Since the latter seems more likely, I am, according to the president, myself defining the nation as one of immigrants, in the, or I guess one of, the national bones?

I ask again, then, what are the bones made of? Do we constitute the bones, or do we defining ourselves as a nation of immigrants, constitute the bones, or do we actually being, which has not been established, a nation of immigrants, constitute the bones? Does something else entirely constitute the bones? Presuming, though, we're talking about metaphorical bones, he of course means essence, but the image of a bone is not that of a substance which admits a multiplicity of essences, if such a multiplicity is possible politically, philosophically, or metaphorically.

So when he says, "We define ourselves" does he mean define absolutely or partially? He must mean partially since the nation can't be singularly "a nation of immigrants" with no other dimension, but then how can we be so in our bones? As I asked, can we be multiple things in our bones?

What about the reflexive, though, ourselves? This has to be meant with reference to individuals. Do we have collective selves and individual selves? Are we anything else? I guess he meant "We define ourselves constituting a nation of immigrants, but he wrote as. None of these thirty one definitions of as fits the sentence. Maybe he's being rhetorical, using a simile? But isn't his point, which he makes three words later, not that we're like a nation, but that we are a nation? Besides, a simile is between unlike things, of what else can a nation consist than people?

So what's going on here? What's he talking about? This is Ciceronian? It's like Jabberwocky run through an Enigma encoder.

Dear Whomever Wrote Those Words,

There are only two sentences. Why couldn't you get this right? Why?

Thank You.

The Joy of Being Grumpy

Peevish, irritable, surly, ill-tempered. This is how we usually define grumpy, but to me it seems a more specific condition: a loss, usually temporary, of humor and sympathy. Such senses bind us to the world and its people, humor to the light foibles which ask charity, and sympathy to the serious seeking compassion. They also bid us be generous and forgiving to others while aware of our own imperfections.

Meanwhile, the grumpy are not aware of their own flaws, only the foolishness of others. All of the grumpy man's own flaws fade away under a bombardment of irritants. In fact, when you're grumpy you don't recognize the good in anything save the perfect. The world is never more black and white than when you're grumpy. The annoying girl is now a shrew, the slow cashier an imbecile, and the chatty neighbor a pest. Formal becomes stuffy, casual vulgar. People with questionable taste become full-fledged philistines, the frugal folks outright cheapskates.

In fact, apart from the dulling passage of time, only the most incorruptible excellence may snap you out of the grumpy funk. But why spoil a grumpy groove? Rather than trying to pacify oneself with some therapeutic excellence, it's far more satisfying to let the grumpiness boil over into a full-blown rant. A good rant is invigorating and cathartic. What liberation from gentlemanly confines, what control one seems to exercise over the life's ills when one rants and raves.

Unfortunately, it's hard to get a good rant going by yourself and an unfulfilled or half-started rant is quite an unsatisfying experience. What you need is a good friend to stoke the fires of disgust, someone who knows and shares just what ticks you off and who sympathizes with your frustration.

It's curious, though, that sympathy should be both the beginning and end of grumpiness. Perhaps it's because we grow grumpy by disconnecting from the intolerable vices of others, and thus the sympathy of friends returns us to a group to which we can happily belong. Ah, friendship.

Quid dulcius quam habere quicum omnia audeas sic loqui ut tecum? - Cicero, Laelius de Amicitia

Actually...

There are many ways to insult a man. You can steal from him, strike him, shout him down, and on and on. Surprisingly few words, however, are so pregnant with scorn that they can single-handedly and unilaterally insult a man. We need not mention them, but most insults can be walked back, softened, used jovially, or explained away. Even many vicious remarks are limited in their focus. One word, though, seems to carry irrevocable and devastating repudiatory power: actually.

Actually will hew any conversation asunder and cut anyone to the quick. In fact, no conversation is so friendly or genial that actually won't cleave it in two. It's so flippant, as if the word means to overturn whatever argument preceded it, however logical and artful. You will be educated, it says. Actually. It smacks of such a smug self-satisfaction in what will follow that it etches the speaker's smirk, and there's always a smirk, into your mind.

No intonation or gesticulation, however soft and timid, can lessen actually's effect. No follow up can change course. It is a declaration of war. As such, it should be stricken from the gentleman's vocabulary. There's always a friendlier point around which one can pivot if you intend to disagree: speaking in the abstract, pretending to agree even though you are disagreeing, or re-attributing his statement to someone else and then disagreeing with that person.

When you get actually-ied, though, all bets are off. It's a total war of rhetoric. So disagree wisely, if you must disagree, less you wake the wit within the gentleman.

Contracting Out Life

Living requires a great deal of work. That much has at least been agreed upon if not since prehistoric times when the caveman first realized he had to purge his cave of vermin and smoky entrails, then since Hesiod said that whatever be your lot, work is best for you. If that much may be agreed, then, we may also affirm that man seeks to avoid work. This is not news, of course, for it has as long been the nature of man to seek respite from life's relentless toil. The industrial revolution gave modern man a new way to avoid work: efficiency. It seems to me, though, he did not succumb to this temptation, at least not always or broadly, but rather redoubled his efforts and produced the spectacular abundance of the modern world.

He achieved this by means of a two-edged sword: specialization. We've talked before about the extraordinary benefits of specializing at your craft and trading your service or wares. Clearly the practice produces goods and services of increased quality at lower cost. This applies to everything from art and artistic craft to services like those of doctors and grocers. Now I'm not going to backpedal from these facts and suggest every man learn toss in the towel at work and retreat to a patch of land for farming. Instead, I would like to observe the sword slicing the other way.

Namely, that the more one pursues greater specialization at one task, the more one seems to forego others. One may of course pursue specialization for the sake of efficiency and productivity so he can make more money or work less, but one may hyper-specialize even for the goal of excellence. No one condemns the doctor for spending his spare time improving his craft, especially when one's employed his service. Likewise no one would blame Mozart or Shakespeare for devoting all waking hours to their arts. It is an awkward and even disappointing realization, then, that most geniuses have developed their one shining skill at the expense of their other abilities.

Man's life, however, is varied. He must learn to feed himself and get himself from place to place, to write and speak well, to care for and protect his family and property. These should not be viewed as burdens to be shunted off at the soonest possibility for there is unique pleasure in fulfilling them yourself. There is no dishonor in treating oneself to the expertise of a first rate chef, but there is joy in watching something one has grown oneself crisp in the pot, whether it is meat from livestock he has raised or basil grown in his window box. Likewise there is no shame in paying a teacher to instruct one's child in specialized learning, but who would not want to teach one's son or daughter to read?

This may sound a strange or cruel, that I wish man to suffer unnecessary toil, and there is of course an element of displeasure in work, that of exertion, but happiness is an activity and how else will one take joy in these things if one does not do them himself? You may experience ease when someone completes them for you, but not joy. Separating man from his intimate needs and cares is to separate him from his self and nature, and what has separated man from his health as food's transformation from nature's fickle bounty culled by his own hands and refined by his own skill, to processed commodity. What has separated him from his social nature as the law's ebb from res publicae of the common man to esoteric knowledge of lawyers. What has separated man from tradition as knowledge's shift from familial and social trust to pedagogical ware. Overall, what has denied man from the edifying, character-forming, and instructive use of his diverse faculties than contracting out ever more of life's work?

It is not so much, though, that we should strive to do everything possible by ourselves all of the time, but that we should let life's intimate moments remain intimate. We should have significant personal connections to the work of family life, of cooking for and cleaning up after ourselves, of teaching our children life's essentials, and living peacefully with our neighbors. We should seek, wherever possible, to learn about the tools we use and to understand the work done for us by machines and professionals.  Such activity not only offers insight into the needs and costs of life, but unique joys in both failure and fulfillment. To contract out activity, that is, life, eagerly and at any and every turn, is a sign not of progress or efficiency, but of dullness and decadence.

A Tulgey Mischmasch

It's always amusing when someone makes a ridiculous statement and then quickly backpedals to a more sensible position. In person, a few glances follow such statements and then everyone begins to chuckle. A good time is had by all and no one thinks the offender a lunatic or even a churl. He just got a little heated up. Occasionally, though, everyone begins to chuckle except the offender, and then all laughter ceases. It really is quite a sight when someone launches into a spirited defense of the patently absurd.

Before we look at a specimen, though, two thanks to Tom Woods. First, I wouldn't have come across the article if he hadn't mentioned the piece. Second, if he hadn't excerpted an interesting portion, I most certainly would not have found it amidst the disjunct prose of an author who finds the wrong word and wrong construction at nearly every turn. In fact, the piece is such a turbid kludge of vapid words clacking together in a mass of syntactical bramble that it's almost unreadable. On the bright side, the style is a perfect complement to the ideas.

All of these events are the slow stripping away of the vestiges of the state, deriving step by step the hell that waits at the logical end of the libertarian impulse, a counterpoint to every argument against state power. From a certain perspective, the state is our greatest invention, for all the horrors it has wrought when wielded darkly. It is the sine qua non of everything else we normally consider to be the triumphs of civilization. Writing, electricity, science, art. None of it is more than dust in the wind without the state to jealously guard it, without a hand shielding the guttering flame from the maelstrom. [Link]

Notice how "the state" is not defined. He employs not a single concept to delimit his encomium for state power, not government or legalism or common law or constitutionalism, not balanced power or natural rights, nor monarchy, republicanism, democracy, or bureaucracy. There is no mention of principles like justice or equity by which one might judge the efficacy of a state. But never mind all that. Never mind too how all such principles would by necessity predate the state which rests on them. Never mind his lack of formal argumentation or empiricism. And never mind that without recourse to the aforementioned principles, processes, and evidence, his essay is but a paean to monopolized authority.

Recall instead, how this author thought so little of us, and so much of himself, that he bothered neither to say something intelligent nor to say it well. What an insult.

Art's Mirror

It is often remarked that tough times try men's souls, and that in such times they are found firm or lacking. True enough. Less often but as truly, observers of God's curious creatures find that peace tries souls too. In the absence of strife, does a man choose to create or does he find a way, or fulfill a need, to destroy? I would note that art tries the soul, that great works of art thrust man into profound realms, and what he does there, if not what he is, what he aspires to.

Years ago I went to the movies with a new acquaintance. After the show, as per my way, I began to prod her for a response. And prod, and prod, and prod. Should said prodding have been of the electrical variety she surely would have perished, but I persisted in stupefaction at her indifference. Of course excellent and terrible movies provoke us, but nothing is so middling that one can't weigh in.

Today I again risked discovering someone by touring a few halls of the Met with two fellow educators and intellectuals.  Not that I feared for them, but it was a risk, as experiencing art with someone must be. Who will they turn out to be? Well, I couldn't have been happier. Who has an eye for perspective and tone, who gesture and proportion. Spiced with my own wit and wisdom, we strolled the halls a trio of élan and perspicacity. Naturally the experience brought previous Met ventures to my mind, different times with different friends and no two trips ever the same. It is a curious realization how much of one's life revolves around the arts, how much life revolves around the arts.

How ingrained in how many minds the hand of Socrates' grasping his cup of death, how deep and far now run the currents of his thought. How many friends were made playing musical poker with Haydn, how many conversions in the halls of Bach's polyphonic cathedrals.

Of course, what's reflected back isn't always flattering, and not just the secret delights man takes in the obscene, but all manner of perverse responses to art. Who is not somewhat thrilled by the devastating finality of Hamlet or Antigone, regardless of the tragedy, or the fleshiness of an ostensibly chaste painting? Yet while some reactions reveal our unsavory natures, others illuminate our uniquely cultivated vices. Prominent among these is inconsistency. Who raves in detail about the genius of Orwell, pops in V For Vendetta for a Saturday night movie, and then votes for statism. Even more curious is what I notice in some performers who don't like to attend the performing arts, which I take to mean they can't be bothered if they're not involved. Take away too the dilettantes, I beg you.

There is power in expression, but it requires an agent. Dare a man sieze it and turn it on himself? The end, though, ought not be reducing artistic encounters to navel-gazing exercises, but respect and gratitude for craft, and awe at what can be unlocked, or unleashed.

Movie Review: His Girl Friday

Directed by Howard Hawks. 1940.

Few action heroes have dominated their movies the way Cary grant does His Girl Friday. In fact, if you consider that Grant disappears for about a quarter of the movie, he probably has greater per scene magnetism. The only dull part of the film is the yawning center where the nitty gritty of the urban political machinery spools out. Yes, these scenes are more than competent and the zippy newsroom dialogue adds spice and verismo, but the political shenanigans stand but a framework for the romance between newsman Walter Burns (Grant) and his protege-cum-ex-wife-cum-girl-Friday, Hildy Johnson (Russell.) These electric scenes bookend the film and come so fast and furious their details are hard to spot. Their charm, however, is sure and irresistible.

Take the opening, where Hildy enters the copy room of her former boss and husband, power paper owner Walter Burns. She hurries in with her new beau, leading the guy through the office. The sheepish man moves to open a door for her but she pushes ahead and barely registers his gesture. What a contrast to her relationship with Walter. When these two are finally alone in his office, Walter takes a seat. When Hildy asks for the same he crosses his leg and gives it a gentle tap. "There's been a lamp burning in the window for you," he says, and to which she replies, taking a seat on the table, "That's a window I jumped out of a long time ago." Thrust, parry.

The scene escalates as he lights up and she asks for a cigarette. Without turning to face her Walter tosses over the pack. After he's lit, Hildy asks for a match and, instead of lighting hers, Walter shakes his out and hands over the box. He finally swivels his chair to face Hildy, entirely comfortable with her towering over him as she sits atop the table. Feigning forgetfulness about when they last saw each other, she adds, "It feels like yesterday." "Maybe it was," he trumps, "seeing me in your dreams?" Slowly Hildy gets caught up in the wheels of his flim-flam machine and they're re-hashing old spats about missed honeymoons and empty promises with Walter constantly re-framing the arguments, going so far as to say she spoiled their cozy arrangement by marrying him. Not content with her level of outrage, he mocks her feminine wiles with a cheeky impersonation and finally gets her to blow her top by claiming he was drunk when he proposed. She moves to chuck her purse at him and, ducking both to dodge it and answer the phone, he chirps, "You're losing your arm. You used to pitch better than that." Whew. Good thing the cigarettes are already lit.

When Walter finally discovers Hildy's engagement, he finagles a lunch with the happy couple, proceeding in every way possible to humiliate the dull simpleton. He bursts out of his office, hat on and heading out. Holding doors? Forget about it. Walter immediately mistakes an old man for Bruce, and when he finally finds the guy, shakes his umbrella handle in place of his hand. At lunch, this time Hildy lights up first and when Walter decides to follow, instead of striking a match himself, he pulls her arm over to light his cigarette for him. Walter orders first and everyone follows with the same. He takes rum in his coffee and Hildy follows suit. Bruce demurs because he has a busy afternoon buying tickets and checking baggage and what a bore, this guy. An insurance salesman, he's "wooed" Hildy with promises of a quiet country life in upstate New York. In contrast Walter begins to tell some spicy stories about some of his old cases with Hildy, who proceeds to kick him each time. By the end of lunch, Walter's convinced the Bruce to sell him a policy, but that's just a ruse to get Hildy to stay and get on top of a hot story with him. At the close of the scene, she takes Bruce's money and cautions her fiance about her charming ex, "A lot of people never did anything until they met Walter Burns."

The ensuing political big-city political chicanery is coherent enough, but it's just a frame to get Walter and Hildy back together and Walter uses it just that way. Whether he's setting Hildy up to be in the action or getting Bruce arrested, three times!, Walter's moving everything to his advantage for getting the story and the girl. We spot Walter's win when the jig with the city bigwigs blows up and Hildy stands there,  handcuffed to him, playing hardball politics with mayor and chief commissioner. She's thrilled. No way she'll give up the excitement of life with Walter for a country-time picnic with Bruce and his mother. No way she'll forego the flitting zips and zingers, the relentless witty persiflage with Walter for Bruce's ho-hum agreeability.

Once the story's all wrapped up, Hildy looks up adoringly at Walter over the typewriter, quite forgetful of Bruce. Yet Walter sends her on her way. She walks off sullen, but darts back when the phone rings. It's the police. They have an ever-bewildered Bruce in custody, set up in another of Walter's schemes. Hilda finally bursts into tears. Walter really does love her. He's swindled her into a plot of murder and corruption, used her to get a story, broken up her incipient marriage, nearly killed her would-be mother-in-law, and dashed her hopes of a peaceful life. But this time they're going on their honeymoon. Yep, sounds like love.

Review: Sleep No More

spoilers

I step into a room built of cardboard boxes. At its center stand two tables, for cards and pool, and making my way between I investigate the far corner. A bar. No sooner do I peek behind than its tender vaults from the shadows. The figure backs me around the bar and once more behind, pours drinks for the two men now beside me. They step over to the card table and with drink, deck, and hammer in hand, begin to play. A king. One man stands, picks up the card, and nails it to a board covered with dozens of others. They continue. A king. The hammer. Now the bartender's bumped the hanging light and it swings like a pendulum, searing my eyes with each pass as it slices the darkness. Before I regain my senses I'm against the wall and two of the men are pushing at one another. They rant and rave and begin to brawl, thrashing one another against the walls and atop the pool table until behind the bar, with a raging rictus of revenge, the tall man cudgels his quarry with the hammer.

I'll forgive you if the scene doesn't conjure an image of Macbeth, but Punchdrunk's production of Shakespeare is less the form of the play than the primal essence. Gone are the tripping words of the Bard, alas! alack!, but so too the trappings of the theater: the acts, scenes, stage, seats. In place of a linear performance we have parallel staging not of scenes but of various moments from the play. One murder is realized as a saloon fight, another a street brawl. A scene of dialogue becomes a sojourn through a silvery midnight wood or a ballroom dance. Instead of seat and stage, masked audience members are free to wander amongst the performances. The twisting, twirling, and hurling dance of the actors supplant Shakespeare's words.

Stitching these elements together is the ruse that we're not patrons at a theater but guests at the mysterious McKittrick Hotel, whose twisted entry corridors shake up the everyday order and lead you to a smoky lounge of peak 1920s elegance. Sip. Mingle. When your number's up you're masked, hushed, and sent on your way through the McKittrick's five floors. The novelty and detail of the sets catch you first. The detail is exceptional and immersive. A room of headless dolls suspended over a crib. (Whose room could this be?) Another of rolled maps with Creasey's history open on the desk. A nurse's room with a lockbox of keys.

You stumble upon a tailor primping himself in his shop. An angry man walks in and a chase ensues. They grapple and now the tailor's walking up the... shouts in the distance?

You see, while the stagings are parallel they're not discrete. You follow the performers around the hotel, intersecting with other performers followed by other guests. On the one hand this adds the frisson of the live and unpredictable, on the other it results in wandering amongst rooms with little knowledge of their purpose. Pretty and jarring as they are, their significance is often more apparent than actual, contributing less to theater than to tone.

Losing the linear structure also jettisons the structured climaxes of recognition and denouement in the Shakespeare. The result is a scramble whose effect comes not from the controlled ebb and flow of thought in verse but from the visceral. There is, however, an exceptional unity of effect owing foremost to the ferocious aplomb and expressive dexterity of the performers and second to the set design. Much is simple curiosity, but the effect is a disjuncture from the ordinary which in in amplifying, immerses you in the boiling emotions.

As a technique, though, the sensually immersive does not engage the spirit as much as the dramatic perfected by Shakespeare. Absent the traditional form and the words of the Bard, Sleep No More doesn't stand so much on its own as, with different tools, amplify certain dimensions of Shakespeare's masterpiece. As that, it's an engaging thrill.

My Guy

Second presidential terms are fraught with speculation about potential lame-duck status. Does he have enough pull to push his agenda still further forward? It's not a useless question, but it's really just speculation about what the politicians will do, for the people have more or less checked out of the debates. The popular opposition by this time is always fully enraged. Nothing the president does, good or bad, is good. They're exhausted from opposing, angered by policy and indignant about losing not once but twice. Again, this is unsurprising. The reaction of the president's coalition, however, baffles.

You see, if a candidate I supported ever won, I would hold him to the high standard of the ideals he supposedly represents because should he fail, he would discredit my principles. I find it tough to understand the "my guy" philosophy of politics in which one must eternally support anyone and everyone he voted for. Now few would admit to unconditional support of "their guy," but somehow the equation always balances in his favor. Does supporting "x-rights" trump foreign policy and the economy? Does the economy trump education policy? It's like a game or rock-paper-scissors where everybody wins.

So I wonder now, for example, as we sit mired in a miasma of myriad misguided, misapplied, and misanthropic policies, what might finally snap one of the president's supporters from his piper's tune. Every single matter, they invariably say, would have been worse under the alternatives. If so, then there's a rather monumental political problem, wouldn't you say? I have, in fact, received such concessions from the president's men, so to call them, that we are in dire straits with poor candidates, yet they subsequently say that, even so, better to have "their guy" in charge.

Still, though, some attribute no vice whatsoever to the president. His failures all owe to external factors. The GOP, the supreme court, the lobbyists, congress, big business, Fox News, and the American people. In fact the president's only flaw seems to be an excess of virtue which renders him incapable of doing the nasty work necessary to nudge his policies through. He's too respectful, too quiet. He follows the rules. He just won't break those eggs. The great Progress-Bringer lays chained, Prometheus-like, to his virtue as the all mighty GOP pecks away at him, a painted president at the cusp of greatness.

Of course the "conservatives" played their parts as toadies before, doing their dance for President Bush.  The "my guy" mentality is unshakeable and bipartisan. "I'm a pragmatist" they told me. Funny how their pragmatism perfectly coincided with everything Bush did to the exact degree.

This is not to say these two parties won't admit the failure of policy. You only need witness their game of hot potato with the TSA and No Child Left Behind to realize that. But "my guy" had nothing to do with that. And never criticize your guy, because then you'll help the other side.  "We have to win elections." If you have principles, keep them under your hat. The implication there is of course that the machinery of government is powerful and irreversible, so just put the guy who seems best at the helm and hope for the best. We'll try and hold him accountable after we give him the power. How liberal.

It's not always unreasonable to vote for an imperfect candidate, but it should be after an honest reckoning one's principles, of what he's done and what one expects him to do, and without the conceit that because somebody was going to win, that it was moral to turn the gun over to him, for having "a guy" is nothing short of worshipping either man or power, two ends which tend to overwhelm all.

Sui Amantes

It is a poor centre of a man's actions, himself. – Francis Bacon

One of the most unexpected side effects of internet use is exposure to high levels of self-centered statements. The most common of these expressions are the need to "do something for myself," or to "center myself" or that "I'm wonderful the way I am." Aside from the Rousseauean dimensions of such statements, I've noticed that once someone starts to make such statements, they come more and more often. I'm tempted to speculate that a superficial or learned self-centeredness can yield the genuine article. If so, it seems to be happening.

Some of the cause is economic: as we specialize more, we contract out more of our life to others. While the end of trade should be gratitude, though, it seems just as if not more often to be a sense of entitlement. Receiving certain services, prices, or convenience from sellers eager to please, we grow to expect such irrespective of the delicate balance which makes it possible. Slowly we learn to trust our desires as the world seems to orientate around us.

So perhaps most of all, the modern news turns around us, functioning not to inform but to make us feel the center of events. With what skill producers draw millions of viewers thousands of miles away into the heart of every incident, from minor scuffles to calamities. The result is not genuine sympathy or empathy, for no man has so much to spare from his daily life that can spare a meaningful amount for each unfortunate he learns of in the news, but sold sentimentality. What are you supposed to think about someone when you read his Facebook or Twitter feed and see comments about how various news items "affected him" interspersed with comments about shopping, traffic, and the weather? Certainly not that he is full of empathy, but merely that he's been frenzied into a flurry of activity.

One almost feels bad for such a misguided individual who has been presented something he genuinely cannot process. How does it affect him? What can he do in response? Yet we've been informed so we must do something, so we chatter about it, accomplishing nothing save convincing ourselves that we're involved and virtuous. The result is navel-gazing prattle like this, sputtering indignation from people who've been trained to have opinions and feel important.

Yet look at the phrase I used before: news items. The very act of reporting seems to reduce people, activities, in short, life, to news items. For what purpose is the viewer informed? If he cannot or not without great difficulty empathize with the many unfortunates of the day's news cycle, why should he know of them? If he believes in the power of prayer and he prays for them, perhaps that might be a reason, but I see more and more people circumvent both the meaning and means of prayer in response to calamities. They "send love" or better, "send light." They've not only nixed God from the loop there, but they've put themselves in place. Their own will and sentiment, naturally not activity of which there is typically is none, will ameliorate the world.

Let's say though, one can neither empathize nor pray. Perhaps one ought simply, "be informed," as good citizens. Yet daily life and daily news do not necessarily or even often accumulate into significant larger trends. What is presented in the news broadcast then tends to accumulate into a slowly, subtly formed sense of life than a body of facts which is later systematically sorted.

Of course, it seldom occurs to man that he could do more harm than good by learning about something. If the purpose of education is wisdom and wisdom right action, then one must ask how much "being informed" by watching the news leads to virtue in good deds how much an exercise in making oneself feel educated, compassionate, and generally superior.

The proper course of action is naturally not to insulate oneself, but on the one hand to refrain from gossip, speculation, and crisis mongering, and on the other actively and systematically to inform oneself slowly over time. Finally, we ought to do good with what we learn, loving not just ourselves or even the truth, but the good.