428. Geezer's Guide to the Daily News.

For my fellows whose primary need now is to economize on energy and time:

1.  Skip all stories about disarmament.  Even if all nations disarmed they would still have the know-how to produce weapons and as soon as their security or welfare or self-regard — the usual "vital interests" — were threatened, boom, there you'd be, facing again what really matters for peace, adjustment of vital interests. Talking disarmament is a way of displaying idealism and drawing attention away from any moves you are making to your own advantage.

2. Stop reading any moral horror story as soon as you get to the third horror.  You're on your way to horror-redundance, what reporters and editors get into when they realize they've got a sustainable indignation going.  You have time to say just once, "I believe it, and it's outrageous."   Young people have the energy to go on saying, "Oh what an outrage, this too, this too, oh how terrible, oh how painful to an advanced sensibility," but you have to have some energy left to respond to the next horror.

3.  Give a low priority to stories about Trump and Russia.  For this story to rise to the level of serious interest there has to be criminal behavior (as distinct from reprehensible behavior) and it's impossible to imagine behavior by Trump and Putin that meets the conditions necessary for criminality.  Trump says, "Do X for me and I'll do Y for you after the election." (The necessary quid pro quo.)  Putin's going to trust that?  Trump's going to trust Putin?  Not in the real world.

4. Suspend your reaction to all summary terms, like "racist," "sexist," "anti-semite,"  "bigot," "bleeding heart," "son of a bitch," and "asshole."  Wait to see their basis in reported behavior.

5. In the final pinch skip all stories about internal troubles.  In a democracy like ours these will always be with us but they can't sink us (we are like a raft, remember, with our feet always wet).  What can sink us is a foolish war.  So when you're down to the largest reading-glass magnification select only stories about foreign relations.  If we succeed there no other failure matters (for long) and if we fail there no other success matters.

427. Poem: Getting Used to Obscenity

So I told George about this site I came across a bunch of naked women sitting in a circle with vibrators in their winkies listening to an older woman with a device in her winkie tell them how to do it and all it will do for their mental health and the cause of women's liberation and George says well that's the way it's going these days porn entering the mainstream and you might as well get used to it and I say hell I'm already used to the porn it's the pop psychology and liberation spiel I want to call the police about.

426. Poem: Our Lady

Queen of Heaven, prayed to by Mike oh Mary help me when the coal slide buried him, what power she must have had a goddess yet human as the girl with her hand extended stopping the announcing angel wait let me take this in wait God himself you say in me from me me what little boy isn't going to bow and revere as his mother and teachers tell him more about her, teaching him reverence and respect respect for higher power and what little boy wouldn't shiver when the oldest boy in the gang Ray then said "ah my Lady's ass" showing as the prof explained later the attraction in profanity it let men show other men their manliness they weren't going to let a bunch of women boss them around and in a gang of boys the first boy to take Mary's name in vain wow that kid had become a man that is had balls and what better sign of their size than the size of the forces he was willing to take on consciously at first then unconsciously and faintly when such boys called every disrespected thing bloody a reduction of the old "by our Lady" but they didn't know that and said "aw your bloody ass" didn't know they were saying "your Lady's ass" didn't know much of anything which is why they were called Know Nothings and with their heirs were against all the elitists who knew something because they had listened to their teachers their women teachers with respect even though they had no balls.

425. Government Shutdown over the Wall

Have you ever heard so many words meaning so little?  "Negotiate." "Compromise."  "Bargain in good faith."

Clearly neither side is going to let the other have a victory.  Victory is either having a wall or not having a wall.  Anything not a victory will be considered a defeat.  So what are you going to negotiate about or compromise on?  Who cares about your good faith?

So all the words from either side now are just noise.  Tell somebody to call you when they hear "OK, no wall" or "OK, wall."  Expect to sleep a long time.

424. Equality

Now a long essay in the New Yorker (1-7-19) about an eminent philosopher who "has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society."  And my wife said long ago — trailed by me — that the concept of equality is a perfect example of a non-starter.

Take any situation where knowledge gives a better outcome than ignorance.  For drama let's make it a dangerous situation, like in a storm at sea or on the edge of a high mountain.  Put a group of people in it.   They are not all going to be equally knowledgeable.  The one who knows best how to get to harbor or down from the mountain will be — what shall we call him or her?  The boss?  The chief?  In any case we recognize a superior and destroy any notion of equality as something to strive for, an ideal.

To broaden the destruction substitute for "knowledgeable" and "ignorant" any pair of terms that identify human traits that influence outcomes — realistic-idealistic, decisive-deliberative, warm-hearted, cold-minded.  Whenever we assess their influence and fit to the occasion and find them pre-eminent in one person we give up on equality.

"Whenever."  Whenever not?  Isn't the major part of our lives, we goal-oriented people, choosing and following the best means to our ends?  And since none of us is omniscient and very few of us are collections of the equally knowledgeable that will mean following a superior.

In a very small part of our lives will we have the freedom —freedom from the link between ends and means — to claim equality.  And unless we define and limit that part very carefully ("Here we must take 'created equal' to mean 'without assignment to nobility or royalty by birth") we are going to be thrown into confusion.  By our bad start  with a basically incoherent concept.