by FPS Doug
Sat Jan 12th, 2008 at 09:03:18 AM EST
Homer made mistakes, Shakespeare made mistakes, Abraham Lincoln made mistakes, and every time I suddenly recognize yet another mistake in the otherwise beautiful and self-evident flow of one of my essays, I still hope against hope that it's the sort of mistake Homer or Shakespeare or Lincoln could have made.
Please, God, don't let me make exactly the same mistake as a gang of imbeciles like George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Doug Feith!
But there it is, all over diary after diary! Shock and Awe, almost to the letter! So what if I can allege a tiny variation? In the glare of reality, shock and re-evalution is just as stupid as the stupidest brain-fart that ever passed for an idea between the ears of our demented President.
The U.S. Air Force shocked Iraq for sure, and of course it never occurred to the arrogant morons in the Pentagon and White House that rage is an enormously more likely reaction to a brutal beating than awe, which is something like a sublime form of the virtue of humility, a state of mind even more alien to Bush, Feith, and Rumsfeld than whatever passes for metaphysics in the mind of a lobster.
So the day after Americans marched into Baghdad, instead of contemplating the infinite depth of the heavens and all the stealth bombers whizzing around in them with awe, the Iraqis erupted in an orgy of looting and general destruction of all undefended property both public and private.
Meanwhile I was busy writing diaries and emails and essays in every conceivable form, with the pervasive modus operandi of knocking one fixed idea or another slightly askew, assuming against all evidence that a little re-evaluation would follow every little shock.
Imagine my surprise when a hail-storm of flames, insults, and troll-ratings poured down on my pointy little head, instead of the gentle rain of insight I expected, and of course I responded in kind. I shock you, you shock me, and so on forever.
I can shock you and you can shock me, but we can't shock each other into awe or humility or insight, and every time we yield to the human and all-too-human temptation to believe we can beat or brutalize each other into whatever virtue may serve our momentary convenience, we inevitably turn ourselves into something just as stupid as the stupidest sons-of-bitches on the face of the earth.
Editor's note: FPS Doug is obviously depressed by the unfortunate response to his essays, and mistakenly identifies with the typical mob of bloggers who have no interest in any discussion beyond confirmation of their own fixed ideas. This re-evaluative essay contradicts its own thesis that re-evaluation never follows shock, and demonstrates instead that if you offer truth-seekers like FPS Doug a choice between self-annihilation and the paralysis of fixed ideas, they inevitably choose suicide.
