Which, of course,
goes to the essence of the pathetic rhetoric of modern warfare, that by
displaying our immortal truth of American exceptionalism, we, as a people, can
declare with apparent certainty that we are in the business of changing hearts and minds.
(See: Bush/Cheney war on Iraq; subset: search for weapons of mass destruction.)
No, straight talk
(consider a newspaper column named Fist Amendment) is only good as a sermon to
the converted. The best you can do is conceive the smartest damn sermon on a
topic (say, climate change, #MeToo, Trump/Russia) and deliver it to the
faithful. Let ’em cheer, fall over themselves in appreciative agreement and
then take the message to the street. Hallelujah?
Problem is
straight talk is not truth. (Regardless of what a blue blood newspaper says in
its promotional advertising.)
President Trump’s
fixer, Michael Cohen, delivers straight talk, and the myriad “churches” in America
write sermons on a particle of truth in what he says (or doesn’t say but
implies) that excites the faithful in what seems an infinite number of ways.
No matter, get on with
your straight talk. The internet will take care of it. Consider this quote from
Patricia Lockwood in the Feb. 21, 2019, edition of the London Review of Books.
(I couldn’t say it any better …)
“A few years ago
when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never
leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of
its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my
own mind.”
Next: Running for
Your Life: Eighteen Miler Ahead!
