{"id":2549,"date":"2008-10-28T10:57:03","date_gmt":"2008-10-28T15:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=2549"},"modified":"2008-10-28T11:00:39","modified_gmt":"2008-10-28T16:00:39","slug":"in-another-pattern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/28\/in-another-pattern\/","title":{"rendered":"in another pattern&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div align=\"justify\">Thinking last night about the Iraq War [<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/27\/and-the-news-from-iraq\/\"><font color=\"#200020\"><strong>and the news from Iraq?<\/strong><\/font><\/a>] put me in a reflective mood &#8211; an Eliot mood:                     <\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#400040\"><em>What we call the beginning is often the end<br \/>                     And to make and end is to make a beginning.<br \/>                     The end is where we start from&#8230;<\/em><\/font><\/div>\n<div align=\"right\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tristan.icom43.net\/quartets\/gidding.html\" target=\"_blank\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><em>Little Gidding<\/em><\/font><\/u><\/a><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">It seemed innocent enough, those salad days of 2000. The <font color=\"#200020\"><strong>Y<sub>2<\/sub>K<\/strong><\/font> people were disposing of their stored provisions for the doomsday that never came, and a sleepy Presidential Campaign pitted two kinds of dullness against each other &#8211; sons of fathers from another time. Then came the Election with its hanging chads and the Supreme Court&#8217;s appointment of George W. Bush, the lesser of the two dull legacy politicians. But even then the bells didn&#8217;t sound the necessary alarm. When the 911 attack on New York came, I guess we thought that was the worst thing that could happen, so we rallied around our dull President, plastered our cars with patriotic paraphenalia, and hoped our he would do the right thing.<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">He didn&#8217;t. At the end of 2002, when the campaign to go to war with Iraq commenced, I didn&#8217;t believe it [the part about the danger of Saddam Hussein&#8217;s Iraq]. I was eager to hear what Colin Powell had to say at the U.N., but I thought the case he made was weak &#8211; even though I didn&#8217;t yet know that what he was saying wasn&#8217;t even true. I&#8217;m ashamed to say that I didn&#8217;t really completely get it until Judith Miller was jailed in the summer of 2005 that the whole Iraq War was based on lies and the twisted polemics of the group known as the neoconservatives. I guess before that, I thought they were just inept or misinformed.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">By then, much of their damage was already done. They had marched us off to war. They&#8217;d infiltrated the Department of Justice and turned it into a political arm of their Party. They had invalidated Congress with Signing Statements, stacked the Supreme Court, shredded the Constitution&#8217;s system of checks and balances and right to privacy. By the time I awoke, the carnage was well underway &#8211; and I woke up kind of early. For many, it wasn&#8217;t until the Democratic Congress of 2006 began to hold hearings that exposed the extent of the wound. And it wasn&#8217;t until the recent months that we knew how they had ignored the looming catastrophe in our credit markets [as they collapsed around us]. Maybe we should have all known it in advance, but we didn&#8217;t. We count on our government to watch out for such things, or at least we used to. So their running up the National Debt and spending us into the ground with a senseless war were only&nbsp; preludes to what their inattention to our domestic and world finances has put on our table.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#400040\"><em>What might have been is an abstraction<br \/>                  Remaining a perpetual possibility<br \/>                  Only in a world of speculation.<br \/>                  What might have been and what has been<br \/>                  Point to one end, which is always present&#8230;<\/em><\/font><\/div>\n<div align=\"right\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tristan.icom43.net\/quartets\/norton.html\" target=\"_blank\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><em>Burnt Norton<\/em><\/font><\/u><\/a><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"89\" hspace=\"4\" height=\"139\" border=\"1\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/tbn0.google.com\/images?q=tbn:dzhTKmkUvWLxZM:http:\/\/obeygiant.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/obama_shep_print_final2.jpg\" \/>And so we&#8217;re hopefully going to elect a young man, an honest and bright young man, full of hope and change, to grapple with the legacy of the years that have followed the Cold War &#8211; a crippling and shameful legacy that will long be with us, certainly past my time.  And now I&#8217;m an old man and things come wafting by from my past &#8211; the writings of Ayn Rand from my college years that lived on in a bug-eyed old man named Alan Greenspan; the specter of the Great Red Menace implicit in the fear-mongering of Rush Limbaugh and his likes; the Rovian guilt by association from what we call now the McCarthy Era; the music of the hippies that went flat and became the culture wars; the fear and deceit of Richard Nixon that pervades the Bush and Cheney White House; the naive and convoluted economics of the aging actor Ronald Reagan; and the hopes from Civil Rights days that sing in some of Barack Obama&#8217;s lyrics. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<div><em><font color=\"#400040\">&#8230; As we grow older<br \/>               The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated<br \/>               Of dead and living. Not the intense moment<br \/>               Isolated, with no before and after,<br \/>               But a lifetime burning in every moment<br \/>               And not the lifetime of one man only<br \/>               But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.<\/font><\/em><\/div>\n<div align=\"right\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tristan.icom43.net\/quartets\/coker.html\" target=\"_blank\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><em>East Coker<\/em><\/font><\/u><\/a><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"justify\">So it&#8217;s almost a time to rejoice &#8211; not just because something is finally going to be over. Eliot was right that there&#8217;s <em><font color=\"#400040\">a lifetime burning in every moment<\/font><\/em> and that <font color=\"#400040\"><em>to make and end is to make a beginning<\/em><\/font>. The reason for rejoicing is that we are finally being offered another chance. <font color=\"#400040\"><em>            The end is where we start from<\/em><\/font>.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">But it&#8217;s also a time to be sad, and let that grief fill in the spaces now occupied the anger and outrage of these last years.  Grief is a great teacher from whom we learn about the past and what we&#8217;ve lost, about perspective. <font color=\"#400040\"><em>What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation<\/em><\/font>. The Bush Administration principals brought the wounds from their collective past into this century &#8211; and those wounds became a cancer. They had neither grieved nor accepted their earlier losses. Instead, they schemed and plotted their return to power, and in doing so took us back to times many Americans don&#8217;t even really recall &#8211; fighting ancient battles on an anachronistic stage in the wrong theater. Our task is to avoid their mistakes &#8211; to allow our sadness over what might have been in their time to run its course, so as to inform but not pre-determine our future<font color=\"#400040\"><em>&#8230;<\/em><\/font><\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#400040\"><em>&#8230; Thus, love of a country<br \/>        Begins as attachment to our own field of action<br \/>        And comes to find that action of little importance<br \/>        Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,<br \/>        History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,<br \/>        The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,<br \/>        To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern&#8230;<\/em><\/font><\/div>\n<div align=\"right\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tristan.icom43.net\/quartets\/gidding.html\" target=\"_blank\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><em>Little Gidding<\/em><\/font><\/u><\/a><\/div>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thinking last night about the Iraq War [and the news from Iraq?] put me in a reflective mood &#8211; an Eliot mood: What we call the beginning is often the end And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from&#8230; Little Gidding It seemed innocent enough, those [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}