As an epistemological pop quiz, it's hard to know if God is still producing intercessionist miracles--coupling, for instance, in just one week, another stunningly incoherent Mitt Romney with a stunningly incompetent Wall Street bank--or if our evolutionary species has merely turned the regressionary corner and is now becoming miraculously dumb. Is Romney really presidential material? And is our banks learning?
But, whatever, what a miraculous week it was.
Whether it's Fate, Providence, or just happenstance, something is screaming "Look out, you idiots!" I mean, come on. Within hours of one another, Romney again vividly demonstrated that he hasn't an honest thought or a redemptive clue in his perfectly coiffed head, while JPMorgan, which Romney would parole even further and release to the care of the Gilded and Jazz Ages, demonstrated, as the NY Times put it this morning, that "luck is the only thing preventing another meltdown."
True, on the upside, and in evidentiary favor of either His better angels or our evolutionary smarts, there was President Obama's embrace of human rights writ larger. This of course cannot be discounted, even in the wretched week that was. Yet Obama's embrace could, politically speaking, soon resemble Cleopatra's caress of the asp.
I doubt it, though. There are too many factors--too many antidotes--in Obama's favor. But still, when it comes to knowing, really knowing, what America is inclined to do--given that one of its major-party presidential prospects is a hopelessly recidivist nincompoop, and that we're still allowing destruction-slinging Wall Streeters to sling destruction--all one can do is scratch one's befuddled head, and take a wild guess.
The only thing that truly frightens me in this world is the unknowable limit on human stupidity. Well that and to some small degree spiders.
Posted by: Peter G | May 12, 2012 at 11:22 AM