Non-Stop Chatter from a Bottomless Supply of Dishonest Fools — Makes It Difficult to Keep Caring about America’s Dribbling Away Future — and the Moral Contrast Presented by Felix Baumgartner’s Attempt to Plunge Earthward from the Edge of Space

© 2012 Peter Free

 

09 October 2012

 

 

The point — a parable of contrast

 

An audacious man’s inspiring courage versus a political culture’s complete lack of worth.

 

Whom we choose to emulate makes a difference.

 

 

My motivation to engage with self-important windbags, including the President and his rival, Mendacious Mitt, seems to be at an all-time low — How about yours?

 

This morning I care far more about Felix Baumgartner’s courageous free fall from the edge of space, than I do about America’s rapidly pissing away future.  Which, judging by the persistently irrelevant blather that surrounds us, is going to lie in the hands of the cowardly brain-dead for at least another decade.

 

Herr Baumgartner’s inspiring attempt to plunge from virtually no atmosphere to full air, protected only by a thin suit, lights the human soul.  Even if he dies in the attempt, we will be more elevatedly human for having known him.

 

Contrast the American political landscape’s unrelieved lack of worth.   A place where honest observations, like the two following, are squashed by the weight of loud, and confidently expressed, duplicitous stupidity.

 

 

Citations — to two articles with merit (drowned in a sea of apathetic irrelevance)

 

Chris Hedges, The Maimed, Truthdig (07 October 2012)

 

Tom Engelhardt, Overwrought Empire: The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power, TomDispatch (07 October 2012)

 

 

You probably will not read either essay — they are (admittedly) an acquired taste

 

The first, by Chris Hedges, is about the soul-price of war.  Only those who have been there, and old souls, will understand the pain that Hedges is addressing.

 

Tom Engelhardt’s essay addresses the conceptually parallel impotence brought on by perennial militarism.  His view is identical to Colonel Andrew Bacevich’s and mine.  Hubris is just as much a sin geopolitically, as it is spiritually.

 

 

The moral? — Admirable audacity combines knowledge of one’s limits with the realistically undertaken endeavor to surpass them

 

American politics, and its leaders, have neither.  Felix Baumgartner, both.

 

I thank you, my un-met friend.