Tuesday, October 7, 2014

The View from Moot Point

Today's electronic scribble is of value actually only for me. Sorry how that works out for you. And when I say ‘value’ I think I mean therapeutic only.

I’m watching a situation develop that I can neither stop nor steer and to make it more frustrating for me, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms to “be careful what you type” a warning with just an undertone of menace which is not the best way in the world to recruit me for your cause but recruitment is about as far from the goal as imaginable.

I remember the first time I read Joseph Heller’s brilliant first novel Catch-22, while I was an undergraduate at Rutgers University (#CHOPMICHIGAN #WOULDTHATWEHADTHESAMEENTHUSIASMFORANEWCHEMLAB), strange how jocks still rule, and thinking it was the funniest book I’d ever read.

Forty years later (#!!), the humor is a little thin as the wisdom “Catch-22 says we have the power to do to you anything you do nothave the power to stop us from doing” fills up the room, displacing all the oxygen while making the art of breathing impossible.

Except, as it turns out, that’s the point, leaving me to remember Ben Shahn and ‘you have not converted a man because you have silenced him.’
 
To be continued? absolutely.

-bill kenny 

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