sisyphusshrugged | flipping and flopping

Just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as the northern star
And I said, constantly in the darkness
Where's that at
If you want me I'll be in the bar

We all, occasionally, are wrong. Hell, my extended indiscreet youth lasted almost as long as George Bush's, although without quite as much chemical assistance.

Here's a question, though, that I've been wondering about quite a bit: what do you think does the most damage - being wrong, or refusing to fix things that are broke because it would mean admitting you were wrong?

How about getting in deeper because if you didn't keep going in the wrong direction it'd look as if you thought you were wrong?

I don't think any of the (minority of) people who voted for George Bush and the people who float in his wake voted for what we have now. I think most of them voted for someone who said that they were going to be reasonable and find a way to make things better that everyone who wasn't on the absolute fringes could live with.

Well, his record didn't reflect that, but the papers didn't talk about his record too much, and people (it seems to me) said to themselves that he seemed like, said he was, a moderate kind of guy who would fix things.

Didn't really work out that way.

Then we were attacked, and folks on both sides of the aisle with their reflexes conditioned by civics classes believed, deeply, some of them, that when our country is under attack, you support the president, and he has the best information and the best resources to protect us, and it was best not to stand in the way.

Well, again, it was a righteous impulse, but that turned out not to have been a really great idea either.

There were and are, we keep finding out, people in the White House and environs who thought of the 9/11 attacks as a golden opportunity to take care of other business and took it.

Unfortunately one more time, all is not gold that you spend far too much money on.

So now we have a mess. We have a mess because we as a people prefer to trust if we can, and we have a mess because the people some of us trusted don't recognize that trust confers an obligation, and we have a mess because neither war nor diplomacy should be in the hands of people who think their perspective is the only one that deserves attention or even understanding.

Mostly why we have a mess, though, is that up and down the line the people running this show made the decision that they didn't have to reconsider anything or change course or even get a little more information in the light of events because they knew they were right.

In the words of a holy book said to be popular with the people in the inner councils of power which they don't appear to have read,

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

and that is why if you're going to have to live on sand for a while, you build a tent so you can move it if you have to.

The arabs could have told us that, if someone had asked them.

I think it's also worth pondering why it is that the campaign of a man who was, for a short time, very popular with the american public before they really got a good look at him and his policies is being quite so insistent that it's a moral flaw to change your mind.

Consistency is a virtue. Obduracy and excessive pride are not.

We were all, to one degree or another, played by these people. If you were, you're in a boat with most of the rest of the country. Practically no-one is in a position to look down on you for it. (Conversely, I always think one looks particularly foolish trying to cut one's fellows down to size for the sin of having gotten the right answer before it was popular - read up on the rhetorical battle between the "premature antifascists" and the anti-Stalinist "fascism apologists" if you want to break your heart and think a little less of everyone concerned).

I respect the instinct to stay the course, but the pearls are getting a little scant these days, and they're unlikely to distract a charging swine.

These are not people who own their own mistakes. Please don't volunteer to own their mistakes for them.

They're not a grateful bunch.

< /rant >

I'm also posting a link to George Orwell's Politics and the English Language because I think people need to keep reading it until they get it, and then after that because it's just so damn good.