Lear's Fool

Lear's fool chided the king, "Thou shouldst not have been old, till thou hadst been wise."
As we close on 40, our aim is to prod wisdom to catch up with age. We leave it to the reader to judge our success.

Friday, November 03, 2006

On Santorum

Once again, Peggy Noonan is right on the money. This nation needs Senator Rick Santorum - and lots more like him besides.

Go listen to this recent speech and see if you don't agree. And see if it's not perfectly clear why this statesman is being booted out of office by the citizens whose best interests he serves.

We're ignorant fools, here in America. We have neither knowledge nor understanding of history. We think we "know politics" because we caught Nancy Pelosi's rant on CSPAN this afternoon, or Howard Dean's latest gaffe on Fox News.

We don't study history anymore, so we're unable to make sense of current events. We don't study political philosophy, so we're clueless as to the various possible solutions to the problems which confront us - problems which are not new, not unique to the 21st century, but which have arisen since time began. We deny the moral sense with which we were born, so we struggle to re-invent a morality fit for mankind. We despise and destroy the virtues, and then expend vast amounts of wealth in various and sundry attempts to diagnose and cure the inevitable social pathologies.

And when a statesman interrupts our fiddle-playing to warn us of a gathering storm, we stick our fingers in our ears with a "lalala I'm not listening lalala", distracting ourselves with ipods, big-screen tvs, cellphones, blackberries - our soma.