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Unpopular Ideas

Ramblings and Digressions from out of left field, and beyond....

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Location: Piedmont of Virginia, United States

All human history, and just about everything else as well, consists of a never-ending struggle against ignorance.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Salutary Avoidance

If they are at all interested in having equanimity and peace of mind, all decent Americans owe it to themselves to arrange and to conduct their lives in ways that allow them to be as little affected as is humanly possible by national and state governments, including the courts, and -- obviously -- the fire department. The reason is that, with the exception of the fire department, all those institutions can and do become thoroughly infested with churls, knaves, rascals, scoundrels, thugs, and outright dummies.

In that light, with so many of that sort sharing the same air and water, the District of Columbia must nowadays be an extremely unhealthy place for living.

That wasn't one of the controlling factors that I had in mind when, over 25 years ago, I left that city where I had been born, raised, and educated, though I now rejoice in that side benefit, since those running the Federal Government now are of an even lesser caliber than earlier. In its zeal to dominate, the Republican Party has seen to that. But I had always lamented the way that the rest of the nation's citizenry felt free to send all those ill-chosen Chief Executives, Senators, Representatives, and judges to essentially join their dogs, i.e. their helpers and parasites, in figuratively crapping in my front yard when I hadn't done the same in theirs.

Even worse, all these undesirables, once they had settled in, would feel that they had the right and the inalienable duty not only to run D.C. in place of its native citizenry, but also to criticize and condemn unrelentingly all aspects of the city, especially its climate and the apparent art of driving in the snow.

Other capitals of other empires, current and ancient -- London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Athens -- didn't have that problem, because the decent and the indecent sorts tended to pile up together in the one city. So the U.S. may be more fortunate, by being able to consign all those rectal types with all their overweening pretensions to the marble blocks of one of the country's smaller large cities, squeezed between Virginia and Maryland, where they are out of the way and can be comfortably ignored most of the time.

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