02-Jan-2008
Iron Filings – 13
As sexton of the language (one of many), I find that a number of expressions truly annoy me. I don’t mean such things as “like,” as in, “like he called me and, like, I didn’t know what to say,” or the substitution of “to go” for “to think,” as in, “she told me I did it all wrong and I’m going well who do you think you are.” Those are bad enough. But consider the phrase, “went missing,” as in “the woman went missing last Sunday night.” To go anywhere is to go somewhere, but to be missing is to be in no known place. Thus, to say she went missing is to say she went to no known place. Just where might that be? It reminds me of seeing a strange object in the sky and someone saying, “We know what it is.” “What is it?” “It’s an unidentified flying object.” So it is, in other words, a thing such that we don’t know what it is. I have trouble with ‘airport,’ too, but I’ll save that for another time.
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Our local rescue folks recovered over two-hundred living, and three-hundred dead animals – mostly cats and dogs – from the home of a woman not far from here. The home was said to be a foot thick in trash and feces. The woman slept on top of a plastic storage bin. Unrelated, though equally strange, a man and his friend were recently arrested for the rape and murder of the man’s stepdaughter. She was nine years old and her body was found in a cave. I like these kinds of stories because they force the mind to build a framework of understanding around them, but the mind says, can’t do it.
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I’m often surprised over how, when I sit down to write something for Cold Iron or the Fancy Dancer (my blog), I feel like I should write something political. Really, it feels like we’re just buried in it these days. Some of it is probably due to the election cycles and campaigning that seem permanently with us. Yet I think some of it is also due to our politicians thinking of themselves more as amateur philosophers instead of the pragmatic, societal managers they’re supposed to be. Should our president be preaching the gospel of democracy to the world? Or should our president simply see to it that this one works as well as it can? Let the other countries make their own choices.
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I get a kick out of how our TV weatherman finds dire, end-of-the-world prospects in an upcoming ninety-degree hot spell or an imminent two- or three-inch snowfall. I used to think he was simply demented. Then I realized he just wants you to keep tuning in to his station or website. That’s what sells ads.
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I enjoy reading Alexander Cockburn, a liberal writer who often appears in the progressive journal, The Nation. What’s intriguing about him right now is that he’s a huge doubter of much of the “science” behind our current brouhaha over global warming. Whether or not we’re all tilting toward some whopping centigrade tsunami is not the point. Emerging orthodoxies can often push us into behaviors that are painful, disruptive, and occasionally deadly. We need doubters in everything – a lesson René Descartes taught us long ago.
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We worry about Social Security as the huge demographic lump of baby boomers nears retirement, although it really ought to be a non-worry since normal life expectancies make it a self-liquidating problem. Unfortunately, our capitalistic urge toward profitability is going to see a huge number of retirement/nursing/hospice venues built with an equally huge number of them empty by around 2040.
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Many times now I’ve tried wandering around such venues as MySpace and YouTube, largely because we’re told so often that therein lies the future. Unfortunately, therein also lies unintelligible narcissism along with the greatest indictment of contemporary language teachers (mostly English) one could want.
G. K. Wuori © 2008
Photoillustration by the author
