THE DAM HAS BROKEN

While it is rewarding to have written some social and political criticism that was “Spot On”, I find it puzzling and a little aggravating that it has taken so long for others to come to see and understand more of our current political morass and weakened efforts.

I offer the following from George Stiner’s work: THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY, in the hope that we will mine the depths of truths so essential to our freedoms.EXCERPTS FROM:

THE DEATH OF TRAGEDYBY

GEORGE STINER

Words carry us forward toward ideological confrontations from which there is no retreat. This is the root tragedy of politics. Slogans, clichés, rhetorical abstractions, false antitheses come to possess the mind (the “Thousand Year Reich,” “Unconditional Surrender,” the “class war’). Political conduct is no longer spontaneous or responsive to reality. It freezes around a core of dead rhetoric. Instead of making politics dubious and provisional in the manner of Montaigne (who knew that principles are endurable only when they are tentative), language encloses politicians in the blindness of certainty or the illusion of justice. The life of the mind is narrowed or arrested by the weight of its eloquence. Instead of becoming masters of language, we become its

servants. And that is the damnation of politics. Corneile knew exactly how this process takes place. No dramatist is his equal in rendering the “feel,” the complication, and the cancerous vitality of political conflict. Only Tacitus can rival Corneille in showing how men are embedded in the constricting, mind-clouding matter of political circumstance.

…the characters assume abstract positions and abide by them to the point of ruin. Their free will is mastered and corrupted by political rhetoric.

…The evil of politics lies precisely in this separation of the human person from the abstract cause or the strategic necessity.

…When rulers begin talking of “streams” and “things,” humanity has lapsed from both their language and their intent.

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This attends to the “politics” of a Supreme Court and to the men and women who have sworn to uphold the founding documents of this noble republic. These documents are some of the finest ever produced by the mind, heart, and hand of the species called Humankind. We trifle at the peril of losing their significance and the freedoms of our souls.

Don Davison