By Jim Heffernan
I hate being held up at the supermarket by someone who examines every package of meat with a degree of care that prompts me to say, “They’re looking for pearls.”
I spend an inordinate amount of time scanning my computer, sifting through mainly dreck in search of pearls of wisdom. I mostly encounter bits of useless trivia that I remember but briefly. It lets me ignore chores that I should be doing, but accomplishes little else.
Sometimes I do find a pearl and here’s one I feel compelled to share. It was in an unlikely essay by a Catholic theologian, David Bently Hart, who was deploring Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees.
He included a 147 word paragraph that better describes what six years of MAGA inspired politics has brought us than anything I have read for ages.
Here it is, it’s from his recent book, A Gathering of Leaves: Extravagances and Ephemera.
“The analogy is imperfect but irresistible. America, with its decaying infrastructure, its third world public transit, its shrinking labor market, its evaporating middle class, its expanding gulf between rich and poor, its heartless health-insurance system, its mindless indifference to a dying ecology, its predatory credit agencies, its looming Social Security collapse, its interminable wars, its metastasizing national debt, and all the social pathologies that gave it a degenerate imbecile and child-abducting sadist as its president, remains the only developed economy in the world that believes it wrong to use civic wealth for civic goods. Its absurdly engorged military budget diverts hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the public weal to those who profit from the military-industrial complex. Its plutocratic policies and libertarian ethos are immune to all appeals of human solidarity. It towers over the world but promises secure shelter only to the fortunate few.”
The 411 page book was just published this month and is not yet available from Tillamook County Library. It is available at Cloud and Leaf Bookstore, Manzanita
As always, discussion welcome at codger817@gmail.com
