Miseducation, Miseducation, Miseducation.....

And he would have been vomiting up all
the homophobia, the racisn and both combined,
along with all the short term coping mechanisms
he ever had to rely upon to keep on writing
until he could stand, talk and trust that he knew
his listener believed him and took him at face value.

 

Kierkagaard Never Lived Through a Pandemic

But for good and ill he knew terror
and anguish in his everyday life,
as other people proved their foolishness to him
in their misuse of commonplace reason.

Where he found faith to be about an obedience
that was deep thought out, and highly personal,
he also found people around him had no interest.

And for us today we find it hard to believe,
less in the Christianity that he aspired to believe in,
more in how easy it is for any of us to become the carriers
 of the virus, Covid 19, in which it is even harder 
 to obey the rules that stop it spreading.

But the example and absurdity of Kierkagaard's life
could have warned us that to not trust other people
we have first to learn to not trust jn ourselves....

 

Benjamin Franklin Wrote

in 1789 to his friend Jean Baptiste Leroy
about 'the certainty of death and taxes'.
Daniel Defoe used a similar phrase
in his 'Devil's Dictionary', written sixty
years earlier.
Has the phrase lost resonance with modernity
because we have ceased to credit The Devil,
and deliver him his due?
Or has the phrase died because we are now
more indifferent to death
and more cynical about government and taxation?

Death and taxes are as certain now
as they ever were. But the new
capitalism is accompanied by an
absolute belief in growth, measured
purely by money.
In the older more limited growth the certainty
of taxes was relatively simple,
and growth was measured wider.
The new measures of growth depend
more than we prefer to think on
the armies of accountants and lawyers
who find legislative loopholes for use
by those rich enough
to believe that what they have is worth hoarding
in tax havens.
The value of these secret secretions
rests on the belief that the effort required
will outweigh the cost-the drain on the creativity,
relationships and energy for the activities
which are the origins of the wealth.

The hoarding is where death reaps
his reward, and where the devil returns,
disguised, unawares to us all....  

For A Longer Life....

A Mr Breuning of Montana died today,
when asked about his longevity
he advised 'Embrace change for a longer life'.
At 114 years old permanence embraced him.

As Philip Marlowe Said

If I wasn't hard
I would not be alive
If I were not gentle
I would not deserve to live.