Doug “Uncola” Lynn touts John D. MacDonald’s Travis Mcgee series, and backs it up with some great quotes. From Lynn at theburningplatform.com:
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
– C. S. Lewis (1942), “The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil”, p.8, HarperCollins UK, 2009
While having breakfast with a friend the other day, they commented on an article they had recently read online. The article was about the discouragement of free speech at Ivy League colleges, and Harvard in particular. I told them I saw the headline but never read the actual findings. In any event, I said I wasn’t surprised… but what did surprise me was that the article showed up on their particular newsfeed; and, for them, I would have expected the online algorithmic process to have distilled the findings into another headline such as: “Harvard Leads Ivy League in Prohibiting Hate Speech”.
The person with whom I was speaking was non-political. They are mainstream America. So, given my understanding of the Orwellian Media, I was surprised to learn that an article about free speech, and critical of Harvard University, would show up on their Smartphone. Unless, of course, something else was at play politically regarding the widely disseminated “information”?
I so enjoy your musings, Doug. Yes indeed, the metaphorical devil is in the details.
As our beloved America (you know, the one of Jefferson’s moral/political abstractions of the individual’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) circles the drain of duty, sacrifice, while steadfastly clinging to the moral abstraction of being the “keeper” of our brothers claimed well-being – in however many of the endless devilish details one might fashion, the imaginary “Devil” continues to retain his successful cloaking device.
How bout this? Instead of our brother’s “keeper,” why not his simple “guardian?” Whereby we do not impose the tyranny of “keeping” him, we instead, simply pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to “guard” his right to his own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness?
We pledge never to abrogate his right to his own life, irrespective of how many of his own “devilish details” to which he might succumb, or whether he chooses to believe he has succumbed to the “Devil” himself?
That we pledge to do so irrespective of whether said Devil is ever shed of his cloaking device?
Dave