No Bottom in Sight....

The Zen of confronting George W.

Some of the ancient philosophies teach that the only way to attain something is to give up all hope of ever attaining it. You must let go before you can embrace, but you must also hornswoggle your mind that you really don't care about embracing that "something" to begin with. Then you can, and will, even though you don't care to, but of course you do, which is why you're letting go in the first place.

It's all a bit of a mind trick, but it does seem to be the only path to sanity these days when it comes to contemplating America's future.
It doesn't have one.

Well, of course it has one -- whether good or ill -- but perhaps we must first forego all hope of it ever regaining any virtue before it can, or will. Put another way -- in the way of the most commonplace vernacular -- perhaps we must hit rock bottom before achieving any ascent.
But the bottom must be an honest bottom. We can't just declare that we've hit rock bottom so can now begin the climb. We must know, with an absolute certainty, that America, at home and abroad, has bottomed out and is now thoroughly, officially, doubtlessly virtueless.

We've been fooled before. We've regularly declared that the Bush administration cannot dig us any deeper or take us any lower or be any more disingenuous and deceitful and virtueless. But it then surprises, digging us deeper after all, and proving that nope, we really haven't hit rock bottom yet.

This week the administration proved this once again, with its defense secretary "caution[ing] that an official assessment on the impact of the troop increase due in September and ordered by Congress might not present a full picture of the situation in Iraq." Said the secretary: "There still will be a lot of uncertainty." In short, they lied again, and this time on a matter that only appeared to be subject to unsquirmability.

Two days earlier Tony Snow provided the preview, saying he had "warned from the very beginning about expecting some sort of magical thing to happen in September. What I'm saying is, in September you'll have an opportunity to have metrics." That's all. Just metrics.
So see? America hadn't hit rock bottom at all. There was still some element of virtue -- that of actually living up, just once, to an ironclad promise made -- that was dangling out there, yet to be dispatched to the netherworld of deceit.

But we were only disgusted because we still had hope. Worse, some will hang on to the hope that Congress will actually do something in September about the administration's latest bait-and-switch, which is, of course, pure folly.

No, we must let go. We must accept that there are yet depths of absolute virtuelessness that remain to be dug. Rock bottom is still out there.

In hopelessness, there is hope. It's one of those paradox things.


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.