another old quote in its new home

We see only what we know.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Meditations in Time of Civil War: The Stare's Nest at My Window



This is an old quote of the day, from a couple of years ago, which I have moved from my old page.
In Richard Powers' recent novel Plowing the Dark, the workers on a big virtual reality project are gathered at a bar watching the news: the Soviet Union crumbling, Yugoslavia balkanizing, Iraq occupying Kuwait,... One of them recalls the following bit of poetry and recites: in a moment not unlike the present...

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.



We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed or a house burned.

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.



A barricade of stone or of wood

Some fourteen days of civil war

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty nest of the stare.



We have fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

- William Butler Yeats

[. . .] we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

Keith Olbermann, "Beginning of the end of America", special commentary on Countdown (MSNBC)

Why do you pity the fool? "You pity the fool because you don't want to beat up a fool," Mr. T explained. "You know, pity is between sorry and mercy. See, if you pity him, you know, you won't have to beat him up."

Interview with "Mr. T" in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 October 2006



Hat tip: Zuska

I have generalized this with a catchy acronym-aphorism — CITOKATE ... or... Criticism is the Only Known Antidote to Error. A practicing scientist knows this, in his or her bones, even as the Cro Magnon ego inevitably tugs in the other direction, murmuring to each of us that we are 100% correct and that critics are all vile fools.

David Brin

[Hat tip: Blake Stacey]

America’s moral integrity was the single most important weapon my platoon had on the streets of Iraq. It saved innumerable lives, encouraged cooperation with our allies and deterred Iraqis from joining the growing insurgency.

But those days are over.

Paul Rieckhoff,the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, in
in an op-ed in the NY Times [may require free registration], the most important thing you can read these days.

My personal favorite poll number is the President’s 2 percent approval rating among blacks. Which is within the margin of error. Which leads to all sorts of mind-boggling possibilities, scientifically: Is it possible that more black people hate the President than are actually alive today? Do you think black ghosts are coming back to hate him? Do you think they can read black sonograms at this point? Are doctors saying, “We don’t know if this is a boy or a girl, but we know this baby hates George W. Bush”?

Stephanie Miller, in an interview with Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive

"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Article III [of the Geneva Conventions] would add to those doubts."

General Colin Powell (retired), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former Secretary of State

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…

When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

— Keith Olbermann, "Special Comment" on Countdown (MSNBC), 11 September 2006 [video]