This is the kind of thing that drives me batty. Our friend Garrison says
here that he is unsure of what a plinth is and I have an overwhelming
urge to tell him, but he is not really here to get my explanation. Oh
well, I guess I will have to pretend. Garrison, a plinth is most
commonly a stone pedestal, but less commonly, and applicable in the case
that you mention it, it is simply a brick.
---
Christopher Hitchens
“ What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
”
― Christopher Hitchens,
On 4/21/2019 8:55 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Old Man Cautions Against Faith in Probability
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
20 April 19
I flew back to Minneapolis for the mid-April snowstorm, as a true Minnesotan
would do. Eight inches of snow instead of palms for Palm Sunday, God
speaking to us: not to be missed. What caused it, of course, was
over-enthusiasm at a 70-degree day, people setting out petunias, putting
away snow shovels.
Do not assume. This was drilled into us as little kiddoes. At Anoka High
School in 1958, we had a great basketball team headed for State and in the
first round of district tournaments it got beaten by a gaggle of farmboys
from tiny St. Francis. Unlikelihood lends disaster a sort of inevitability:
thus, as I board a plane, I think, "This is the end of my life. Goodbye, my
darlings." This acceptance of disaster is what keeps the plane aloft.
Other people imagine that if they exercise regularly and eat more fiber,
they'll live to be 98. I don't. I believe that an exemplary healthful
lifestyle makes it more likely I'll be struck by a marble plinth falling off
a building as I walk to the health club. I'm not even sure what a plinth is
but it's likely that one will kill me.
My grandma used to sing me to sleep with a song about two little children
lost in a blizzard - "they sobbed and they sighed and they bitterly cried,
and the poor little things, they lay down and died" - which is nothing
Mister Rogers ever sang, but Grandma saw no reason to hide harsh reality
from us. She did not tell us to look the other way when she chopped the head
off a chicken. Death was a part of our lives. How many children today have
observed a beloved relative swing an axe and decapitate a bird? Not many.
My fellow Democrats have been assuming for two years that our corrupt King
would be brought to his knees by a keen investigator - and they are now
sadly disappointed and wandering in confusion. Everyone knows he is corrupt
- he himself boasted about it - he grew up admiring men who shrewdly worked
the system to their own benefit, cutting corners left and right, stiffing
the little guys, paying off the big honkers. Public service was never his
thing, not then, not now.
Democrats are horrified by the King, of course, as most people are. He is
compulsively cruel, resolute in his ignorance, proudly illiterate, and on
the one occasion he was seen in church, he did not bother to recite the
Nicene Creed, unlike the four ex-presidents in the church with him. He
doesn't believe in a Holy Trinity but rather a Fearsome Foursome, Himself
included.
So Democrats have launched a couple dozen campaigns against him. Every
Democrat with better than 5 percent name recognition is out on the trail
speaking to crowds of librarians, yoga instructors, poets, birdwatchers, and
organic farmers and talking about climate change, health care, and the need
for civility in public life. Next spring, Democrats will nominate a
beautiful person in a white robe and sandals who holds out his or her arms
and birds come and perch on them.
We assume that this wonderful person will win. That is what should happen,
just as we ought to have daffodils blooming in April. As a Minnesotan, I see
danger in the act of leaping to logical assumptions.
I awake sometimes in the middle of the night, seeing the headline KING
COASTS TO 2ND TERM. Political scientists are astonished - and historians.
But bikers, Baptists, and lovers of horror novels are not. The King is a
living parable, a bad dream become real. We are not an enlightened people.
It is 1856 all over again, except now with social media. Nobody wants to
hear this. When I say these things to my fellow Democrats, they excuse
themselves and go to the kitchen and brew a pot of chamomile tea with
touches of rosemary and warm up a plate of artisanal corn muffins.
They have contempt for the King, his bad grammar, his cruel stare, his love
of the garish, his pettiness, his devotion to his hair, and their contempt
will lead them to nominate a holy progressive who will have his or her lunch
eaten. This is a Minnesotan's view. I am looking out the window at snowy
fields as I write.
Having said that, I am going for a walk. I'll stick close to the curb, to
avoid any falling plinths. Have a good day.
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