Ok, only 3/4 of a bottle of moderately palatable wine, the which amount I wouldn't consume in a week normally, so, well, you make the call...at any rate, I've given roughly half of the readership of this blog license to blast away...
But to the chase: I'm 2.489 sheets to the moderately surging breeze, and I'm laying (lying?) in bed, exactly halfway through a triptych epic of literature that is known, market-wise, as "The Baroque Cycle." I just turned the page where the "cycle's" heroine, Eliza, the financial and sexual sorceresse who is in the process of sawing away at the capo of that we know variously as "monarchy," "oligarchy," or "whatever you call this bullshit we are witnessing on CNN and FOX this evening."
Any Neal Stephenson phans out there? Well if not, here's the money quote that got me off the mattress and onto the keyboard, from page 412 of the second volume, "The Confusion," (hardbound), a quote from Thomas Hobbes:
Where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater the ruin
,
I know, Hobbes was a monarchist - just as Marx was a communist (who said "Religion is the opiate of the masses"), and as Jesus was a christian (who said, "Love your neighbor as yourself"): famous people are always uttering valid truisms and maxims that their followers faithfully ignore.
But I digress. Brilliance comes in all shades and hues, and Hobbes was brilliant, even though he was shackled to an historical pylon called "divine right of Idiocy." Whatever.
The points being: that we are still saddled with the vestiges of aristocracy and accretionism that have given us the likes of not just George W. Dipshit, but Joe W. Marblemouth and Al W. Gormless. They are all putting the finishing touches on the castles that are encapsulating us like the silk encasements of so many caddis fly larvae.
Oh, and those castles are collapsing. I've been hit by falling gargoyles, have you?
That is all. Go back to your regularly scheduled programming.