You've been waiting for it, and here it is. "What's this now?" you respond. Why, it's "random ruminations," the sort-of-annual sort-of-list of sort-of-related thoughts I produce at irregular intervals but for which, astonishingly, I've yet to become famous. Previous installment: March 2018. Next: Um … Decebruary?
(1) I have a confession. Although I'm a journalist dealing in a broad range of topics that include our nation's culture clashes, I've not watched any video of the incident involving the MAGA-hat-wearing teens, an American Indian elder and others of mysterious provenance last week on the National Mall in Washington. I saw pictures, of course, and read about it as the news and reactions unfolded and folded back on themselves.
It's not that I find controversies like this unimportant. There's a benefit in discussing them and in trying to get them straight. But a relentless parsing of evidence on matters of opprobrium is not a good use of time, and these debates generate so much nonilluminating wattage that I fear they ultimately have less to do with improvement than with aspirations of superiority on all sides. (If you insist that I admit it, yes, even on the side of abstainers.)
In any case, conflict is a standard feature of society. I have a pragmatic phrase for it, if you will: people behaving behaviorally.
(2) Anger is a most unsatisfying emotion, because in order to be channeled constructively, it must be transmogrified into something that is no longer anger.
(3) As I've aged, my eyesight has been going from bad to worse. I now wear contact lenses with multifocal concentric rings (the brain is supposed to sort it all out), with cheaters on top of that, for reading. With this arrangement, I can see everything I look at, but never as clearly as I'd like. It occurs to me that this is a metaphor.
(4) News arrived Tuesday that Russell Baker, whose nationally syndicated "Observer" column appeared in the New York Times from 1962 to 1998, had died at age 93. That sent me to the internet to read a few of those columns and sift through quotations. Among them: "An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious — just dead wrong." True that, Mr. Baker, and nonetheless, rest in peace.
(5) When Baker began writing his column, the Times obituary reports, "he had in mind casual essays like E.B. White's in The New Yorker, cast in 'plain English' with 'short sentences,' in contrast to what he called The Times's 'polysyllabic Latinate English.' "