The Weekend Eudemon
Well, we're back and at full force. Eric's trip to Nigeria went well.
It was actually another trip to the hospital, this time for a scope down the throat and into the stomach. It's a fairly simple procedure, but there was a small scare when Eric checked in and the nurse said, "You're here for a colonostomy, right?" Startled, Eric said, "No, um ah, I'm here for that throat thing." The nurse explained that someone had mixed up the operations on the chart. Eric replied, "That's all right, just make sure the doctor doesn't mix up the instruments when he puts it in my mouth."
The procedure went well. Eric's has had some stomach pains unrelated to his bum gall bladder, hence the stomach scope. The good news is, Eric isn't a hypochondriac; he does have a health problem. The better news is, the problem isn't serious and can be addressed with a low-impact prescription.
God bless the doctors.
Except those who routinely keep people waiting 30-45 minutes in the waiting room. We've frequently grown exasperated with doctors who value no one's time but their own. Eric has a large number of doctor clients, and he's always tempted to make them stay in the waiting room for 20+ minutes, but alas, Eric values money more than revenge, and doctors always pay their bills.
If you want to take revenge on a doctor who's kept you waiting, complain of stomach pains and give other symptoms that imply a problem with your colon. The doctor will probably suggest you have a colon check. As part of the procedure, you'll probably have to fast and have an enema. Don't do either. When the doctor starts the procedure, tee hee!
Of course, you'll humiliate yourself in the process, but few things worth having come without a cost.
Administrative notice: We're going to disable the comments feature. We bring about 200 people to the site on a week day, a little over 100 on weekend days. Yet we're not getting many comments. We've speculated that our viewer-to-comment ratio is one of the worst in blogdom. Perhaps more troubling, we've begun to get hit by spam. Various web sites (on-line gambling sites mostly) post a benign message ("Nice Site!") and then provide the URL to their site in hopes of increasing their traffic. It's getting to be a hassle to monitor and simply not worth it. We hope y'all understand.
The Punchy Journal
. . . A "mechanical Jacobin." That's how another wise man described the car. When peaceful moments like these are shattered by the metallic beast, I tend to agree with him.
"Jacobin" refers to a group of late eighteenth-century revolutionaries who regularly met in an old Jacobin convent in Paris. Led by the bloody Robespierre, it spearheaded the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution: ten months of mass executions carried out with uncompromising equanimity by the Jacobins, a group of men who never doubted that they held 100% truth and righteousness in their hands, who thought they knew exactly what was needed to bring about a new and improved society, who didn't hesitate to use evil to bring about the new society, who tried to force everyone to come along with them to the new society.
Uncompromising, forcing everyone to the new society. I think that's why that wise man described the car as a "mechanical Jacobin."
Consider the ways the car has an impact on an ordinary guy who would otherwise avoid it: Roads are everywhere. The roads take people–and their speed and loud engines–everywhere. No man–except the self-sufficiently rich who can build a remote country fortress inaccessible to cars–can escape it. If you live in modern society, you must live with the car.
A guy, unless he is willing to be labeled a freak, is also expected to have a car. He must undergo the capital expenditure of buying it, the cost of insuring it and paying for license plates, the cost of repairing it and putting gas in it. Where does he get the money? He works for it, and if he needs to work extra hours for it, he must. The car imposes its demands day and night in the form of extra work, and as a result it takes away the most precious thing of all: leisure.
A guy must also (again, unless he is willing to endure freakhood) conduct his behavior as a guy who has a car. Does someone request your presence at an event one hundred miles away? Big deal, you have a car: drive there. Does a client want you to come to his house five miles away? Drive there. Do all the other kids get driven to school? You better drive your kids, too, unless you want them to feel like freaks.
The roads that accompanied the rise of the car also transformed society. In post-WWII America, we built the freeway system. It cut straight through old neighborhoods, tearing apart ethnicity and depriving people of community. The freeways gave us suburban sprawl by making the commute easier.
All in that name of the mechanical Jacobin . . .
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A few quotes related to the foregoing:
The Jacobin Revolution is carried on by men of no rank, of no consideration, of wild, savage minds, full of levity, arrogance, and presumption, without morals, without probity, without prudence. What have they, then, to supply their innumerable defects, and to make them terrible even to the firmest minds? One thing and one thing only–but that one thing is worth a thousand: they have energy.
What is Jacobinism? It is the attempt to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the people. For this purpose the Jacobins have resolved to destroy the whole frame and fabric of the old societies of the world, and to regenerate them after their fashion. To obtain an army for this purpose, they everywhere engage the poor by holding out to them as a bribe the spoils of the rich.)
Edmund Burke (1729-1797
Values such as love, honor and loyalty do not, cannot thrive, in a sociological vacuum.' They must be cultivated in groups small enough to instill learning and meaningful enough to the individual to convey to him the profound significance to those values. Without such groups, without higher and ennobling purposes, money becomes the common denominator in human relations, and people develop a narcotic-like fascination with money. Cash payment, as Thomas Carlyle wrote, becomes 'the sole nexus between man and man.'
Brad Lowell Stone on the thought of sociologist Robert Nisbet about the need for cohesive neighborhoods.
