The Nightingale And the Rose

Pardon me while I don’t quite bite. Anything can be spun, including facts and numbers - like ‘the economy is improving’ and ‘unemployment is decreasing‘ and ‘green‘ jobs are the future. It’s generally done by introducing a ‘new’ method of counting, using ‘new’ parameters and a different basket of assumptions. In education, overall results are generally improved by lowering the bar and dumbing down tests.

All this frantic fudging does not change a single thing of significance. Obama is still a socialist (whether we say it or not). And he may even be a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood for all we know (whether we even dare ask the question).

Partisanship has nothing to do with it. The proof is in the pudding. America is slipping, the dollar is slipping, our educational system is not producing and we are making mistakes in every area of endeavor relative to the rest of the world.

Whether we point it out or not, whether or not we’re turning off our radios because we’re sick of hearing about it, it’s happening at an alarming rate.

I note that the Batchelor show has one big advantage over everybody else in the business: he doesn’t take calls. Therefore he’s spared the tedious bleating of the inarticulate, the partisan poisoned, and the uninformed. Batchelor only talks to ‘experts’; meaning, that what has made them experts is in large part their familiarity and comfort level regarding language. This translates well to radio. It does not mean, however, that the ‘great unwashed’ - the rest of us - have nothing to say.

While everyone likes to claim the people’s support for whatever murderous scheme they might find themselves accessories to, they remain prepared to drop public opinion for expediency’s sake. In Beck’s case, I am not so sure his being dropped from major markets has so much to do with poor ratings as with his fingering of the great puppet master himself: Soros, who seems to have his fingers in every conceivable pie - just as I never believed that the re-elections of Reid and Pelosi were entirely free of electoral fraud.

I just finished reading ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ by Oscar Wilde. It is one of the stories that came in a volume published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin. Like Grimm’s fairy tales, the themes in these stories are not necessarily all clover and honey. Some serious issues are explored here under guise of clear language and simple metaphor. ‘Nightingale’ for instance explores the notion of personal sacrifice for a lost cause. It can bring tears to a child’s eyes and continue to haunt into adulthood.

In America, there have been many more such sacrifices than those currently living here. In fact, it could even be said, that every grave in America holds the remains of a martyr who had some sense of the eternal. What would any of them say if they were to come back today and watch the rose tossed carelessly aside to be crushed by an unseeing wagon wheel? Would they be impressed by the gloss of manipulated polls and surveys? Or would they be moved to weep at the flag (they fought and died for in some cases) being dragged through the muddy streets of our relentless discontent?

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