"First then, wilt thou suffer me a few questions...to test the state of thy mind?"

Though royal purple soothes his pride,
And snowy pearls, his neck adorn,
Nero in all his riot lives
The mark of universal scorn
Yet he on reverened heads conferred
Th' inglorious honours of the state.
Shall we, then, deem them truly blessed
Whom such preferment hath made great?


The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius is one of those lost treasures of the dreary old Western canon. It is beautiful, lyrical, and that most dangerous of things for Academia-- passionate. Written by a Roman civil servant while awaiting a terrifying execution for false charges of sedition, The Consolation deals, as one might expect from that background, primarily with the problem of evil. As Boethius laments his loss of station and fortune, he is doctored back to spiritual health by Philosophy incarnate. In the course of their dialogue on the futility of worldly honors, the preceding verse is deployed to underscore a key claim: That honors received by a savage tyrant (and thus, by a savage state), are not honors at all. That recognition and acceptance from evil is something to cause shame-- not elation.

And now, Obama receives his laurel wreath; his authority over a government, and thus a people, whose viciousness is only matched by their self-satisfaction. He does not so much offer hope as he implores that we be hopeful, or more directly-- that we (and the international community) offer his administration a kind of divorce from the ethical history of his predecessors. But I never owned slaves, why should I be punished for all that oppression? Cynicism in regards to the ethical bent of the new administration is wrong despite having full knowledge of all the monstrosities concocted by everyone who's held that office since I woke up in history class because he's never been President before. As though the 85 year old man who has hated scrambled eggs since he was a child only does so because he hasn't tasted mine yet.

We kill, we torture, we starve. We've always done it, and we've always ignored anyone who tried to tell us about it. Obama is clearly an intellect of this first rank, a man who supped at all the finest tables American academia. He knows all of this, there is no way he cannot-- and yet he still asks. He is no fool and so he must be a liar.

As a wise man once said when asked: What is to be done?
Buy a gun. Practice.