Thursday, October 13, 2016

Sometimes the Good Wins Despite Being Good -- Or Maybe Because of It

It is becoming amply clear that Donald Trump cannot win. He cannot win because his backers are supposed to uphold the moral high ground, and even though many of them are hypocrites, he hasn't given them much choice but to reject his obvious moral lapses. But there are those who support him in the evangelical camp who think that the Bible has precedents for immoral men to be God's anointed. This is all so Vacuum County!

Read Vacuum County to see how this plays out!
For those favoring a purely opportunistic voting strategy, the tables have turned. If you were voting for Trump just to beat Hillary, voting for Trump can no longer achieve that goal. Under the principle of the wasted vote, a vote for Trump is no longer anything but waste, Which means that voting for Gary Johnson just might be less wasteful, given that his backers include those who just want to block Hillary but also a large and incorruptible base that is voting Libertarian. Suddenly the pragmatic choice is not the lesser of two evils, but actually something good. Who would have guessed it?


In a similar twist of fate, the international literati have chosen a poet whose poetry actually scans, despite the fact that it scans -- or is it because of it?


Ever since WWII, people in power have been trying to undermine meaningful literature and poetry that scans.  They've done such a great job of it, that many college professors and professional poets don't know anything about meter in poetry, anymore. And even naive readers have learned to object to the poetry of Kipling as doggerel on the grounds that it is too "sing-songy". Many don't even know that the effect they deride is meter, and that it sounds song-like for very technical reasons, having to do with the interface between music and lyrics,

The powers that be are now so tired of the poetry that is not "music" that they have chosen a musician's lyrics for the Nobel Prize of literature. Is it despite the fact that it scans that Bob Dylan's poetry was acknowledged by the poetry haters -- or because of it?

Sometimes the good is chosen, not despite the fact it is good, but because of it, and the only thing that makes that seem like such a radical choice is the people making it, with their long history of choosing evil over good.

2 comments:

  1. Donald Trump never portrayed himself as a moral person in his career, so I do not understand why people thought he had a complete transformation. I am not a fan of Bill and his antics, but I think the problems starts when we start looking for morality in politicians. I do not want to know about their antics, but I only respect Gary Johnson because he seems like the only one who did not have these issues during his career in business and politics.

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    1. No, I never for one moment thought that Trump was moral, and many of those abandoning him may be hypocrites, though I did not know specifically that he had committed sexual assault until the tape surfaced of him boasting about it. We have known more of this type of information about Bill Clinton for some time, and we know that Hillary condoned it. I have some reservations on Gary Johnson's version of libertarianism, but I have no concerns whatsoever about his ethics when it comes to being a decent human being.

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