Pushing seventy, we remain exremely prolific… compose well thought-of lyrics and music (ask, we’ll tell), produce informed and (dare we say) literate blog comments on topics ranging from climatology to Planet Earth’s location in Sagittarius where Crux branches off from Carina, to certain Stoic meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and so on.
Read Jacques Barzun, “Dawn to Decadence” (c. 1996). Therein you will find Western Civilization from 1450 – 1950… Barzun tends to scant mathematical logic (Godel), most economists; genomic biochemistry, quantum physics; AI, computer sciences, robotics– in a word, conceptual underpinnings of the modern age from Maxwell on. So what– he composed this magisterial treatise as Emeritus Professor at age ninety-four, whereas today’s closeted and formulaic academics wouldn’t know Byzantium from Baltimore. Meantime, we are completing a 180,000-word literary fable regarding Wise Learning and Right Choice, which agent says “has merit– powerfully original”. Maybe Rubius Hagrid will obtain a remaindered copy.
This blogger-vs.-credentialed doofus controversy is much overblown. If it’s worth reading –interesting and informative, suggestive of context and perspective– we’ll give it a scan. But TV since the mid-1960s, print media (papers and periodicals) from the early 1980s, have actively hindered any disinterested observer’s efforts to obtain broad-based, rational coverage of any topic. Hyper-partisanship, supercilious scare-mongering, extraordinary ignorance and ill-will regarding economics, non-sectarian religion, historic socio-cultural norms, have reduced “reporters” to guttersnipes sieving backed-up sewers of their own devising.
Just this week, a recent Dartmouth graduate called Ragos (yes?) applied his sophisticated expertise to a kindergarten-level rant about how anyone outside corporate cubicles can hardly spell “floccipaucinihilipilification” (coined by Edward de Vere, The Bard, commonly designated “Spear Shaker” from Oxford’s association with chaste Athena, Goddess of Wisdom portrayed by Phidias in the Parthenon). Ragos’ somewhat truncated vocabulary ought to include ye olde Floccipauci, for his proclivities exemplify it: “Habitual denigation”, a dolt’s tendency to dismiss anything beyond his impoverished comprehension, i.e. everything that challenges his self-serving, preconceived worldview.
We’ll take honest comment, careful observation, informed theses by bloggers over mass-media’s destructive propaganda anytime. Eight years old or eighty, anything you say will likely prove superior to such Buggywhip Award contenders as Ragos the Reminiscent– “so young and yet so vile” (Cato).
