It’s been an entertaining week here in the US, which seems like a callous thing to say and, frankly, I’ll cop to the charge. I have been entertained – not by the ongoing misery of Covid-19 and its steady rampage across the country I was born in, and certainly not by the everyday and cast-iron racism in most Western countries that’s only been emphasised and highlighted by recent events. No, I’ve been entertained by the other side of the news, namely the functioning of government. If you can’t be entertained by government, you simply aren’t paying attention, or else you’re some kind of anti-tax nut job who can’t acknowledge that your ability to be an anti-tax nut job is due to the existence of an effectively functioning civil government in the first place.
Statues
Lots of dead white men are coming off their pedestals these days, and I can’t say I’m that exercised about it. The thing about statues is, they are almost never good art. There is good sculpture, of course, and very good full body sculpture – but statuary is almost by definition banal.
Reparations
It being Sunday in north Georgia, obviously, I was listening earlier to The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright on CBC Radio 1. The well-curated program ranged across what one would expect in a North America ripping itself into pieces, but there was a gem in the middle that tried to explain Modern Monetary Theory or MMT, a recently fashionable idea in economics. It’s not a difficult theory, really, and it is fundamentally correct. The theory is as follows:
Milestones
I didn’t realise this until I looked at the website statistics, but with Mark’s last post, we have now reached 150 essays posted to The Essence of Water. Given that we’ll celebrate our three year anniversary in about six weeks, that’s pretty impressive – about one essay a week, on topics from money, to provincial French cities, to swimming in Ireland, to breaking free and learning to study philosophy – and all of it of a common theme, of existing as ethical, moral individuals.
Rites of passage
Right now, my son is looking for his iPad. After seeing him spend two hours watching train videos and play a game called “Township,” which involves spending large amounts of time loading trains with fruit, I told him “screen time is over” and then hid his iPad. It’s in the main entry hall of this ridiculous house – which appears, for those of you who are interested, in season three, episode one of Ozark, a Netflix series, where a squatter lives in this house and cooks on the same stove I use every night. I hid it behind a random work of art which is leaning on the overwrought concrete mantle of a fake fireplace. I doubt he’ll find it soon, but who knows. While he’s looking, I have a bit of spare time.