The Pelosicrats appeared to have raised shamelessness to a virtue. Rangel, Geithner, Daschle, the names resonated through Vice’s “black trumpet” — the names of those too important, too “indispensable,” to be called to account for their “mistakes.”
Press and public are all agog about Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who so adroitly set that crippled airliner down in the Hudson River, Friday afternoon.
In a just world Mr. Ward Churchill, the Colorado “scholar,” would be forced to walk around wearing a T-shirt like one of my grandsons wears occasionally — the one that says “I make stuff up.”
It has often been noted that even the most realistic literature, plays and films fail to capture authentic human conversation — not because they cannot, but because narrative movement and character revelation demand some enhancement of the frequently incoherent, awkward and oh so boring way we humans talk to each other. Ingenious written dialogue achieves the right “ring” of authenticity while incorporating the economy and condensed revelation of art.
As his fellow French revolutionaries voted to execute Louis XVI and couched their votes in grandiloquent phrases of condemnation and excoriation, Joseph Sieyes is reported to have cast his vote with these three simple words, “Death, without phrases.”
