Both my inner poet and my inner scientist were completely unprepared to deal with the fragile, frequently fraudulent, fluid and , honestly, weird interplay of the abstract and the particular in the language of american politics. While they are arguing on how to wrest the truth from that interplay, little gets written. My inner monk staggers by once in a while, leaving the impression that he is either drunk or stunned by the loosey goosey acrobatics and alchemy by which the general and the specific are transmuted one into the other and back in newspapers, in blogs, on TV or from the lecterns and edicts of appointed, elected or more-or-less-elected persons in our government but most of all, in the arguments between my poet and my scientist. My poet loves the generalizations and feels nothing else will span the gaps between where we are and truth. My scientist accepts no coin but fact. Little facts to be amassed and sorted and finally linked like the pearls on a strand to produce a necklace of truth. Today the monk interrupted the bickering:
"How did you two ever agree to issue only communiques with no references to real persons and events? Can you know nothing and still tell the truth?"
"No way! " they shouted in unison.
And then he shuffled off mumbling "weigh, weigh, weigh..."
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