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Pitchfork © 2010
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Freely quote with attribution

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Do not foresee a moment, a battling; foresee two years and more, a
warring.  Pitchfork

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Jorge [George] Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás

Sounds good.  Reads well.  Kinda rhythmic.  ‘Fork wish he wrote it?  Nah.

Paying attention to the other guy’s story pays dividends of understanding state of mind or lack thereof: state and mind. 

Let’s look some more at Jorge’s.

‘Fork enjoys most of what he’s read of Santayana’s work . . . except, for example, this line about “ . . . remember the past . . . condemned to repeat . . .”  The thing’s in the words and the thoughts they conjure.  Makes ‘fork itch.

• To ‘remember’ much stuff for a long time is not a strength of ‘fork’s.  Doesn’t matter what stuff.  Just stuff.  Lots of stuff.  He’s selective about memorables.  He figures it’s so with most folks.

• And the ‘past’ covers more than the ‘fork could ever have time, talent, and temperament to reckon comprehensively and conclusively.  He figures it’s so with most folks.

• Plus, Yogi can get you to thinking . . .

The future ain't what it used to be.

Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra

. . . neither is the past, with new authors and agendas . . .

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies

as a street [lady] with syphilis.
Arthur Schopenhauer

• The ‘condemned’ has to be about human nature fatalistically and not faithfully, as Jorge was agnostic.  Dubiety about God is a loss that keeps on taking.

• That ‘repeat’ conviction similarly forces as inviolate and vainglorious.  Oh sure, you can make a moment of it philosophically.  Oh sure, there are patterns to life at summary levels, say, birth and . . . and summative and sorta-same forms of fun and f..lishness and frustrations and frailties in between. 

It's not true that life is one d... thing after another;

it is one d... thing over and over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

• However, where ‘fork’s bare feet hit the ground, he doesn’t see institutions and eras, births and [else] abounding.  

I know histhry isn't thrue, Hinnessy, because it ain't like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that'll show me th' people fightin', gettin' dhrunk, makin' love, gettin' married, owin' th' grocery man an' bein' without hard-coal, I'll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure.

Mr. Dooley, Finley Peter Dunne

 

‘Fork sees individuals, opportunities to avail, and obstacles to avoid, his America a train chugging to worse before better.  It may be the nub of ‘fork’s discontent with the opening quote – clinical, antiseptic, not lighting up the people to whom Mr. Dooley’s looking for legitimacy, impersonal, inhuman, institutional. 

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Terry Eagleton

It is a cosmic perversion of identity, a tortured theocracy that godless government must make a divine presentation.

‘Fork thinks that Santayana and others are blinded to the nonexistential and the honorable in humanity by their faithlessness.  Human behavior is foregone, a cycling in time, to be done and done again.  Spirituality seems a mystery, even limitedly to probative thought, contemplation, imagination that Becker himself typed as ‘trouble’.

“But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and [else], the meaning of a rose or a star cluster—then he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them.”  Ernest Becker

In his American lifetime, ‘fork’s observed increase in the coreless, the unprincipled, the secular, the relativist, the situationalist, the collectivist in places high and low. The source of their succor and security:  gubmint, one way or another.  Becker’s right.  American society [read, evermore: American gubmint] maps most lifetimes through side streets of submission and servility and sameness, detours and cul-de-sacs of dependence and domination – to The American Way, deconstruction zones all.

Tensions between the governing and governed are not resolved in zero-sum games.  Both governing and governed lose.  The former lose liberty, livelihood, and lives.  Additionally, the latter also lose trust and the temples and other trappings of power.  Maybe this rendition of historical banes is of Jorge’s ‘repeat’?

The deepest, the only theme of human history,

compared to which all others are of subordinate importance,

is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Government cannot present goodness, morality.  ‘Fork knows that’s come and long gone hereabouts.  So government must express its superiority, if only by force on ‘fork and other folk, and ‘fork and other folk are expected to express forbearance, compliance, indulgence in civil deference and deferral. 

Military matters moved over, lacking competition from without and within, functional incompetence of governance is ‘fork’s shrugged modality. 

Elements of dissolution:  pride; dishonesty; immorality; inequities; favoritism; disrespect; dishonor; reckless executive and enforcement; reckless legislation, reckless adjudication, arrogance; avarice; conceits; deceits; broken rules; broken promises; broken livelihoods; broken lives; broken families.

Expectation's mutuality with purpose and meaning interests:

• Divination of a sort – by derivation borne of reason, justification, experiential judgment, or so forth – as antecedent 

• Divination of another sort – inquiry, variously – as precedent

• Both as precedent and antecedent, expectation, purpose and meaning demand founding in a belief system no matter how sterile, for degrees of separation from uncertainty.  Uncertainty – to despair, despondency, and dread – are the antitheses of expectation, purpose, and meaning, including the deconstruction of The American Way.

Pray lest it be thus, to fuzz-up the purpose and meaning of governance with unreliability and distrust in cascading elements of dissolution and, therewith, expectation.

If history teaches anything about the causes of revolution - and history does not teach much but still teaches considerably more than social-science theories - it is that a disintegration of political systems precedes revolutions, that the telling symptom of disintegration is a progressive erosion of governmental authority, and that this erosion is caused by the government's inability to function properly, from which spring the citizens' doubts about its legitimacy. 
Hannah Arendt 

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Every indicatory declaration about America’s tomorrows with which ‘fork’s reckoned embraces a swift unraveling, a rush to subsidence and chaos.