How Tart It Is (And Away We Go)

By the way, I've started rereading Voltaire's Candide. I'd forgotten how bracing its cynicism is, how disrespectful of absolutes and of grief over their absence. I love the "hot" political bloggers who (rhetorically speaking) hack off Bush's legs and watch him dissolve in flames. And I certainly think that "we" are closer to an accurate view of the world -- a view that will at least retard the dissolution of people and systems -- than "they" are.

But it is refreshing to step back and, like Voltaire's Candide on the last page, listen to:

Martin -- "We must work without arguing. That's the only way to make life bearable"

And then say, like Candide (to Pangloss praising the chain of events that brought them to this moment in this "best of all possible worlds") -- "That's true enough, but we must go work in the garden."

Midnight Addendum: Hmmmm. The mood has passed. I've ordered a 'Hillary in 2008' poster. For did not Voltaire also say:

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

A little gardening, a little agitating and then a nice piece cake: It's called multitasking.