 
Life is not the kind of film where everything turns out as we would like.
Even so, I prefer it un-cut.
   
For me 'bootstrap' is primarily a computer term but its history goes back ... see Wikipedia, which gets it right: a metaphor.
An un-bootstrap then, a 'bootstrap (not!)', might be an 'energy drain' (as we used to call it back in the day).
Maybe 'soi distant' has something to do with it. Who said that? Was it ee cummings?
The varieties of free-rider (for show not blow as they say about pocket-handkerchiefs): bureaucrats, 'career' politicians, consultants; have been called 'barnacles on the Ship of State'.
Apt, for anyone who knows anything about boats.
In the inshore Newfie fishery we called it 'slub' - a combination of barnacles & seaweed growing on the hull - slows you down, uses more fuel &c.. Once in a while you put your punt up on the beach at high tide, scrape and re-paint with red-lead, and float her off again on the next tide.
If Jesus comes back (if he was ever here in the first place) he might throw the consultants out of the temple this time eh? And that would be the (merciful) end of the United Church of k-k-Canada being as it's 99 & 44/100ths percent consultants.
When we make the movie Rob Ford can play the forerunner: a combination of John the Baptist and George the Gravy Train Killer waddling about in the Credit River in a toga with one of those big floppy gloves that says "I'm #1!". |
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It doesn't matter how you worship, as long as you're down on your knees."Leonard Cohen, 'Light As The Breeze', 1992.
  
   
One question that might fall begging out of this: Are all humans nowt but hangers on? Is it in the OEM spec? Some doom enthusiasts say so:
But things may not (always? ever?) be what they first seem. Predilections ('dilection' being spiritual or Christian love) and assumptions are potent root causes of opinion. They fatally distort & fog the lenses and mirrors of the intellectual telescope. A-and they can be so deeply buried (metaphors and such like) within the psyche.
Still, in the language there is gradation: a calling, a vocation, a career, a pastime (better in French passe-temps), solitaire, solipsism ... just a clue ... And another - when you hear yourself saying, 'That's obvious!' or 'Obviously' or 'Of course' or 'Clearly' you might just wanna give your head a little shake cuz maybe it ain't.
Smoking is suicide they say. Maybe mining tarsands and burning the refined oil/gasoline/plastic/fertilizer is a kind of civilizational smoking - a bad habit yeah, but hey! I'm addicted! Even W thought he knew that one.
BUT
As P.W. Anderson points out in a 1972 paper in Science, 'More Is Different - Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science': "... the twin difficulties of scale and complexity ... at each level ... entirely new properties appear ...". An example of this can be found in another paper I remember seeing in Scientific American about the same time in which a systems analyst proves that above a certain number of lines of code more bugs are introduced with each change than are fixed.
These observations have a certain weight. Could it be common sense I wonder?
The pervasive and ubiquitous coupling of 'passive' and 'aggressive' suggests to me that blaming the victim is a bog-standard and fundamental human mode.
You can see it in Toronto as they jockey for position at the shelves in a supermarket: each one at once apologizing for stepping in front and clearly either reduced to merest passivity or not giving a rat's ass.
Why did everyone turn on me?
There once was a man named Moby Dick
Who had the misfortune to be born with a corkscrew prick.
All his life he did search and hunt
To find a woman with a corkscrew cunt.
When he found her he dropped down dead.
The sonofabitch had a left-hand thread. |
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