"I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least";(1) and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it...
"After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."
Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.
The flying, the swooping and the fall, the front doors that lured us into cosy environs. He was gorgeous, laid out there in the Berlin of my youth, perfect; physically; handsome, beyond handsome, and in the random nature of those drunken nights, which in reality had begun so much earlier in the night, and we walked and walked, in search of the replay, trying to find that same doorway again, trying to find that apartment where surely I would be welcome, which I should never have left so blasely the next morning, after that superb night.
I knocked on the doors of people I had never met, surely it was this one, surely this, trying to explain in broken German who I was looking for, backing off embarrassed, but convinced, that behind one of these doors lay my future, my love, the answer to the emptiness which never went away. I would start by drinking some red liqueur which was popular in the city, kroust, I think it was pronounced, switch to beer, back to the red. I would search all the same bars; and found his car in the street once; and wrote a hello; saying which bar I was in. It was all hopeless and the money ran out; and when they got used to seeing me drunk every day the drinks that used to appear magically before me from all those eternal, faceless admirers, dried up and once more we were flying over the remote mountains of Iran and Afghanistan, peering down looking for signs of village life, other peoples lives, any life but mine.
The house, the warmth, the welcoming mat that I thought was Henry's was a chimera of the worst kind. I followed his shambolic, no doubt unregistered car, down the dirt tracks, deeper and deeper into the forest I had always feared. We pulled up at his neighbours, the only other people living in here, a big burly Aussie bloke working in his shed, and if this was his house it wasn't too bad; though he had emphasised the simple nature of his lodgings. But no, this wasn't it; this was just the neighbours; and from here we had to embark on foot. I was grandly told I would be sleeping in a caravan in the main house paddock, but first we should go to his place. And we walked and we walked, along a narrow barely marked track. We crossed a creek, where he proudly pointed out his rain forest plantings, the same ones I had heard about for years. They just looked like trees to me; green like everything else in this bloody place, as my exhaustion increased.
I could feel, now, the isolation of this shrieking place all around, the infinite, hallucinatory sound of the cicadas caught high in the eucalyptus; and we walked yet further until finally there was a roof in the distance.
But the house was not really a house; it was only the shed of a mad old man in the bush; and the glowing woods and the veranda overlooking the valley were nothing at all. His shed, which remarkably had a phone and electricity, and in the last week a fridge as well, even though we were miles from anyone else; faced on to a wall of trees. Henry started talking about nature, but at this point I couldn't have cared less. This wasn't home, this was despair, this was the alcove under the highway ramparts, this was the stinking mattress hidden in the city's tunnels, this was the insanity all men faced when left alone.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/14/world/main3709829.shtml
(AP) Children in Kenya trooped through traffic jams back to class Monday as public schools reopened after a weeklong delay, a sign of returning normalcy that belies the deep political and ethnic tensions unleashed after a disputed presidential vote.
The official death toll from the country's post-election violence rose to at least 612 as more bodies were found.
In Nairobi, Kenya's two rival political parties braced for a showdown in parliament, which opens Tuesday to decide who becomes speaker of the East African country's national assembly.
Rachel Arungah, who chairs a special government committee set up to coordinate aid, said at least 612 people have died in the crisis so far. The latest count - up from 575 - was based on bodies found at mortuaries, homes and other places previously too dangerous to reach.
Arungah said the number of people displaced had decreased from 250,000 to around 200,000 as people moved in with relatives or returned home.
Since last week's conflict, primary and secondary school grounds in rural areas have been used as sites for displaced people, while others were vandalized or burned down by rioting youth. On Monday, some remained closed, but figures on how many or what percentage of students showed up nationwide were unavailable.
No comments:
Post a Comment