On Exhibit

Welcome to my museum. If this is a real day with real people in it we should give insouciance a another shove because we’ll need it. I’m a mad little trumpet today, a feeling disguised as a sharp bright noise. I didn’t think the neurosis would’ve gotten this big and walked all over my nervous system in such heavy boots. Here’s an interesting exhibit it’s a string of domestic animals filling the space between my furloughs. Glass case with a perpendicular speech act and the face of Samuel Beckett at age 78. Lustrous horse and a gun made of goose bumps. It shoots real nibbles. This makes everything inglenook and perpetual, the way paper trembles under a load of words.

Words do everything. Including thrust into ridicule feeling discontented and logged. Prayer is a bright multicolored beetle connecting interrelated elements for food and posterity. Or it could be. It can be anything. This is a word and it can be anything. It depends on how you read it. The boat’s rudder will not be affected by your uniform. But the journey could use some old-fashioned navigation techniques, malleability and rubber.

If you ask me mysticism is celestial softball poker is a waste of television and matter is a form of energy periodically manifested as a tape measure.

Wicker fiction touchy fish that establish protocol for the behavior of water. Comical replication in a suitcase headed toward kettledrum olives. Is it literary to have more than one metaphor in your pants? Myriad virilities jiggled on a python patrol. You could say heat is a forearm frequented by shampoo. That would be masturbation’s model as it scrambles for soap. Or that caring is a landscape within the reach of novelty.

I’m particularly wiggled by ninety protoplasmic mops. One of the things I think we need to take seriously is musk-ox. There’s something very powerful going on. Why is it easier to imagine the end of the planet rather than the end of capitalism?

Avarice, in a nutshell. It explains everything. It explains heaven and fog horns. It explains patchwork and rain and the 9^th letter of the alphabet which is just now inventing ice.

Merriment ensues. There will be licorice in our social conduct and root beer in our conversation. References in the act of determining fruit will be baked in semantic shellac.

How merry to marry a skirt. How merry to needle a toga. Together we will thread the air with rattlesnakes. Paleontological stars are perched on a backpack. An occasional nudge rewards my prison. Nearsighted recognition of a tadpole on a prescription for cough medicine the way I see porridge is large leaves and a renegade desire. I could leave now walk right out the door but instead I’m going to offer you a strong current of water and a ticket to our large stemmed glass parade. It begins at eight and soothes all substance by emitting little waves of sound and nomenclature.

By Implication

Implication is better than teargas. Implication can be used in multiple ways, whereas teargas has essentially but one application, which is making people scatter. Implication can be used in mining, philosophy, and ice skating events. Teargas is just good for crowd dispersal. Implication fails in this respect. I’ve attempted implying that people clear a room so that I may be alone, but it generally misfires. No one seems to know what I’m talking about. That’s when I like to bring out a canister or two of teargas. It’s pure magic. Everyone runs away screaming.

Implication can be injected into a conversation almost at any point. Results may vary, but depending on whatever it is you’re attempting to imply, implication works better than teargas in virtually every instance. Teargas is not conducive to conversation, but if it’s solitude you want, you can’t beat it.

Once, at a UN conference, I was in a bad mood. I wanted to be alone, but was too sedentary to rise from my seat and find a private room. I just lobbed a couple of tear gas canisters and cleared the room instantly.

The ensuing wars were not my fault. But if any dignitaries were unduly inconvenienced, I apologize.

Implication can, by undertone and innuendo, have a lot of imputation in it. Implication is folding. It’s reciprocal, sporadic, and casual. Implication may contain bromides, boll weevils, or venison, but it will always love you in return, especially when it waddles into a conversation like an artery and deepens someone’s gabardine.

What I’m attempting to suggest here is simply this: syllogisms are clunky. It’s almost always better to use syllogisms late at night or first thing in the morning. Off-peak hours are generally 8 pm to 7 am. Thus, when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what makes a thing a thing, he narrows the question to apply only to living things. He doesn’t infer it. He moves it into the totalities of signification and intelligibility where it can be reached by spiritual insight, and then hammered into a piece of old gray wood, just like the revival guitar players. This isn’t explicit. But it’s implied.

Let It Rain

All these years I’ve tried avoiding pain when I should’ve been providing it a home. Happiness is fine. But it’s notoriously fleeting. There is always something giddy and silly about happiness. It’s a tease. Everyone wants to feel happiness. It’s an obsession. Especially in the United States. Positivity is exalted. Pessimism is condemned. It’s assumed that if that one is consistently happy and positive and brings a cheerful attitude to the abrasions of daily life one will become rich and in full control of one’s destiny. I’m reminded of the opening scene in Night of the Iguana of all the middle-aged women singing “Happy Days Are Here” again on the bus which is driven by a fatigued and afflicted Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon, played brilliantly by Richard Burton. There’s an evident undercurrent of deep unhappiness among the women but they put so much force and vigor into their singing that their zeal seems freakish, almost demonic, a toxic whitewash in its stubborn refusal to admit any dark emotion or untoward feeling reveal itself, particularly any natural or authentic energies that could ruin the artifice and allow a space for more genuine and therefore dangerous feelings.   

No one has succeeded in defining happiness, but everyone knows that as soon as one becomes aware that one is happy it evaporates. Worry sets in immediately that you can’t keep it, don’t deserve it, can’t use it to immunize oneself against the adversities of life.

If you Google happiness quotes you’ll get 14,142 citations, the vast majority of them completely inane and a few that make no sense at all. One which stood out is Mark Twain’s observation that “Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.” I like this because Twain isn’t pushing happiness as a sacrosanct condition conducive to the overall wellbeing of a culture but presenting it as a suspect state, the product, no doubt, of delusional thinking, of filtering out information that isn’t consistent with an attitude of triumphalist positivity. Because if you look at the human condition squarely and honestly you see it for what it is, a chronically insecure predicament of loss and vulnerability. The Buddhists are right: don’t get attached to things. Life is a state of continuous flux in which nothing lasts except the dynamism of change itself. Buddhists stress compassion, not happiness. And if you enter almost any Christian church you’ll see a man hanging on a cross with open wounds and a crown of thorns, sometimes unconscious, sometimes looking heavenward. It’s an odd paradox that the same culture that is so obsessed with this story of sacrifice and agony places such an obsessive premium on happiness.

So why not give pain a broad and open acceptance? I really like the mindfulness attitude toward pain. It isn’t viewed as negative or punitive or a crippling, stigmatized condition to be endured with as much dignity and stoicism as one can muster and treated with an armament of pain medication. Mindfulness practice urges the removal of judgment. If pain is experienced with less resistance and the kind of denigration and shame with which we color it when we’re locked into it subjectively, and begin to value it more objectively as a sensory phenomenon with no moralistic evaluation imposed on it pain – particularly chronic pain - becomes much easier to bear.

So give it a home. The harder you try to avoid it or end it the harder it is to deflect and evade.

Easier said than done, I know. Easy to be glib. Hard to be ingenious and breezy when you’re buried in black despair or feeling the stabbing pain of a cancerous tumor.

“Pain has an element of blank,” observed Emily Dickinson in one of her poems. “It cannot recollect / When it began, or if there were / A day when it was not.”

I vividly remember the day I fell and dislocated my shoulder. It’s been over two years and the pain is still with me. It was also discovered that I had arthritis in that shoulder. I’ve been experiencing intermittent pain there for some time. The fall so traumatized and aggravated the pain as to make it a permanent resident in my body. It has become so integrated in my overall sensorium that it now feels like a part of my identity. Pain can be so immersive and all enveloping that its defining features become lost and it becomes increasingly difficult to assign it a history with finite parameters and comprehensible data. It becomes a big blur. It’s like playing chess with an extraterrestrial.

Emotional pain is the hardest to describe. People who’ve never experienced clinical depression have no idea what it’s like. They think it’s a bad mood. Snap out of it, they say. Look on the bright side. Clinical depression isn’t just a bad mood. It’s a dimension, like the realm of the Upside Down in the TV drama Stranger Things, a subterranean domain of toxic mists and giant snakes and ravenous bipedal hounds. Once there, it’s extremely difficult to get out. You can see the world in which you once lived and led a life of reasonable well-being, loved ones, friends, familiar people. You can see them but you can’t interact with them.

The way out is through acceptance. You lean into it. Lean into the pain. Lean into the despair. Lean into the anxiety and accept it. Shake hands with the darkness. Get to know your inner demon. In Greek mythology, a demon – which comes from the Greek word daimon – was a tutelary deity, a divine spirit.

Nietzsche saw pleasure and pain as a false and unimportant polarity. He saw them as epiphenomena, wholly secondary affectivities “on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity.” He saw suffering as an art, a discipline. “The discipline of suffering, of great suffering,” Nietzsche proclaimed, “do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?”

I’m not sure I see it that way myself, but I like Nietzsche’s bravado and articulating an evident relationship between suffering and creativity. I do know that it helps immeasurably to bring a creative response to pain. Give it a mouth. Give it a pot and a calliope and a big fur hat. Give it a bed of topsoil and a load of compost and wait to see what grows out of that.

Inside Out

We all have an inside and an outside. Or so it seems. It feels like that. Out there is the world. Inside me are private thoughts and feelings. Feelings and thoughts that seem unique to me. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them. My response to the world feels singular. It gives me a feeling of separateness. But I’m not. Nobody is. How could you be?

The world travels through us. As food. As water. As the air we breathe.

When we breathe, the air we inhale travels into the bronchial tubes to smaller air passages called bronchioles to the alveoli, tiny balloon-like air sacs, to red blood cells in the capillaries where oxygen is extracted from the general air and distributed throughout the body. The oxygen helps liberate biochemical energy from food and converts it to adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an organic chemical which provides energy for driving the numerous processes that give and maintain life. We’re intimately connected to the world. We are the world. We’re no more separated from the world than the hair on our head or the sensations in our skin or the fluids filtering through our kidneys and liver.

Our feeling of being unique and separate individuals is illusory. But a compelling one. Our thoughts, opinions, ideas, perceptions, feelings and dreams are private. We can share them if we so choose or we can keep them to ourselves. We can let them drift through our minds like clouds or haunt us like ghosts or lick our brains like Iggy Pop.

What are thoughts exactly? Do they have a reality? Are they edible like beans or tangible like spars? Are they heavy like clubs or brittle like stems? Do they produce flowers? Do they expand like balloons? Do they hold objects like trays?

No. They’re not real. They’re waves. Impulses. Electro-chemical signals. What gives a thought the feeling of being real is the attention we give it, the energy that we feed it, the language we use to create it. A thought can burden us and a thought can empower us. A thought can inspire a religion, invent a new mode of travel, or weave a mathematical construction postulating the origin of the universe. It can lead us to insights about a potential romantic partner or tumble around in our heads like a pair of socks in a dryer doing nothing at all except distract us from the purity of a moment. They create as many problems as they solve. They’re a weather of the mind. Epiphanies are lightning. Depressions are troughs. Intuitions are chinooks.

Thoughts may not have anything like a true reality but they do affect behavior and behavior can have real consequences.

For example: in the afternoon I run down a residential street lined with oak and cherry trees. The houses are fairly large, Queen Anne-style residences with fine brick-work and broad porches and dormers and crisply painted woodwork. The people that live in these homes are quite wealthy. This is Seattle. A single individual needs an income of approximately 72,092 dollars per year to live somewhat comfortably. The people on this street – unless they’ve been living here for 40 or 50 years when homes were more affordable – are quite wealthy. Bill Gates wealthy, no. But wealthy enough not to worry about doctor bills or car repairs. Comfortable enough to have a couple of kids and afford their education.

I come upon a man and his two boys playing basketball in the street. This is a relatively busy street. One or two cars can go by within the space of a minute. This is common. There is no sidewalk for much of the way and the road must be shared with all sorts and models of cars and trucks and vans. The man has set up a portable basketball hoop – blocking entry to a little path that leads from the street to a length of welcome sidewalk - and painted – that’s right: painted – a free-throw semi-circle into the middle of the street.

I find it difficult to ignore this encroachment on public space. “That can’t be legal,” I shout. “It’s not,” the man responds. But he’s decided to do this because people drive too fast on the street. If he and his two boys come out and play basketball in the middle of the street, he’s forcing them to slow down and pay attention to their driving instead of texting or watching videos on their phones. I agree that this is a common problem. But this isn’t the way to avert drivers from doing it. Out of frustration with the absurdity of what this man is doing, I submit my prerogative to call the police. This startles him.

“That’s aggressive,” he says.

His answer confuses me. Aggressive? How can calling the police to settle a dispute over the use of a street be aggressive?

The answer that leaps most readily to mind is “aggressive? How is that aggressive? If I -was going to be aggressive I’d punch you in the face.”

But instead I provide a more prudent answer: “if I was going to be aggressive I’d be shouting invectives.”

I don’t like my answer. It’s weak. It occurs to me hours later (as always maddeningly happens the best response occurs when it’s too late, which is why they French invented a perfect term for it: l’esprit de l’escalier) that what I could’ve said is: “aggressive? You call that aggressive? And painting a basketball court in the middle of a busy residential street isn’t?”

Nothing is resolved. Just an opportunity to blow off some hot steam in the face of a wealthy, entitled douche bag.

And no, I don’t care for rich people. They’re generally true to their stereotypes: selfish, arrogant, entitled, narcissistic, avaricious, self-centered and toxic.

A number of things may be gleaned from this. One, I’m not a Buddhist. I’m far too judgmental for that. Two, I’m not rich. If I was, I’d have significantly fewer worries and stand a far better chance of being a well-balanced, calm, rational, forgiving nature and going around smiling in the face of catastrophe with the generous, enlightened spirit of Thich Nath Hanh. Three, my antagonism toward the social environment of places like Seattle and San Francisco steeped in techno-utopian, libertarian smugness, is acute. Rage is a common component of my emotional life.

Sure, I’d like to be broader in my outlook. I’m not proud of my hostilities. They get in the way of enlightenment, whatever enlightenment is.

I’m assuming enlightenment is that ultimate, unswerving awareness of being one with the universe, including the rich. Seeing the good that is in Donald Trump. The potential for kindness in Mitch McConnell. The benevolence that leaked out of Hitler and found expression in his love of animals.

But I’m getting sidetracked as always by my obsessions with evil. The older I get the more I wonder about the nature of evil. Nietzsche’s masterful philosophical inquiry in Beyond Good and Evil does more to confuse me than provide any answers.

At least when I write I get an opportunity to get that stuff moiling and roiling and boiling in the private sphere of my skull out into the open where I can get a better look at it and wonder how many other people share these feelings. Which goes a long way toward mitigating it.

Lovely word, mitigate. From Latin mitigatus, past participle of mitigare, “soften, make tender, ripen, mellow, tame.” It’s a good feeling when it happens, when the hardwood pew of a principled ideological position softens into the cushy generosity of an armchair meditation.

“We are all the leaves of one tree,” remarks Thich Nhat Hanh. “We are the waves of one sea.” How do I get those words into my blood? I appreciate these words cognitively, but how do I embrace them so deeply that they’re more than words or thoughts?

Because in Seattle, a lot of leaves on that theoretical tree are rotting on the ground while a few at the top are getting abundant sunlight. And a lot of waves in that sea are choked with plastic while others are lapping the private shores of billionaires.

Self-Portrait In A Convex Pizza

The wedge of noise that I rattle makes everything sidereal. A gray temerity. An anonymous pagan. Here it all is: sandwiches, textures, wheels.

An impenetrable smack causes time to point. We strain to milk the ceremony of words smeared on the reverse side of a church.

What is time? Bewilderment. Closets. Symbols. Why does it move forward, never backward? Because it’s held in the hands like a bar of soap.

I am words. We are all words. Everything is words. I am words in pizza. I am pizza. We are all pizza. Pizza is the Tunisia of Geneva. Lolita’s amnesia is due to anesthesia, not pizza. The pizza was an arena of synesthesia due to the freesia in the magnesia. The pepperoni was baloney. “I am legend,” said Melissa, who was full of macaroni.

This time it changes the cynosure to a lyric. Until the thin science of subtleties finds its razor we will continue to sweep the floor. I’ll go get the horses. It’s time we got out of here. I smell the law at every turn.

The problem of looking backwards, towards causes, to see if we have done well is that it only confirms the ideas and concepts we had before. This only serves to check boxes but we learn nothing new. If, on the contrary, we invest in movement, things are always new. But who will formulate this goal?

I remember nothing of the path. The armadillos were a minor help. I noticed that I had claws and wings. Was this a joke? Or a new mode of life? The cat sat at my side. Her pupils were dilated. Completely black. I heard the clatter of metal as dawn crossed the mountains. That's when I started thinking about rags. Carrots. Mistletoe. Dreams of an after-life. Christmas in Budapest. Hegel’s aesthetics. The mesas of New Mexico.

I remember caves. Rapids. The sound of water roaring through subterranean chambers.

I remember membranes and amber, exasperations produced by gluttony. I know how to engage the world. What I haven’t yet learned is how to disengage with the world. I know what it is to stand in a garden while the ganglions of one’s brain hoist an idea of free will into cognition. Is there such a thing? Is it possible to powder the face and put on a wig and attend the ball without being recognized? Will anyone notice the look of Cubism on my face?

Certain representative planets offer some good breakfast deals. There’s that to consider, plus clouds and liner notes. Who does those anymore?

I like to wear necklaces of faucets. Old kitchen faucets. It goes good with my wallpaper. Go ahead. Bathe in the flow of events. Do what I do: hire a painter to defend what happens when the wrinkles deepen and the load gets heavier and threading a needle becomes the focus one’s existence. If you can sit still long enough, the result will give you power. The authority to occur at any time, postmarked and naked in the morning light. 

Intramural Outlaw Cookies

I’m guessing a dashboard cohesion. Let me introduce you to a nuclear peacock. Unlucky fecund checkers played by portico toys. The masseuse jumps through a geometry book. Fireside figurines obviating typewriter darts. Purple jets for a portable marathon wink. It takes three days to collect a sequence. Lonesome road on which an elf finds a radio whacking a furry garage in a song about macaroons. This is naturally phrased as a form of flimflam, which is always hasty to swing on an insinuation.

Horny smut infusing a delirium of wardrobe refrigeration. Titanic life of a bohemian vaudeville. It could happen to rawhide. Please muster a conduit and tell me what the introspection can confiscate. The brain moved sideways like a crab all the way to the side of the head and sat in a puddle of words throwing dishes at a thesaurus. A porthole sucrose invented itself in butter. The photography had a fierce climate in its knobby linen. We used it to care about a diagonal. Hornets of the underworld wielding gumdrop vaginas.

The moisture of an alibi stumbles into evaporation revealing wainscot and caricature. I taste the flame of a vision. The sweater swoons in its knitting blinking like a taillight on the back of a vicissitude. The weight of a door hides from the street. The moon is old and extracurricular. I feel leavened, as if about to clamber aboard a mountain and ride it into hysterics, places where the rock kisses the sky and the sky reclines in its sessions of sweet silent thought, dropping rain on the robots and making the mulct succeed at spring.

Paregoric garden for a misanthropic afternoon. The python is thick with punctuation. Semicolons hiss with courtly neuralgia. The montage reciprocates with a cacophony of luxurious wax. All the mirrors come together in a rebellion and vomit reflections on the floor of a greasy spoon. Today’s special is a halibut garnished with cowboys. History is a nightmare from which we’re all trying to awaken. The seismograph sponsors an inquisitive tentacle. It wraps itself around a coatrack, impregnating the day with a lisping vulnerability. I like the seats by the window. I can hear myself think. It sounds like the rustle of taffeta in a Texas brothel.

Intramural outlaw cookies overrule the mantel vortex. Pleasantries are always genealogical. I don't know why. Recognition is squalid. I prefer to be crinkled. There is wisdom in soup. We must sometimes look elsewhere to find the proper retort. It's not the weight of the insult that counts, it's the radioactivity of the zeal. Witchcraft is for babies.

The peanut is a perfect star. But the star is not a peanut. The star is a zip code. Aristotle states that happiness is the most desirable of all things. I can’t argue with that. The peanut is a perfect zip code.

A female movie star stumbles around backstage at a TV quiz show wearing nothing but a search warrant. Pencils subsist on graphite, thereby proving the existence of palmistry. Fingers are tabloids teetering on bobsleds. I see no reason not to clean the senses with a Hollywood premier. The longitude of an irritation is ransomed by a ginger snap, while a latitude requires chocolate. I also have a theory about sagebrush, but I’m saving that for a Beatles concert. I live in the past. The rent is cheaper and the landlord is dead.

Staples Steeples And Shabby Proposals

R and I went to Staples to have a guy check out my printer. It was on the fritz. It would either fail to set up because – as the machine alerted me in the little menu box – the ink cartridges were empty, or there was a seemingly non-existent paper jam. I very rarely print anything anymore. I think the ink had just evaporated. I’d gone to Staples earlier following a dinner at Chinook’s overlooking the docks and fishing boats at Fisherman’s Terminal. We had hamburgers instead of our usual fish and chips, which are now $23.00. Nineteen dollars on Monday. But the portions have been getting smaller. I spent thirty bucks on a new black ink cartridge and inserted it into the machine. No go. I did manage to get it to run briefly, but the printing was bad; every other line was faded. So I had a dilemma: do I spend another thirty or forty dollars on color ink cartridges and see if the machine still works or just give up and take it to a shop that does recycling?

I called Staples and spoke with a young man who said he’d take a look at it for no charge, but they don’t do repairs on printers. So I brought it in on an unusually hot day in May and the young man took a look. He grabbed a packet of color cartridges off the shelf and inserted them and printed the cover of a brochure. It looked pretty good. A few sentences had lines running through them. He inserted some device that cleaned the machine and ran it again and the print job came out looking even better. The colors were vibrant and the text was legible. So I spent another forty bucks on the color cartridges and brought it home and printed out some documents. There were flaws at first but eventually everything printed fine.

The young man remarked that the machine was pretty old and may not have much life left in it. The machine was nine years old. We live in a such a funny world now. When things get to be five or six or seven years old and they cease working we don’t find that strange. Nor does anyone look to have them repaired. We just toss them into the landfill, or bring it to a recycling center if there’s one available. The waste is colossal. Is this capitalism? Is this what capitalism wants? Stupid question. No need to ask. Yes, of course this is what capitalism wants. Built-in obsolescence so that people are forced to spend more and more money and equipment that’s not designed to last more than a few years. It sucks. No one values much of anything anymore.

Saturday. 11:01 a.m. I look to see what’s going on with Notre Dame cathedral and discover the hideous plans for replacing the roof and spire that were destroyed in the fire of April 15th, 2019. One, from designer Mathieu Lehanneur, would be a “gleaming, 300-foot flame, made of carbon fiber and covered in gold leaf, that would be a permanent reminder of the tragedy.”

Yes, and a permanent reminder of how crass, vulgar, and imbecilic our age has become.

Another ridiculous proposal, from Alex Nerovnya, a lecturer at the Moscow Architectural Institute, suggested “a roof resembling a diamond around a rebuilt Gothic spire.” It looks more like a greenhouse, but at least the spire more closely resembles the graceful lines and Gothic embellishments of the original spire designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc which began construction in 1845 and was completed in 1865. It takes time to do a good job. Cathedrals evolve slowly. There’s a reason for that. They embody the more transcendent values of a culture and are consequently liberated from the usual pressures of finance. The emphasis is on beauty, not money. God, not Mammon.

Emmanuel Macron moves in the opposite direction: this is a guy obsessed with money. He wants the cathedral repairs to be done in five years, in time for the Summer Olympics in Paris scheduled for 2024. Given these restraints and pressures, the ultimate design will be based on speed and ease of construction. It will look like a cheesy piece of space-age junk at a garage sale.

R says she will divorce herself from Paris if these plans go through. I feel the same way. It’s deeply upsetting to see this remarkable building so abused by the greed and negligence that has come to characterize these times. Notre Dame cathedral is the heart of Paris. It represents the higher aspirations of the human experience, a move away from the drearily pragmatic toward the sublime, which is often vigorously and pointedly non-pragmatic. “Like other beautiful things in this world,” proclaimed John Ruskin, “its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.”

Is there anyone resisting Macron’s impatience and these shabby proposals for Notre Dame’s restoration? 

Yes: a group of restoration experts published an open letter in Le Figaro to Emmanuel Macron urging him to be more prudent and reconsider his proposal to have the work done in five years, stating that “these choices must be made in respect of what Notre-Dame is, more than a cathedral among others, more than a historical monument among others, by observing a scrupulous and reflective approach, one of deontological ethics.”

Deontology is a term from moral philosophy meaning obligation or duty. It espouses the theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether the action itself is right or wrong rather than the consequences of the action.

Macron, however, is a man well-known for his arrogance and patrician attitudes. It has taken months of vigorous protest against a militarized police force by the yellow vest movement to get Macron to budge even a little in his neoliberal economics shifting wealth to the upper tiers and impoverishing the lives of the working class.

I don’t think there’s a way to stress just how coarse, barbaric, and loutish this current age is. Can there be anything more ominous than a cathedral fire to underscore just how pedestrian and stupid everyone has become?