Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with occasional drizzle and a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:20 PM for 12h 54m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1803, British scientist John Dalton begins using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.
Entitlement, the feeling of a person or group that it is owed special status and privileges, grows stronger while it remains unchecked. After a while, it becomes impossible for that person or group to imagine any other perspective.
So, over a generation, a small faction of residents (e.g., bankers, landlords, public relations men) may come to believe that a community of many thousands revolves around and serves only the needs of that faction. Appeals issued to others to serve the faction’s bidding are simply pretexts to attract a few dupes, pigeons, marks, or stooges. The most deluded of those outside the faction think that they’re inside.
Some of this peripheral ilk will speak with a devotion about those men as intense as a normal person’s devotion to God, family, or country. Watching a few local politicians of this type, this libertarian blogger is surprised that they don’t genuflect upon seeing a landlord, banker, or public relations man walk by. Perhaps they do, and I’ve not noticed.
(In my case, I worship with a progressive Episcopal parish that uses an Anglo-Catholic liturgy. Something of left and right, so to speak. In that tradition, parishioners genuflect, for example, to honor the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I’d teach these local sycophants how to bend their knees if it didn’t seem so irreverent to me to do so in ordinary affairs.)
Entitlement demands much — too much — of some.
Whitewater can do better.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 observed by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:
Biting/funny today. It is only biting because it is true, however. Everyone in town knows what you’re saying here. It’s a joke about how how these guys think about themselves. It’s as much of a joke how a few followers scrape in front of them. There are still some with this bad habit. They’re easy to spot.
It was worse years ago. People used to sweat these guys out. They expected to be taken very seriously. Not so much anymore. Your take is almost always critical/satirical. When you started to refer to “Babbitt” and “Candide” about them it was clear you had their number. Contrasting real principles with their opinion of themselves hits home.
By the way, friends on campus say hello.
Well done, John.
Thanks very much.
Hello and my best to all of you.