His was a life of bricks and the skillful hands to lay them, fast and capable hands as adept as machines. His was a history thrown with gale force at walls and buildings all over town, a long constructive life of making things to last. Everywhere now in his decline were the monuments of his having passed that way, standing in red clay and mortar, signs of a man’s existence no less expressive than those of whatever poet you might wish to mention.
Tony Kushner is a well-known playwright, and his latest success was found in writing the screenplay for the movie — Lincoln — starring Daniel Day-Lewis. With each chit comes a chipping, and Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney is rightly angry that Kushner intentionally changed history to add fake drama to the movie by deciding to invent two members of the Connecticut congressional delegation who voted against the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery. In actuality, all four members of the Connecticut representatives voted for ending slavery. Why would Kushner so deliberately skew what really happened?
When I was in eighth grade, there was a large poster hanging on one of the walls with the image of Michael Douglas on it and a long speech about greed. I had no idea what it was or why his face was on it but it was an interesting speech, albeit one that went against everything we were taught in school. The speech taught that greed was good and important. We were taught in school that greed was bad and that sharing with others was good and important.
We live in a bored world of consumption of expectation. The new and the fresh rarely find a moral or aesthetic foothold in our mainstream minds because it takes too much effort to think about, and consider, the foreign and the challenging.
We live in a wild and crumbling world. We used to subsist in a universe of extremes. There were the bad people and the good people and the moral among us fought a couple of World Wars as an entire generation leapt from the continent to save the world from repression.
On Sunday, “Boston Rob” Mariano won a million dollars on – Survivor Redemption Island — and his win should be a cold shock to the rest of America as a morality cringe and pure evidence of a tasteless failure our societal values.
Berkshire Hathaway has a problem. No, it isn’t their “Official Home Page” website that looks like it was designed by a third-grader in 1991 — note the ubiquitous link to Geico insurance in the footer; and no, it isn’t the choice of using standard “visited links” color as the active “UN-visited links” color default, either — the Berkshire Hathaway problem is actually one of moral decay in the falsely avuncular personality and faked “Aw, shucks” leadership style of Warren Buffet.
Drugs are bad business for baseball. Manny Ramirez announced his retirement from the game last week because he didn’t want to serve a 100-game suspension as a second time offender of Major League Baseball‘s drug policy.
Today is Opening Day for baseball in New York City and I love this time of year. We enjoyed six weeks of Spring Training and now the season proper opens today — we hope, if it doesn’t rain all day! — and the time for renewal and freshness is now.
We live in a cruel world. There is suffering. There is a lack of human compassion. We prefer the preservation of the self over the welfare of others.
We read to experience what we do not know. We write to share what we think we understand. Learning and sharing constructs leads to literacy and thus begins the formative memes of a shared, and cogent, morality.
UPDATE: 48 Minutes After Original Publication.
This article deserves an immediate update and, unlike the New York Times, my updates and corrections always go at the head of my articles and not at the very end. Half an hour ago, I heard from Mark Jeftovic at easyDNS and I received permission to republish his email here:
Hi David,
I really appreciated reading your article on the entire “wikileaks” fiasco. It was nice to finally see the entire account related by a third party and basically get it right, from beginning to (almost the) end.
Really great, I am very grateful to you, thank you.
The latest development is that as of a few hours ago, we were added to the DNS delegation for wikileaks.ch and expect the .org to follow:
http://blog.easydns.org/2010/12/05/easydns-added-to-wikileaks-dns-delegation/
What a weekend.
Thanks again.
-mark
Here is my reply to Mark:
Hi Mark!
Thanks for the email! Your response means a lot to me.
You are handling this so well — it’s like you very own special ”Mainstream Media DDoS attack!” SMILE!
I was going to mention in my article that the best revenge would be for you guys to step forward and actually back up WikiLeaks as a DNS fallback — but I didn’t want to put you in any more wondering jeopardy — how great it is that you guys stepped into the fray and put your backbone into WikiLeaks? I love it! Now I wonder how soon you’ll hear from Joe Lieberman and the frantic frenzied?
Do you mind if I add your email as an update to my article?
I thank you!
Best,
db
Long Live easyDNS!
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
If there’s any sort of notion of morality in the mainstream media — don’t ask easyDNS.net to stand in the pulpit to testify — because easyDNS have wrongly been nailed to the cross to bleed for the WikiLeaks debacle, all because of rotten and lazy reporting that basically leaves easyDNS for dead.
In our ongoing, national, economic convalescence, I wonder if the result of such monetary heartsickness is a de-evolution of our moral presence into unsacred totems. I ask this in the recovering wake of the tepid immorality of Rev. Cedric Miller — who urged his flock to give up Facebook because it was a “portal to infidelity” — only to be proven to be a sinner himself.
In our current, bloody, culture wars — values and morality are given passing play — but few people address the loss of virtue as a necessary component of a righteous humankind.
