The Books of Bokonon offer an apt lesson

This blog cannot live up to its title if I don't occasionally offer some scripture from the fragments of The Books of Bokonon that appear in the classic Kurt Vonnegut novel, Cat's Cradle. So here is one that seems quite timely:

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.  

That strikes me as a good warning for any of us exposed to politicians, the usual talking heads we see on cable (and YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, etc.), some of our academicians, clerics, celebrities and influencers, etc. So it goes.

Someone kindly compiled all of the passages from the Books of Bokonon on a website. You should still read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a classic, and that's no foma.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ozymandias

When I think of our current era and all of its dictators and would-be dictators, there is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley that rings as true now as it did when he wrote it:     I met a traveller from an antique land,     Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone     Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,     Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,     The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;     And on the pedestal, these words appear:     My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;     Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay     Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and ...
Read more

Desantis still wants to be Mussolini when he grows up

The Florida governor dictator has been working like madness to kill a ballot initiative that has already been given the go-ahead and which is already on actual ballots, weeks before election day. He is desperate to keep that 6-week abortion ban in place. It's the same ban Trump supports. The tactics Desantis uses are disturbing and anti-democratic: sending secret police to ballot initiative signatories, threatening media outlets that run ads in favor of the initiative, and even cooking up an excuse to invalidate any votes for the initiative. Read more here . What we are witnessing in Florida as is the case in other GOP dominated parts of the US is best understood as follows: GOP politicians don't care about the give and take that comes with governing. They want raw power to rule, period.
Read more