irreverent: failing or declining to revere that which expects reverence, refusing to venerate that which expects veneration, disrespectful
Why do we tolerate stupidity? Institutionalize it, memorialize it, standardize our culture by it, and worst of all, elect it? I prefer to expose stupidity by running it up a flagpole. I make no apology for identifying self-serving posturing as the stupidity that it really is.
Some things -- institutions, customs, ideas, actions, traditions, belief systems, people -- have become surrounded in pompous pretensions and expect to be respected, not because of what they are, but for what they purport to be. Harvard University for instance, paper currency, Congress, "peace and social justice" promoted by violent thievery, the Easter bunny, Noam Chomsky, to name a few.
I originally called this blog "Stains from a Leaky Brain", referring to my tendency to describe what I actually behold, not what I am told I am supposed to see. I let something ridicule itself just by exposing its own contradictions. But it's not polite to do that. If the name of a group includes the word Liberties, we're supposed to revere the group and accept that its name accurately describes its mission. We're not supposed to make the candid observation that the actions of the group, the American Civil Liberties Union in this example, refute its own claims of protecting our liberties; that's not polite. If it says it's for liberty, then certainly that's what it is for! We were supposed to believe that the German Democratic Republic, (the old East Germany, the DDR), was indeed democratic -- and a republic -- just because its name proclaimed it so.
My brain processes a lot of information, filters and dismisses the irrelevant, files away the pertinent, and retains a sort of trash heap of stuff that falls into categories such as What the f***? Sometimes I just can't let it go. If it insults my intelligence and yet I'm expected to venerate it, (the U.S. Senate, for example), a little of my incredulity seeps out. It falls onto a page as words that just can't be erased, even if I offend someone and they insist I take them back. But the stain has been made and I have to stand by it.
I changed the title of the blog to Woodbury: Irreverent Maine Yankee for personal reasons, but it remains the same blog. I will praise something now and then that I think deserves praise, and I will speak up when I find myself expected to venerate something stupid.
-=David A. Woodbury, Lincoln, Maine, 1 January 2012=-
