Rhinocrisy

One of the problems with being poorly-read is that the occasional flashes of insight you might have on any particular subject are fragmented and disconnected, and at best represent pinpoints of understanding in what is most probably a vast corpus that has been explored and assembled into a huge body of knowledge and theory by hundreds of people, most of whom were far more clever than you are.

Exemplis gratia: I was about to write something for myself relating to something else^* when it occurred to me that there’s really no mode of writing or speech that allows you to actually write to yourself. You’re always writing to an imagined audience, maybe of a necessity since the whole enterprise of speech and writing involves communication, and one can’t very well communicate something to one’s self without a touch of dissociative identity disorder.

I thought this was a clever bit of insight, and I was about to congratulate myself on it and explore it further when it occurred to me that someone else had probably thought of it sometime in the fifteenth century and written a treatise on the subject. This was so disheartening that I immediately gave up thinking about it. Most of my interesting trains of thought are wrecked in this fashion.

Yes, the U.S. Postal Service, beleaguered by e-mail, abandoned by lovers, relegated to sadly delivering bills, jury summonses and credit card solicitations, still has a niche: carrying misinformed whackjobbery to the United Nations. The good news is these windnuts just donated $39,000 to one of my favorite institutions, one which they consider flatly horrible — the ever-leveling democratic Post Office.