Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Summoned By God (To Write This Column) by superspecial awesome guest star David Brooks

This is a column about two ways of thinking about your life.  


(As usual, I was inspired by one of the primary sources of spiritual insight in our modern world: The Harvard Business Review.)  


Anyhoo.  Two ways.  In one way, there is that side; in the other, the opposite side. (The opposite of that; I think this is clear.)  


One way is American; the other way, not.  


One is right; one is also right...but in a way that is un-American and will destroy our American way of life, our American values, everything that makes life worth living, and quite possibly life itself.  


(But I respect it, as utterly repugnant as it is to me.)

But isn't it true that sometimes we have do to things sometimes one way, and sometimes the other?  So sometimes we have must do things in the first manner, and other times in the second?  Go figure.

Probably at this point you're saying to yourself, "This guy can't possibly  be serious.  Every week he sets up a false duality and then conjectures a solution so full of holes that it couldn't get past a freshman philosophy course. And yet he gets paid for it."

Well, my response to that is: Up yours. God summoned me to write this--how else could I possibly vomit forth whatever idiocy possesses my cortex and get cold hard cash for it to boot?  Not without the intervention of the Divine.  Obviously.

So it's your choice, gentle reader.  Either submit to God's Mysterious, Ineffable Will, or submit to your individualistic, pioneering American DNA.  Or perhaps both.  Or maybe neither.

There is no contradiction there, just as there is no contradiction between believing that wars, roads, schools and hospitals pay for themselves, or that deficits are paid for by tax cuts, or that hiding from a war is as courageous as actually fighting in one.

There.  I have passed Go and it's time for my $200 schekels.  From God. (After all, he's the one who put me here.)


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