Speech Enjoyed By All

Adam Liptak, "From Justice Kennedy, a Lesson in Journalism". November 11

PAPERWORK. Groucho Engels, in comments:

How exactly is metaphysics to blame for anything? Metaphysics is simply the realm of inquiry related to the non(or not currently)-emperically verifiable aspects fo the universe like free will, physicalism versus dualism, etc. It's very similar and related to epistemology and ontology.

Unless you are taking some hard-line materialist or positivist stance that contends to reject the very existence of these issues then your use of the word metaphysics makes no sense.

Metaphysics is not a synonym for religion or spirituality or the supernaturalism. Metaphysics is not heir to murderousness any more than the scientific method is heir to it for it's role in being used by those who invented the atomic bomb.

Please either show me what accepted definition of metaphysics you are basing your use of the word on or tell me what you meant by using the term and we can look for a more accurate word.

Okay, first, I'm a guy. A dude. A schlub. And I happen to have a blog, the way some people have bulimia. It's not much of a gig, but it's at least as lucrative as the one it replaced: smoking a joint, going to the Mall, and telling passing women what I thought of their tits. I am not responsible for anything I say. I realize this flies in the face of that accepted, Voltaire-like dedication to public discourse an' all, but there you are. I don't defend the things I say, let alone your right to object to 'em.

However, I do promise not to trip you just because no one's looking. Which, I think you'll agree, at least distinguishes me from 98% of the people who want you to believe they're speaking to you seriously.

The serious answer to your inquiry is one I'd rather not give, but here it is: I was using "metaphysics" in the sense in which David Brooks used it first:

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

which, I think, carries all the (mis)connotations you object to. Brooks' intent was to make religious belief a biological imperative. He wasn't including the search for Beauty, or Self, or Parking. He meant religion, and specifically organized religion. My intent was to be funny. I was mocking Brooks. I thought that was clear.

Also not funny, but also true: I took exactly two weeks of Philosophy in college. It was my first semester and, unless I'm conflating it with some other class I couldn't wait to drop, it was held that hot August in Ernie Pyle Hall, which was originally built as a storage shed. I'm not making that up. Tiny row of windows at the very top of the back wall, and the Professor was a droner. Worse yet, to my eighteen-year-old mind, he started the thing off with four sessions on Alfred Jules Ayer. I mention this because, like a lot of idiots, I would realize fifteen years or so later that I was sneering when I should have been listening. I was in fact some species of intuitive logical positivist, and as jumbled up as that phrase implies. So, yes, I do reject the idea that there's any meaning in that parenthetical "not currently", though I would not go so far as to deny the non-existence of non-things.

As though banging a drum in search of a fugitive!

-Chuang-tse

There's a lot of other stuff wrong with me, too. For instance, I read Gregg Easterbrook's football column, or football * column, as last year he absolved himself of the responsibility of watching all the games, and this year he's absolved himself from writing about football. But he does go on about minor civil servants and their majorly-expensive tax-supported bodyguards, which is one of the things that crossed my mind when I read this:

WASHINGTON — The school newspaper at Dalton, a private school in Manhattan, contained a cryptic note from its editors last Friday.

“We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints,” the note said. It promised “an explanation of the regrettable delay” in the next issue.

It turns out that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values, had provided the newspaper, The Daltonian, with a lesson about journalistic independence. Justice Kennedy’s office had insisted on approving any article about a talk he gave to an assembly of Dalton high school students on Oct. 28.

Okay, so the bodyguard thing, or more accurately a tangent of the bodyguard thing, actually came in around third or fourth, since my first thought was, "I wonder if the FBI Light Opera Society** seamstress has already stitched up a closetful of Kennedy's self-designed Rehnquistian Mikado Impeachment Get-ups, or if he's still in the sketching phase?" Followed by the idea that if we could just combine America's Next Top Designer Whose Flakiness or Poor Impulse Control Titillates the Nation's Terminally Teevee Captive with next year's Docket we'd have ratings dynamite with little or no discernible effect on the Court's actions.

The bodyguard thing, really, is just that I believe we need to take advantage of modern technology, not just to get to know the quote real end quote people who govern with our consent (Kidding, kidding!), but to more closely approximate the will of the Founders, who intended our choices to be made more manageable, in their case by limiting the gender, color, and net worth of the electable. I have, on this very internet, suggested that we'd be better off if once a year every opinionator using the public airwaves and making more than the $250 K per Charlie Gibson thinks puts you squarely in the middle-class had to open his or her primary home to the cameras, with all the Help lined up, in their required livery, and, for the sake of time constraints, we truncated a complete tour of the place by just looking into every bathroom. With a handy numerical counter in the lower right corner. I think political commentary would be improved overnight.

So, too: this view of Justice Kennedy's Roman gravitas and Hahvahd Law grandeur should not be limited to a few staff members at some $33,000/yr. Ivy-pipeline academy and the two- or three-hundred of our fellow citizens who still read newspapers. No. (And th' fuck does Justice Kennedy even have to ask that sort of company for the osculum infamum of Rank?)

Ellen Stein, Dalton’s head of school, defended the practice in a telephone interview. “This allows student publications to be correct,” she said. “I think fact checking is a good thing.”

And that barking dog belonged in the cornfield. He's happier there.

Anyway, I'm just spit-ballin' here, but there's this: everybody hates the droning, interminable, not to mention unfair questioning the Other Side subjects his side's Court nominees to. How 'bout we leave it to a vote of the people who've waited on them at table, or shined their shoes in the clubhouse over the past year or two? How much worse could it get?

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* Graphic element, not a footnote.

** That's two. Did you spot the other one?