Monday, May 12, 2014

Justice Kagan envisions a rotating gavel for everybody's god



  Meticulous application
  of equal oppression, a
  conciliating remedy of
  liberty: just possibly
  a solecism prefiguring
  a benign shambles.

  An air of biding time,
  of grave confusion un-
  der due lip service to
  equality, and an obvi-
  ous groping for a less
  regressive Court major-
  ity, bear the hallmark
  of a more fertile dis-
  integration than were
  expected in the senti-
  mental lunge to revive
  icons. We've seen such
  ferment, and it can be
  a pleasure to reclaim.





           Presumably, there is much
           here that was part of the
           inherited bardic formulas,
           repeated and perpetuated
           after much of primitive be-
           lief had degenerated into
           mere clichés of speech and
           storytelling. The essential
           difficulty is to find the
           proper line between a
           thought-world that was gone 
           and a rationality that was 
           yet to come.





































Supreme Court
  of the United States
May, 2014

Sir Moses Finley
The World of Odysseus
  Morals and Values
Viking, 1954©







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