We resort to this practice so seldom,
that I retrieve an illustration from
an OSHA manual from the previous cen-
tury, to revive consciousness of the
primary problem. Ignoring the cigar-
ette, a ubiquitous hazard back then,
we find the safety of one's footing
subjected to risk from above and be-
low in the wheelbarrow's nonchalant
progress toward some offscreen rest.
And so we expose ourself to blithe
advice just now, to drop everything
and skip on down impeachment's merry
footpath, as if to some off-loading
of yet another spasm of rectitude.
To be so exhorted by stern piety's
born exemplar, in an excitable New
Englander, was one thing; but now
with the vestal chronicler of The
New Yorker's Watergate reporting,
echoing from that vise, it is cer-
tain that this will be yet another
weekend of very high advertising
costs for breaks in the talk shows.
It's a pity that Ben Hecht's death
row comedy on the media, The Front
Page, has slud into the mud of our
era's dissipation, or we'd all re-
member involuntary manslaughter's
dim exculpation - that the design
of a gun compels its use - as the
unlaughable projection that it is.
Impeachment is a gun which, because
it is showy and noisy, exists to
exploit impetuous sentiment rooted
in opinion's utterly voluntary de-
signs. To be castigated as immoral,
not to rally to its toxic tocsin
of punitive restoration against a
plain and stark contempt for opin-
ion's impotency to restrain it, is
to plunge the foot into a tenacious
trap of history's surest injury: a
cycle of revenge extending into the
generations, mocking the remedial
allure of dumping its load. It be-
longs to the vise. It's an asset of
the vise, its load and its vessel.
To resort to it so barefootedly as
to lack the means of conviction, is
to enshrine injurious recklessness.
Look to your Left, look to your Right.
Whose need for its relief is greater?
Le Corbusier
Taureau
1963
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