The War on Terror

We are testudines testa sua inclusi, like so many tortoises in our shells, safely defended by an angry sea, as a wall on all sides.

-Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy



Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.

...

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

...

He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

-Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

crumenimulga natio

[a purse-milking nation]

"That the state was like a sick body which had lately taken physic, whose humors are not yet settled, and weakened so much by purging, that nothing was left but melancholy."

-Hippolytus

The Audacity of Hope

Can hope—desire—be dangerous?

Qui cupiet, metuet quoque porro,
Qui metuens vivit, liber mihi non erit unquam.

[Who hath desires must ever fearful be;
Who lives in fear cannot be counted free.]

-Lactantius

Desire to gain portends the fear to loose. So does well-meant liberalism lead to a certain perverse conservatism: prisoners of of our ambition, of our acquisition.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

-Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Through a glass, darkly

Why do we condemn the Bill Clintons, the John Edwards, the Tiger Woods of the world? Why do we Americans (prudish so) hold our celebrities so lofty in moral expectation?

For princes are the glass, the school, the book,
Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look,

Velocius et citius nos
Corrumpunt vitiorum exempla domestica, magnis
Cum subeant animos auctoribus.
[Domestic examples of vice corrupt us more swiftly
and sooner, when in stirring our passions they
are backed by the example of the great.]

-Antigonus

Examples of the great
Are great enablers.