Tread lightly on the things of earth

© FreeFoto.com by Ian BrittonI thought the outing-the-CIA-agent story (Rove leak aka Treasongate aka Turdgate) had legs back soon after it happened in 2003. I was aghast then to see the lengths to which these White House playas will go to stifle truth-telling and dissent.

That this possibly felonious crime of outing a CIA agent had been committed within an administration whose forebear (George H. W. Bush) had called those who expose intelligence assets “the most insidious of traitors” made this story’s weird, sad irony impossible to ignore.

Or so I thought.

Two years later, the story’s finally getting those legs.

As I was looking back through my reading notes taken during the buildup to war and afterward ([scroll down to] Feb 2003) to see what I’d read and thought about the Plame case early on, I got lost revisiting the diverse sources I’ve read. Dear God, I thought as I revisited, these notes and commentary were more than an in-the-moment therapeutic defense of soul and sanity — brick by brick these readings built The Case Against an Administration.

As more of what I’ve been railing about comes out, I see that more of us are coming to the same conclusions.

© FreeFoto.com by Ian BrittonI think maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel. Of course I realize it’s an oncoming train; its name is Consequences. But maybe just maybe we’re shaking off our numbness enough to roll off the track, snag a door handle as it whisks by and James-Bond, stunt-jump ourselves onto the train and into the engine room in time to apply some smarts that will turn this runaway train into, well, probably not a glory train, but something a little more in that direction.

My rule of thumb is simple:
If shining more light on a position weakens it, that position isn’t worth holding.

Conversely —
If keeping light out is the only way to keep a position viable, the position isn’t sustainable.

Let the light shine.

Update:

The entry title is an obscure reference to imagery I was thinking about, The Perils of Pauline, the 1914 silent film serial in which —

Week after week, Pauline evades attempts on her life. She fights pirates, Indians, gypsies, rats, sharks, and her dastardly guardian. Her most familiar plight is being tied to railroad tracks with a rapidly approaching train.

But what my brain blurped up as the name is The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, which I see now is the 1969 animated series from my childhood:

Penelope was an heiress whose fortune would go to her lawyer, Sylvester Sneekly, if anything ever happened to her. Sylvester decided to spend every episode trying to do away with Penelope so that the fortune would be his. …

Of course, fate always seemed to be smiling on Miss Pitstop, and she always managed to escape harm, most often, by inadvertently turning the tables on Sneekly so that he would become the victim of his own bad deeds.

What an interesting mis-remembered conflation, rich with petard hoisting, but hinging, no doubt, on this:

The [Penelope Pitstop] series was modelled after the silent films of the 1920’s, specifically The Perils of Pauline.

The polysyllabic name Penelope also lends ~alliterative flesh to the other allusion, Prometheus Unbound, which is (so I thought) the Frankenstein story. In the Jeopardy game in my mind, then, “Prometheus Unbound” and “the present U.S. political situation” are answers to the question, What does monstrous arrogance lead to?

(Turns out the Frankenstein story is actually Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he’s who wrote Prometheus Unbound.)

Maybe the patience and fidelity of Homer’s Penelope figures in, too. Maybe she’s an apt symbol for us as we come back to sensibility. Who knows? Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Thank goodness for Googlable clarification.

BTW, a third instructive Jeopardy question/answer pairing for What does monstrous arrogance lead to? is “Paradise Lost.”