Boo

Terrifying Words

By John Taylor; 2007 September 13, 06 Izzat, 164 BE

A couple of servers somewhere on the Net send me a new word and a new quote every day. Today's two examples fit together and supplement yesterday's discussion of Al Gore's book, and Lo Tzu's idea that fatalism, excuses rather than action, is the ultimate evil. So, here they are. First the vocabulary supplement:

roué \roo-AY\, noun: A man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure; a debauchee; a rake. From the French, rouer, "to break upon the wheel" (from the feeling that a roué deserves such a punishment), ultimately from Latin rota, "wheel."

And the quote of the day:

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, `I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" (Ronald Reagan)

The quote from Ronald Reagan is truer than he ever realized himself. The wealthy elites to whom he and his ideological successors, Bush I and Bush II, came to offer their terrifying aid are just what the word for the day describes: roués. No doubt about it. Their life of sensual pleasure is all the more culpable because it is corporate; it feeds on corruption, on unrestrained growth that turns wealth and power into cancers. Now they are getting what they asked for, to be broken on the wheel. And the rest of the world is on the wheel with them. If you doubt, check out this audio recording of a talk that Stephen Lewis gave at McMaster University,

 http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?bigideas

 According to the blurb, "Lewis refocuses his progressive energy (from AIDS in Africa to) ... the cause of climate change." He describes how he attended the first ever conference on climate change in the mid-Reagan era, the 1980's, and how even then the Third World countries were saying, "If you think we are going to sacrifice our growth when the Western leaders are giving up nothing, you are crazy." You hear that, and you think "a plague on both your houses!" A leader should not be considered a leader if his only qualification is that he is the biggest pig with its face buried deepest in the feeding trough.

 A leader is someone with a solution. A leader is the reverse of a fatalist; it is someone willing to act, to persist, to sacrifice the lesser for what matters most. And what does God value most? Just that, sacrifice. He, our beautiful Beloved, loves this more than anything else, including his own construction of the universe, as Baha'u'llah points out:

 "By My beauty! To tinge thy hair with thy blood is greater in My sight than the creation of the universe and the light of both worlds. Strive then to attain this, O servant!" (AHW 47)

 Let me put it in milder terms. Positively: God would be vaguely pleased if the hog would draw its head back and give the piglets a chance at the feed trough. Negatively: God might rap the knuckles of a roué caught with his hands in the cookie jar.

 As Lewis points out, if at the time of that first climate control conference governments had adopted the modest goal proposed: just not increasing their carbon footprint, the climate crisis would never have grown into the hydra it is today. Today our most starry-eyed, idealistic goals for reducing emissions do not dare aim at the low levels they were at back in the 1980's. Instead, the American president was in fatalistic denial, negating his own power by openly declaring that government initiatives are the problem rather than the solution, while at the same time he was yelling "Sooowieeee!" to the elites who had put him where he was. In the perspective of history, his words were terrifying, just not for the reasons he imagined.