Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, just upstream, the citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.
The controversial Barry Coat of Arms
fey a. [ME feie, fey; AS fæge, fated] 1. fated; doomed to death. [Archaic and Scot.] 2. in an unusually excited or gay state, formerly believed to portend sudden death. [Archaic and Scot.] Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary Deluxe Second Edition Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp. gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie ©1983 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.
Argument is the fundament of discourse, in the plain spoken words of the Barry Family.
In the Barry Family view this cannot be gainsaid without engendering what would be denied, and, as properly offering an instance of a thing may never be used to prove the inexistence of the class to which it belongs, the irrefragable nature of the matter is assured.
Argument is the fundament of discourse.
Bogus Authority, a Testament
(Part the Fourth)
All the many sharp conflating sparks engendered by the unending collisive discourse of authority fly out, greedy for new fuels. Everywhere the disparate stands of conversation, so far afield they seem at first unlikely bearers of those elemental antagonisms, take heat from it, reflect back that argument's reddening glow.
Had we thought to put a prelude to this piece, beginning just before Part the First as seen below, we would of course have spent no little time considering the storied tale of Robin Hood, great exemplary evidence it lays out of so many of the strains of argument hereinunder entered.
Perhaps in a preface, if not crowded out by a preface's other usual concerns, or in an introduction, the shorter shrift of the whole being customary there, or, given that the subject's full examination might distend beyond its proper bound the ordinary limits of an introduction, in a forward instead, with its happy hint whenever met that the matter at hand will soon enough be entertained, the characteristic Robin Hood so commonly imagined might in no wise have been misplaced.
Song and story carry the fellow's tale to us from a distant time and place. He stood against the Sheriff of Nottingham, all will agree, the clever bandit and his merry band.
But where does the authority of Robin Hood come from, and how, in all the ensuing years, has it endured?
By all rights, following the logics of Mr. Bagini's remarks in Bad Moves: Bogus Authorities, we must acknowledge the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham. It devolves directly, is parcelled out, from the source proper to such dispensations, from some lord or other endowed in that noble age with the suitable franchise for making such determinations.
But Robin Hood, what lent his actions any authority, we might ask, and generalizing from the principles of Mr. Bagini we might well conclude that the short answer is that there is no reason for it in the least.
Oh, of course, he had his merry men, and they all approved, and the audience for the songs and tales that kept his adventures alive down the years. There is that: popular authority, the continuing cry of the crowd to play that one again, that one about the green-clad fellow and his resistant band that they all down the ages never tired of.
In time by dint of artful minstrelry the singer entered into the song itself in the proxy person known as Alan a Dale, though clearly from what's extant of the story's earliest form, we know that Will Scarlet was the fellow who did the singing in the group, a wastrel sort of nobleman he was, but trained to the lute like all the popinjays both good and bad that noble life produced.
Made like mirror of the order they opposed, the band of them called merry were, with the noble fellow and the relaxed cleric Tuck, and the sturdy yeoman John, and the fine true female Marion gathered there around the fellow Robin.
Redistributive they were, and sure the poor would be a good audience forever for a tale with such a thrust.
But, too, each of the rest of them up and down the ranked order of society, hearing the tale sung, heard in it of one just like themselves who heeded the dangerously attractive call for rough and rowdy justice there. A noble, a monk, a yeoman, a fair maid, and the good fellow with the confident smile to lead them.And then of course the singer, edging himself into the thing in the person of Alan a Dale, so late arrived in the corpus, but in no way unnaturally enlisted in that band.
The singer is authorized by the auditors of Robin Hood to represent to them by means of his however dulcet wordings both coded and overt, the happy consequences of bold good acts agreeable to all, even though clearly such acts are prohibited, strictly speaking. Prohibited but desireable by all, at times, given the unjust rankling irritants that make up any social order.
The singer carries the sweet argument by his own harmonious authority. It's that singer's job, certainly, to avoid what disapprobation lurks ever in a crowd, of the sort that will suddenly turn it toward some meaner entertainment.
It's clear that Alan a Dale, for example, would never sing a song of that fine fearsome fellow Nottingham, resolute champion of order in those parts, and oh what a man with the ladies.
No.
A Dale, any a Dale, would know better than that.
Grand thing it is the subtle agreement the best of them arrange, singers, between the complexly offered sensibility they produce, and that received by their most willing auditors. Beside keen talent of expression it seems to those of us here at HCE who have investigated the matter to any depth at all, that the best of them incorporate the sensibility they offer up as well, personally consonant with the song in a way those gifted with only proper pitch can never be. The same complex sensibility inhabits them as they make song of, it seems to us.
Mr. Thome Yorke is a corker in this respect, from what we gather of Mr. Bagini's regard for him. Genius he says he has.
For all we know Mr. Yorke's is some modern mordant moaning, enrapturing enough to people brought up on that sort of thing, making and then meeting great popular demand for the strain of such expressiveness peculiar to him alone, as is the common path of genius among singers in this age.
We do grant him his willing listener, and thus at the very least, the authority to be their Alan a Dale, however much his proferred sensibility may be disjoint with our own in the event. That he, inhabited by that sensibility, might speak it in any context, is a measure of unsurprising consistency. So that when he says words so deprecated by Mr. Bagini, we must aver that his authority is well established in tradition.
Bogus Authority, Aside
(Part the Fourth here unavoidably abeyant, its proper place is taken by the following related bog coda of the Barry Family lore)
All the glad rhythms of any ongoing argument, particularly with respect to the question of authority, rise up and fall away in concert with the tenor of the times. The rhythms can be modeled, made mnemonic by the measured rhyme of wording, that lending of similitude to the aural equivalencies at line-end.
Rhyming the thing is the great service in keeping it all in memory, in the Barry Family's long experience. Little talent for it members of the Family ever displayed among themselves, true; still the Barry Family anciently granted the felicity of the insistent technique in helping to uncoil the longish strands of argument sometimes necessarily deployed when having at a particular point in any lengthy and as yet unended strand of conversation.
Particularly for the longer stuff rhyme will always offer up by its potent usages the gracefully imposed scheme of order just orthogonal to the main concern of the matter at hand, the meaning of the thing well-boundaried by rhyme's self-same-sounding endings.
Commonly in that distant time before the Romans came to the Paris Basin, when memory was the only available notetaking surface, as members of the Barry Family recall, much of the best and most usefully said could go on and on and on before ever arriving at some delightfully achieved point, itself the sought-after consummation devoutly tbw of every utterance, as all agree.
And it was unarguable that the prodigious long parsing of stuff properly loosed by lip found its ablest assistance in the nice employ of rhyme, its advantageous candle discovering by brightened clue the needed motion along the future path of wordings from among the few fairest possibilities made sensible by that means.
So like a pack of dogs in metaphor, the rhyming schemes all are, set out ahead suggestively once loosed, sounding the desired way from the near distance in their brayed anticipations of equivalence to the auditing ear of those attending.
Ah, rhyme!
The Barry Family with its uneven mastery of dogs even in metaphor, was never fortunate as those so talented to always follow the dog's best bark in this, and as the constant interruptive leanings of their own conversation acted quite persuasively against one of their kind holding forth long enough to develop the technique to any appreciable degree, in practice they were never much for rhyming.
Ill-suited for memory by way of rhyme, the Barry Family fell on to the other methods of achieving the result, its members holding in their heads by a motley of bogrelated processes all the storied knowledges needed by their ilk.
Still: a good rhyme, ah! The Barry Family concurs in its sweet desirability.
Credit where due: when rhyming they are the marvels with the tactic, the masters of it are, the ones who rhyme so well, holding in their heads by dint of it magnificent long matters made instantly retrievable by rhyme's best usages, in the Barry Family view.
Bogus Authority, a Testament
"After reading Captive State, I will never be able to take the Labour government seriously again."
—Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead (Quoted on cover of George Monbiot's Captive State)
Julian Bagini — whose name is otherwise unknown to us here at HCE, though we must suppose it fully merits the renown it has accrued among the sort of people who pay it any attention at all when it appears — has written extensively on the subject of Mr. Yorke's quoted words. His essay Bad Moves: Bogus Authorities appears on the website Butterflies and Wheels.
Mr. Bagini shares with many the highest opinion of Radiohead's music. He cannot be faulted in this. It is a common feature of the species to be pleased by music, and for that pleasure to attach itself most ardently to a particular purveyor from time to time. We here at HCE know the feeling well, although, having only passing familiarity with Radiohead, we necessarily reserve judgement on its proper ranking on our own List of Wonderful Musics, as yet unfully mapped.
"In my opinion - which has never been humble - and in the opinion of many others, Radiohead are the best rock band on the planet right now."
Mr. Bagini's essay begins with this polite encomium before it turns to sterner stuff.
"But although I am prepared to acknowledge the genius of Thom Yorke et al in the realm of music, I was not aware that Yorke was also a political commentator worth paying serious attention to."
…
Mr. Bagini by this route successfully reaches his point:
"Why then should Yorke's endorsement of a book on "the corporate takeover of Britain" be considered worth splashing over the dust jacket? What lends his words any authority?"
Having reached Authority, true subject of the words he visits on us here, Mr. Bagini is essentially through with Mr Yorke, though he cannot avoid a Parthian on leaving him."The short answer is that there is no reason."
But this shot, though short, curiously circles its mark.
Disappointingly to those of us here at HCE who own the Barry Family partiality for extensive remarks on the subject of authority whenever and wherever the topic comes up, Mr Bagini visits the agelessly disputed question on his lookers, rich fodder always for an essayist, only to restrict his musings on the matter to dust jacket words like Mr. Yorke's (words so well known to us here at HCE from their recently constant presence) in practice known as "blurbs" to those who mention them.
Every subject has its due, in the Barry Family estimate, and once broached, will by necessity either travel by suitable argument to its conclusion or continue on, buoyed by endless mention, unresolved but always seeking resolution, which may finally come e.g. in the form of the common agreement or grateful indifference of its participants.
Mr. Bagini's remarks, inasmuch as they mention the troubled and troubling nature of authority, must be acknowledged as a smallish thread in that greater, continuous argument of authority which has been going on since long before the Barry Family can be said to have noticed it at all.
Certainly by now the Barry Family has its acknowledged views on the subject, which, while never claiming objectivity, are at least distant enough from the matter to provide what its members take to be a proper focus.
Authority arises, in the aphorismic axiomatics of the Barry Family lore, and it is held aloft on the raft of argument; discourse delivers it down the days.
What gives it legitimacy or denies it that quality is a subtlety than cannot long be avoided, but the existence of authority precedes such considerations, just as the existence of the eye's widely known capacity for sight precedes our evaluation of exactly how and by what complex means it does or does not adequately see in the given instant.
As to the dog's sight, we here at HCE who are responsible for expressing ourself on its behalf lend it small weight nevertheless with reference to the rainbow, and cannot imagine that its colorless view of the thing, should it be communicable, might add much at all to our own more authoritative considerations, based as they are on the human capacity to distinguish those colors denied the dog's view which, by universal agreement among our kind, are the rainbow's salient characteristic.
(Neither would we deny on the other hand, should it come to the rhinosophies, the condign superiority of the dog's own snout for smelling what may smell, nor its capacity for putting its nose where ours would never go in seeking further evidence in support. Thus we would grant the dog surpassing knowledge in this respect, little though it tips the scale in our view when considering the question of authority put before us. Should there be some clever test made to identify the very best of noses found in dogs which by some means could determine the preeminent beast among them, still we would ask when seeking the identity of the winner, whose dog?)
The Barry Family, while agreeing that the knowledges are a charming feature of authority when they do appear there, recognize also, particularly with respect to humans, that authority has its own designs, from which great swaths of the complex range of knowledges may as often be excluded as employed.
Knowledge appeals to authority, but its supplications are not always taken up, competing as they must with the other organs of authority's operations. Obvious knowledges are commonly enough ignored by the overriding concerns of authority.
The poor must eat. It is this irritating detail, one of the constant knowledges derived directly from the periodic hungers essential to all our kind, which inclines the Barry Family, in concert with any number of otherwise quite dissimilar entities, to adamantly insist that the poor have some food to eat, for example.
The Barry Family quickly admits that the hand with bread in it is more authoritative than the fondest wish in this regard.
Still, these are the Barry Family views, authoritatively expressed on many occasions. Having little authority, though authoritatively ours, these expressions give but little succor in themselves to the poor, though in concert with the little acts of others may contribute to a palliative end somehow.
The poor must, in fact, eat, as must we all, however much this knowledge may be regularly excluded from authority's engaging interests, or our own, more's the pity.
The knowledges in themselves are no guarantor, and the lack of them no prohibitor, of authority.
As each entity owns its acts, it has in that at least, authority.
This is the embodied authority of being. The dog has no other authority but its own to bark in dark of night, a point we have raised ourselves periodically to little effect.
Based on whichever of those knowledges we here at HCE have as yet been unable to convince it mean nothing in the night, the dog does bark, and without passing into questions of legitimacy at all, without in any way exploring the sharp full shape enunciating it, we acknowledge the authority of the dog's very own bark when it comes to barking. All other barks are mere mimesis. We choose, oftentimes, to take issue, to deny, to at times forcefully reject in no uncertain terms the knowledges contained in that made bark of the dog. But there it is.
As argument is the fundament of discourse, it issues forth from time to time provisionally ascendant judgments which remain in force for as long as the cunningly crafted retort as yet unspeakable by some other party to the conversation remains unassembled, or for as long as it takes for the superior expression of the very same thing to subsume the previously ascendent judgement in its better saying.
At times such retort as can be made comes swift and firm, at times it is slow to announce itself, gathering as it must the full force of its withering refutation against the implacable advance of the argument before it. The unended argument of authority is ever–quickened by incessant pronouncements based on it.
Authority may be granted, its powers parsed and passed from one entity to the next. This is the bestowed authority of rank. As the argument of authority is continuous, and its seemingly conclusive expressions, once reached, reveal themselves to be like some surmounted hillock giving way to yet another higher ridge toward which the unended avenues of argument can be seen to climb, bestowed authority is forever subject to the vagaries of fresh perception. Authority may aggrandize unto itself new powers unanticipated by its first grant. Or it may find itself bereft of any useful powers whatsoever, its jurisdiction collapsed by the better suasions of some newly fashioned argument.
Mediævally, in those parts of Europe that had such a thing, in that dark age of a time when the ranks of utter poverty were often enough the greatest aspiration of the broken most of them below it, it was the great and useful role of the famous and yet-catholic church to advocate the interests of the poor, recommending with what authority it could muster of its own as a voice on their behalf, that the poor have some food to eat. This unitary voice was broken later on the wheel of argument over its own authority to speak on anything at all, but still may be heard from time to time echoing among the variegated pronouncements of its descendant parts.
The argument may settle the thing, though the settled thing is a faintly worthy discourse in the Barry Family view.
Thus we rarely mention Peter Ramus, whose revolutionary pedagogy in the hands of his European disciples swept aside the classical pedagogy of the Middle Ages and replaced it with the progenitor of the system of education we are even now in this day and age enjoined to follow. He plainly won his argument about it, based on current conditions. His view is now the settled thing.
The very fact that students walk from class to class, lair of the given professor in our age, instead of having each professor come around to them, the contemporary practice in pre-Ramus times, is an innovation traceable directly to him. He championed practical knowledge, and the role of the campus in dispensing it. Every business school that now exists, exists as a result of his insistent original argument for the profession of the practical in schools, revised and expanded down the years in the complementary acts of those who followed after.
He opposed Aristotle, of course, whose judgments, ascendent things they were in matters of pedagogy all during the longish sway of the Mediæval scheme of scholastic discourse, went unchallenged til the time of Ramus.
The scholastics, the pride of them, Mediævally European Europeans, accepted Aristotle's sept of liberal arts framing the knowledges that could be had at universities. Colloquially they were the quadrivium and the trivium. Among these Ramus took particularly geometry and rhetoric to task, one each from the quadrivium and trivium advanced by Aristotle, which consisted of, in its greater part, the quadrivium, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, and in its lesser, the trivium, grammar, logic and rhetoric.
He tore at Euclid's Elements for its meaty parts, as he saw fit, Ramus did, and proposed the introduction of a new scheme of geometry in which the practical parts might be more abruptly introduced. Geometry as now taught in schools is more like what Peter Ramus meant for it to be than the measured considerations of Euclid.
He revalued rhetoric entirely, and clearly by current usage, when the word comes up at all, it is to be understood in the sense Peter Ramus fashioned of it, as a matter of style in discourse only, generally embedded accusatorily, said of some pointed phrase of that which, otherwise less plainly adorned, would come across a lie.
These are among the settled things that the original arguments of Peter Ramus led to, though he had little authority to joust with Aristotle himself, seeming-settled arbiter of pedagogies in that age the great Greek was. It all led to a sad end for Peter Ramus, just as the barking dog's good reason to bark at night is so often met with the clearest disapprobation of the nearby authority, which though currently ascendent will eventually be tested as the dog predicts.
The pedagogy argued for by Peter Ramus was taken up and sounded by the pack of those who valued him for another reason, however much his suggested reforms complemented the mood they had for change. Murdered martyr for his notorious contrarian religion he was, caught up in the fashion of the age for dealing mortally with such famous arguments as Calvinism might invoke.
Posthumously the pedagogy of Peter Ramus was one of the many proud protestant possessions in the great heated argument of authority in that glorious and deadly age of renaissance.
William Temple, prosperous man by contemporary measure of wherewithal he was in England then (where he housed for ten surely challenged years the hospitalities due the author of the soon-to-be-written A Tale of A Tub, whose name is by convention scarcely uttered in the Barry Family conversation, but whose fame in English literature is wide enough so that even the first mouthful of his notorious proposal, as example, will immediately make sensible the full flavor of his identity to those who pay any attention at all to English literature) called Sir William Temple as often as not by those still subject to that style of address, took up the study of the words of Peter Ramus, great inquisitive man of the mind, this William was, who had after the classics like so many others in that age with the all-new weapons of the protestant discourse at his disposal.
William's own temple was for a decade inhabited by that unholy spirit of his related houseguest, who satirized at a later time in his tart Battle of the Books this particular strain of contention in the greater argument of authority then raging.
But hadn't it been settled already? Hadn't there been, back in Paris at the university Peter Ramus proposed to change, a hearing on the matter? Sure, with all the pomp and seriousness acknowledged necessary for such a convocation, hadn't it been called together there under the auspices of church and state? Of course it had, then.
Wasn't it a time for a proper argument back then though, the Renaissance?
Aw, in Florence mathematicians would have after one another, and as the rhetoric was as much a part of their proper training as the logics, they'd draw the big crowd tempted by the best of arguments to a square to hear them out, the crowd knowing that, given the proper encouragements, reference to the salient fact that the one of the disputants, for example, had no nose at all but only a little silver cap he'd had fashioned to wear there, could easily enough be elicited in the heat of discourse, even discourse on the cubics itself, dry subject farther from their daily interests and as a result less likely to bear their continued attention, however cunningly orated, than the absent situation of the nose of the fellow himself.
Certainly noselessness incites the profound interest in any age, startling detail it is, so it is no wonder that it might compete on equal footing for their attention with the announcement of that first successfully argued envisionment of the cubics the two disputants were offering.
In Paris, re Ramus, a quæstio was convoked, giving home field advantage to those who argued on the side of Aristotle and Euclid against the program Peter Ramus had.
A neutral court, sessioned perhaps along the modest banks of the Blackwater river in Ireland, might have seen Peter Ramus prevail, or at least have made a nearer match of it, but that was not to be. The court of inquiry, with all the formal trimmings of authority Paris could bring to bear, found him wrong.
The panel gathered and by its vested powers of authority ruled in firm favor for the deponent classics in all particulars.
The pedagogy of Peter Ramus is thus that twice–settled thing; settled divergently with respect to the formal ruling on the matter delivered out of contemporary Paris by the authority &tc. vested in its makers on the one hand, and settled as well in the colloquial application of the practices of Peter Ramus on the other hand (ascendent though by all rights still arguable progeny of the pedagogy of Peter Ramus in our own poorly educated age they've come to be).
Having thus prepared the proper conceptual groundwork for our finalizing consideration of Mr. Bagini's previously introduced remarks, we turn toward our own summary statement, Bogus Authority (Part the Fourth), so soon to be made public if we have any say in the matter at all.
Bogus Authority, a Testament
(Part the Second)
"After reading Captive State, I will never be able to take the Labour government seriously again."
—Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead (Quoted on cover of George Monbiot's Captive State)
It would seem for the most part unarguable that Thom Yorke's words as quoted here capture his intended meaning to a large degree: Mr. Monboit's book Captive State has had its effect on him, an effect which he publicly avows.
His avowal is unfortunately freighted with the hyperbolic use of the word "never," which those of us here at HCE, constrained as we are to follow the standards of the Barry Family lore, must greet resistantly wherever it is deployed.
For all we know Mr. Yorke may feel justified in now and forever considering the Labour Government a bunch of clowns, but in our cautious view a clown with a gun is to be taken very seriously indeed, and the Labour government, however else it may be characterized, by virtue of the powers vested &c., is unquestionably well-armed.
Our concern in this regard is muted, however.
We understand that locutions such as "never" are an allowable feature of the book cover "blurb," the necessarily compacted phrasings of which admit scant space for a thoroughgoing examination of the quoted person's full feelings in the matter.
Having been well-served here at HCE these many years by our principled unwillingness to lift and look under the rock of British politics, we would as soon leave Mr. Yorke's words stand as they are, imperfectly expressive though they may be, without calling for any further explication on his part, or on the part of anyone else, for that matter.
Bogus Authority, a Testament
(Part the First)
"After reading Captive State, I will never be able to take the Labour government seriously again."
—Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead (Quoted on cover of George Monbiot's Captive State)
Those of us here at HCE who reflexively recoil from spelling the word labor with a "u," or the word "Tom" with an "h, nevertheless must acquiesce readily in the face of such practices insofar as they reflect the fundamental prerogative of self-styling due every self-stylable entity.
It is beyond the capacity of the dog, for example, whose sensibilities we are ever at pains to include in our deliberations on such matters here at HCE, to foist upon the others of its kind a willful idiosyncracy in this regard. The rhinosophies of dog knowledge are the strict standard of measure in matters of identity among that kind, and it is beyond the capacity of the dog, in the unlikely event that it could ever choose to do so, to present anything but it own frankly given odor as badge of its existence. It cannot add the aromatic equivalent of "u" or "h" to what it offers up. No, what discernable niceties of individuation may waft their way toward inspection by its kind are no less than the unmediated product of lineage and personal circumstance, such as they may be, and nothing more.
Despite the incessantly ironizing tendencies of humans in our present age, we take Mr. Yorke's words to be the same sort of guileless self-report as would be required of every dog in every instance, and accurately indicate a personally disillusioning effect the book's contents, whatever they may be, had on him when he read the thing.
It would, of course, be just possible to construe Mr. Yorke's words to mean that he had not yet read the book at all.
Mr. Yorke does not say, for example, "Having read Captive State I will never &c.," which would clinch the matter, but instead, "After reading Captive State I will never &c.," which leaves the small but still not inexistent chance that, on being given the opportunity to scan the thing, he declined the offer much as we, in a similar vein, being given the opportunity to leap from a cliff, might likewise demure by remarking, "after jumping from the cliff, we will never be able to give the world a serious look again."
Which is to say, given the choice between continuing to take the Labor government seriously and reading the book, Mr. Yorke chooses the former course.
We cannot say, given our admittedly self-imposed ignorance in the matter, extending as it does in near-utter fashion over the entire Labour Government and all its doings, why anyone would in fact prefer to take it seriously, as such a reading would require.
The armed invasion most recently undertaken by the famous United States of America which surrounds us here at HCE has not escaped our notice by any means. No.
Though the invasion took place far from our own home acres, word of it, loud, contentious word of it in point of fact, has distracted us so often from our own engrossing interests that we are obliged to put aside from time to time those considerations which characteristically monopolize our thoughts and attend to the heated discussion of the matter raging all around us, which discussion began even before the shock and awe of the event itself was brought so forcibly home to us by the makers of what we consider news here at HCE.
Satisfied quite early on by certain signs, signals and demeanors of those capable of ensuring that war would come, that war would come, we accepted (sadly as always when such decisions are taken) that war would come, notwithstanding the sometimes plaintive, sometimes furious disagreement in the matter expressed by those opposed to such a plan.
It is not without interest that those so opposed from the first to war maintained that it would be, should it come, on the face of it, unjust.
The basis of this stark claim was that, by longstanding conventions used to evaluate such things, barring an attack, or clear evidence of an attack soon to be mounted by a given foe, no nation was free to simply and boldly (in the term of art "aggressively") war on another; no, this would be a war of aggression, and immoral. Rather, that nation was constrained to avail itself of other means painstakingly crafted for resolution of the constantly erupting frictions of our age.
The Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, whose ancient franchise so often incites him to pronouncements on matters of morals, made this very point himself in the months leading up the unleashing of the recent war.
Nonetheless, of course, it was unleashed, as we had forseen it would be.
Puzzlingly, now that it is done, there comes from those who unswervingly supported war, insistent and widespread word that neither the President of the United States nor any of those closest minions charged to speak for him, claimed in the runup to the war that the chosen foe was an imminent threat at all.
We don't know what to make of this avowal here at HCE.
Certainly those who supported war cannot now have come around to arguing it was immoral from the first, although their thoroughgoing examination of all the relevant speeches does in fact reveal the absence of "imminent threat" per se from the locutions of presidential speeches at the time.
We don't see what good this does them to rub the noses of their opponents in this fact at all, given that their opponents maintained this all along.
We clearly recall the presidential rhetoric of some prodigious threat or other, now evaporated (having been proved illusory in the war's aftermath). A mushroom cloud and vile toxins were mentioned more than once, although these selling points, as is so often the case in promotional campaigns, exceeded in enthusiasm the reach of plain truth.
We are stumped by this latest sally of supporters of the war. There is no imminent threat that we will soon make sense of it.
Anciently at midnight on this day these stars known now as the Pleiades would culminate, would reach the highest point above the horizon their yearly round would take them, formally marking the end of the harvest time and the beginning of the new year.
The Pleiades rode high above, the world turned toward its shrivelling subtractions, and the new year, balanced there in the minds of all between the gathered offerings of earth and its inevitable chill undoings, began.
The Barry Family laugh, untowardly given thing, has its home there, in that fey moment: wilful celebration in the measured braying gift they offer up to death and all its dealings.