A Nation of Sludge

From Dr. Anthony Esolen:

Sludge is a buoyant commodity.  You can slap a fetid scrap of it with a long stick, but it bobs up again and floats your way.  Floating our way again is a lecherous congressman from New York, who made of himself his own porn star for the internet, who resigned in shamelessness and resurfaces the same.  But what’s the problem, eh?  We are sixteen million million dollars in debt, and we overspend ourselves by more than a million million dollars a year.  What’s one more liar in Congress, when our whole political life is woven from scraps and rag-ends of lies, that the Constitution is more than embossed tissue paper for the lavatories of the Capitol, that legislators legislate, that judges judge, and that the executive executes?  Every four years we engage, at tremendous expense, in a charade of self-government, a mass selection of the American Idol, a celebrity in chief, with light and noise and not one sensible thing said.

In Ohio, an Amish man and his “accomplices” are sentenced to fifteen years in prison for disciplinary hair-cutting of some of their fellow Amish.  The federal government, careless of the families being destroyed, steps in because the scissors was transported across state lines.  A thousand renegade Amish barbers could clip away with abandon and not do as much harm to the common good as will one day’s worth of people crossing our borders illegally, but the Amish don’t have nearly the number of votes as do the latter. (Read entire article.)

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