[Newspoetry] 3/31

[DL Emerick]

If we don't circumvent intelligent life soon, there will be no chance of ever
finding intelligent life left on this Earth.  SETI will have looked in the wrong
way and place for what was there, as a possibility, in never an actuality.
Planetary death, I had expected, to be like the death of a star.  But, surely,
all the dead planets of this solar system will soon be numbered one more, one
too many, and one too few, so far as I care.  Running the world was never a job
for morons.  It was once possible for philosophers to think it was possible that
kings might be philosophers.  Now, more realistically, even philosophers think
no wisdom guides any kings, except accidentally.  The reason for this reversal
of reason?  Not cynicism, per se, but a concession, to the death of reason,
evident in its dearth, upon this earth.  Reputedly, it is proclaimed that
mankind is better educated than at any time in all of previous history.  The
result of mass education?  Extinction of the people, death of the planet.  Oh,
say some of the so-called wise, don't call it death -- call it normal variation,
or even transformation, or even evolution.  The planet is sick of man and is
calling out to the stars, "Save me from this plague of man who is not so wise as
his intelligence supposes, when it erases wisdom in the name of a higher IQ."
An intelligent man, we suppose, would know the limit of intellect lies at the
boundary between it and wisdom.  We have no tests for wisdom, hence we can't
find it, so amorphous and invisible is it, chaotic and formless substance of the
void, perhaps, even, it is like the once hypothesized celestial ether filling
all of "outer" space.  No.  Philosophers have learned, to love wisdom is not to
have it, but to respect it, to honor it -- and, too, learned, all too well,
kings rule by acts of possession, sometimes (or, perhaps, always) even madness.
We, the possessed, are not wise.