[Newspoetry] 3/31

[Mike Lehman]

Somehow, I think you've managed to channel Vonnegut. It's good to know 
he's not completely gone.
M

DL Emerick wrote:
> 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.
>
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