“…their cold, hard faces were worn like coins that have been withdrawn from circulation, but there were greedy teeth behind the withered lips.”
From “Old Goriot”
“…their cold, hard faces were worn like coins that have been withdrawn from circulation, but there were greedy teeth behind the withered lips.”
From “Old Goriot”
My answer: the hacks who support and sustain the bogus “war on terror” (doesn’t deserve capital letters), the un-winnable wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unrestrained free market, where any favour can be bought if you have enough money. The hacks include, not only the justly despised neo-cons and conservative non-intellectuals but a disagreeably large number of people on the so-called “left” who supported the violent export of what they apparently think of as democracy (Washington Post, New York Times, and a whole crowd of Democratic Congresspersons).
We witness the catastrophic decline of what was, in living memory, a fairly noble and moral Western civilization by comparison with what preceded it. I say this despite the howls of protest from some highly-educated liberally-minded friends who are convinced that it will all turn out well in the wash – don’t worry. I would reply that so ill-informed is the American public that they have no idea how far the rot has set in.
All this worry is unEpicurean, I know.
The boarders in Mme. Vauquer’s boarding house were sometimes sad and sometimes sympathetic souls, if that’s the quotation you were citing. Au contraire, the American officials, pols, and academics and their ilk who sustain the outsourcing of violence, wherever these people may fall on the political spectrum, are outside the moral universe of those ordinary, hard-luck people who interested Balzac. Or so it seems to me.
Perhaps a push-back is starting. A U.S. military judge (Navy) disqualified a Pentagon Air Force general from participating in the first case brought to trial under Military Commissions Act. Also, the House has subpoenaed the Torture Boys (Addington, Yoo, Feith etc.).
We all know why the American public is “ill-informed.†But that’s for another day in the Garden.
“Worry†may be un-Epicurean but who is immune from that human reality? The best we can hope for is to keep it at bay so that it doesn’t interfere with the good that is withing our grasp.
You are, of course, quite right about the boarding house. But I just love the language he uses (not to mention the sustained cynicism) and it reminded me of the people whose only concern is money and taxes and who have neither the christian compassion or the imagination to be anything else but selfish.