this i believe

maybe you've been tuning in to npr's new series "this i believe" - the revival of an old edward murrow radio show in which people articulated the fundamental principles by which they lived and how they came to those principles. the first contribution to the new version, from colin powell, was just unlistenable: a little collage of cliches, as in "i believe in america." yeah whatever. but anyway, i decided to have a crack, though i have this funny feeling they're not going to bite. so anyway:

The applicability of principles to situations is always at best inexact, because situations bristle with specificities of which no principle can take account. Indeed, the broader the principle, the wider its application, the more it approaches the status of sheer yammer that no one even hears: it merges into the white noise of politics and advertising, the rote muttering of educators.

Some people, perhaps in a momentary delusion, manage to commit themselves to a principle, or a slogan, or even the merest word, such as "excellence." The problem may not be in the state of the enthusiast's  sincerity, but in the absence of anything in the world that corresponds to or causes that enthusiasm: there is nothing out there that attaches itself as the reality to the abstraction that is "excellence." One floats into the term like a balloon into the sky, then pops. "God" is a word like that. "Truth." Even, God or whatever help us, "love."

  Principles always have the possibility of imposing or nurturing psychosis: a mere detachment from the real world, life among the abstractions, life that has left the world behind and now is lived nowhere.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in "This I Believe": the phrase, especially under the tender ministrations of, say, Colin Powell, quickly degenerates into cant.

Principles do such a sorry job of finding reality that people have been tortured slowly to death as an expression of love or because of a commitment to human freedom.

I have no idea what principles are worth living for or what the purpose of life is, and perhaps the only real purpose I want is letting go of purposes: immersing myself in the process in all its detail and renouncing the fantasy of transcending or explaining it.

   This I believe: Children are our future. Believe in yourself and you can do anything. Freedom isn't free. I believe in the promise of America. I believe in the amazingness of the sheer wonder of life.

I believe that I have a dull headache here, right behind my eyes.

Comments

[perianwyr]

If there's no land, people tend to cling to debris and one another. If there is a mirage of land, people may swim to it. If you say there isn't land and there is, it's a mighty big and deep ocean that you are sure not to survive.

[flawedplan]

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the
clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over on me, but that I will try always to recognize and rfsubmit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.

D.H. Lawrence

[El Serracho]

i believe that is a well written comment on the claptrap that passes for thought these days.

thanks.

[Mike Farrell]

There are a few things worth dying for... a job isn't one of them. There is no right answer to the question "does this dress/blouse/pantsuit/nightgown make me look fat," except to immediately enter a coma.
There is either no God, God has one evil sonofabitchin sense of humor, or we haven't figured it out yet. Old age, and life in general suck, only less than the alternative.

And, I still believe in the promise of America and in people's incredible ability to amaze us...

I do have to wonder if Colin Powell has grown a beard yet; I would hate to have what he has on his conscience and have to shave very often.

[adam s]

A recent item in Lloyd Grove's Lowdown column in the New York Daily News recounts Powell's entertaining answer when someone asked what he's up to in his retirement.

"I get into my shiny red Corvette, drive up and down the George Washington Parkway and try to outrace the Park Police," he's quoted as saying.

http://www2.indystar.com/articles/4/235786-2894-103.html