Ice Cream in Hell

Ice Cream in Hell

Toward a Framework
for the Practice of Liberal Art &
Offspring & Symptoms: The Liberal Arts

Dear Graham,

Do you wonder how many people who hate
Political Correctness are politically correct
themselves—or love it and then ooops:
politically incorrect their own self,
damnit.

I’m thinking appreciatively of Rev. Jesse Jackson
these days: career built on PC and then hoist by
his own petard. Double whammy.

Momentary. No big deal. Says more about US
and our reservoir-dog Mexican stand-off mutual
blackmail “gotcha”-unavoidability always quibbling
over the contentious bottom-line: aHA now your
goose is cooked—then it says about Rev. Jackson.

Or you describe IT your way.

Describe Mode:

Damaged and damaging if I do and damaged
and damaging if I don’t, damnied, damned.
Or call it “vulnerable” if you’re politically correct.
Walking wounded. Any one not: throw the first
stone.

Don’t you love it? Come on admit it. Or NOT?
We can argue. Political Correctness. Can’t live
with it, can’t live without it—pervasive, permeate,
the amnion in which I swim—all soaking wet
thinking dry thoughts: Joe Fish with immaculate
theories of absolution.

Walk on Eggs (w.o.e.) or Walk on Water (w.o.w.)
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either
fire or fire.

I mix meta force: poetically incorrect. Do you have
a problem with that? It’s our Double Bind that I
would turn up and put in play.

Can’t quite put my finger on it: the beauty, irony,
pathos, horror, hilarity, hysteria of my human
condition. Can you? We could compare.
Is it Comic? Tragic? Some ratio of
the two? In the eyes of the beer
holder?

I have this summer adopted Dr. K’s triad:

in-denial
under illusion
pandering

his structure for considering how to talk about the nature
of our Energy Crisis. I think it works well descriptively.
I have scrubbed these words clean & pure and they
happily represent me and of course I project:
Samize the whirl. No doubt.

Lewis Hyde, in The Trickster Makes the
World, offers a variant:


Hunger
Lying
Thieving

Ought to be a third triad out there somewhere.
Political Correctness, of course, denies this fundamental
dynamic structure—whatever token terms manifest and
embody it; the whole point of P.C. is to cover our
Emperor Butt in illusion & pander like a sonofagun.

Right there is where the psychic toxic waste clogs up
the bozone level and we got globule warming like
anything. Frank’s right.

But IT needs Fine Arts treatment. Otherwise it’s
like throwing rice at a rhino—that and surgeon
general warnings. Or what’s a college for?

ah humanities! where's our fine artists
when we need them? The world
awaits its lovers.