Turkey on Alert
“There are so many inexplicable things in life, but one loses sight of them when singing the national anthem.”
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Old philosophers never really deal with death, in the concrete that is. Philosophers deal with life with much more clarity than with death.
Example: when the squirrel runs up the tree at night and then is found the next morning dead in the garden a shovel is required. But the philosopher instead walks right past the dead squirrel, late for an appointment, as if the squirrel doesn’t exist.
Politicians are oddballs too, distracted by squirrels and very important football games. Superior intellect is not a requirement for a public service; intellect is too often overestimated in the collective mind of the body politic so that the standard-issue political speech of our time goes like this: somehow the idiot got the crown instead of the emperor!
It was a trick to believe in the idiot, as some did: I am the superior force, I am the emperor, I am the rightful owner of the crown etcetc.
Football is no longer in my immediate or long-range future. I once remember watching a football game on a little Sony tv, Dolphins v. Jets, 1980, NBC. No announcers, only the sounds of the actual game on the field, a kind of peaceful bliss presented in black-and-white. I enjoyed the game that was then being played 3,000 miles from home, as much or more than I’ve ever enjoyed watching a football game before or since. Now, if I do watch a football game, it seems I must listen also to the commentators commenting on the other commentators who have previously been identified as celebrities with superior football credentials and who sit on the sidelines in the tv studio bantering with an additional side-kick celebrity, added as a surprise guest star to fill in the otherwise dead air just prior to halftime.
Turkey, let’s talk turkey, turkey paired with football and squirrels, the athleticism glowing from the insides of both the athlete, the football, and the squirrel.
from W.V.O. Quine’s seminal paper, “On What There Is”, first published 1948.