Punting

Since my blogging time today got subsumed into a lengthy debate about the gender-neutral pronoun in English, the use of “man” to mean homo sapiens and not “a single male human”, and related matters, I have to punt on blogging tonight. (Although the discussion should be the seed of a good post later.)

So, for your entertainment tonight, I turn the microphone over to my old buddy George, making points that seem nigh-prescient now about consumer culture and the unexamined life:

My heart rebels against my generation,
That talks of freedom and is slave to riches,
And, toiling ‘neath each day’s ignoble burden,
    Boasts of the morrow.

No space for noonday rest or midnight watches,
No purest joy of breathing under heaven!
Wretched themselves, they heap, to make them happy,
    Many possessions.

—George Santayana (1863 – 1952)