Onions and Cats

“Time at last produced philosophers who saw that neither onions nor cats nor even the heavenly bodies had organized nature. They did not immediately tell the people, for anyone who spoke badly about onions and cats in front of old women and priests would have been stoned.” Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

It’s all good.

Stupid me. I only today realized that “It’s all good” -- that amoral, irrational, asinine and masturbatory phrase that I’ve detested ever since it became au courant -- is fully and almost literally the same arrogant, spoiled, self-satisfied and facile 18th-century Christian Panglossian bromide that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The vile thing about postmodernism is its self-congratulation for being, allegedly, ahistorical. But it’s so obviously Baroque Redux! -- in its irony, its bricolage, its spoiled carelessness and its vacuous, murderous optimism. And why not? The price technology has charged for power has been laziness since Yahweh flattened Babel, since Socrates declined to write. When have better vacuum cleaners NOT made housecleaning more convenient? Stand outside THIS telos, postmodernist: arrow, gunpowder, oven, Bomb, remote control.