- Ma’am, would you like gut or wit today?
- A little bit of both, thank you.
- And how would you have them, Ma’am?
- A drizzle of finely chopped wit over the gut cooked
over easy.
The wit simply wouldn’t function like wit without the
gut. The gut, like the salt and fat in the
best cuisine, enhances the flavor of
our perceptions, transforming them to preserve intact our healthy levels of
madness. Being the constructive ally of
wit, the gut grinders the joy and sorrow of life and serves them to us in an insanity-proofed
silver platter. It’s when I am weary of
considerations and life is too much like a scalding 170˚ cup of Joe that I reach
down to my gut to gauge the pressure and heat of the moment. Use it or lose it. So, I overuse it, trying to keep afloat of
this sizzling double espresso where the wit, amidst a heated mass of perceptions,
thoughts, feelings, colors, and shapes, persists in its futile search for
clarity. Have you ever imagined Dante’s
purgatory?
In keeping calm and carrying on with reality, lately
more gut than wit is churned away. I
find hard to reasonably justify that in such austerity times presidents and corporations
indeed exploit the recession and that the top 1% take home an average of 1.3
million annually, while we have the largest percentage of long-term poor since
President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “war on poverty.” Is this what Zakaria (2007) referred to
when stating that “in the Western world . . . liberalism has produced
democracy, and democracy fueled liberalism” (p. 122) (Caution: Stern drop in gut levels). Never mind the Cheap Food Policy! Let us stuff ourselves up with genetically
modify produce while the government gives hands outs ($955 Billion dollars over the next decade) to big agribusiness
like Monsanto that graciously witted bring to your table chemically engineered
foods. The options are gleam for the
less privileged including working parents and their children, the elderly, people with disabilities and veterans: go hungry (2 Billion people will get out of welfare for the $192 billion cuts in the SNAP program) or engross the lists for kidney and liver transplant;
a Catch-22 gone awry.
If we are what we eat, double ration of gut, garçon! for I am weary of the rampant
economic paralysis and social and intellectual stagnation. I mean, while the wit has become speechless, allowing,
for example, the scathing 10 billion budget cut in education programs, we recur
to an already debilitated gut for clarity of perception on the critical
thinking skills, or lack of, thereof, that enact and reproduce an ever-so-increasing
educational gap. Confronted by often
side-splitting indictments of the
various contradictions we live our lives by, I find myself continually dumbfounded
by our nearsightedness. (D’you got
some gut to spare?) Nonetheless, as if
re-enacting a modern Never Ending Story, we fight with some wit and spare gut
the gnawing calcifying influence of current dysfunctional times. Paraphrasing Pope, be it what it will, a compressed
visceral passion must conquer reason still, cracking open the fossilized
arteries of our democracy. (Sigh from
the bottom of my gut …)
- I’d like a cup
of your best iced-Joe, please, garçon!
