A koan is a short, often paradoxical idea, meant to tell the truth, or cause the ego to give up, or cause enlightenment, or all three.
Old well known koans:
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
What is the sound of a tree falling in the forest, if there is no one there to hear it?
I try my hand at koans. I’m no good at it, but I try.
Why it is so easy for ‘the base’ of any side to fall so easily into a Pavlovian rage by telling them half-truths which are purposely meant to make them cry out: “Look what they’re trying to do to us now!”
Why is the party of conservatism, liberally going all ‘jr. high schoolyard fight’ starring Palin, Scozzafava, Owens, Hoffman, Limbaugh and others.
What is oversight if no one is watching… Charlie Rangel, for instance.
If AIG with its multi-billions of dollars of real estate holdings said they stopped hiring their window washers worldwide to save money, what if it was really so no witnesses could see in the windows where executives in the glass towers were stuffing thousand-dollar bills down their trousers?
What is the sound of pharmaceutical lobbyists standing in line for the dole, while arranging for ill people not to be able to buy affordable medicine because someone drew a line across a river, saying a nation is defined only by landmass, and not by the life-sparing needs of the people.
I wonder about why Joe Bruno suddenly stopped showing up at Albany in his doublebreasted bragadoccio and who is suited up so late to investigate him and why.
And then, there’s this, a true koan, I think….
“If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket
would be elected swineherd every time,
no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.”
by Orson Scott Card, contemporary novelist
Except, there has to be an antidote to that, otherwise we’ll never make it out of the sty alive.
Something like…
if humans could discern before the fact,
the man with the slop bucket?
His real record at the slaughterhouse would be revealed
before he was ever allowed to declare he was running.