Friday, June 13, 2014

Apodicticity!

Has anyone besides me ever noticed the similarity in the expression on the faces, in repose, of Mary Baker Eddy and Mark Twain?  Not that either would have welcomed the comparison, still it's there:  The word that comes to my mind (having just re-read the Nun's Priest's Tale  for the umpteenth time) is "vulpine."  A gentle-seeming, predatory watchfulness, not unmixed with admiration (presumably of any ex tempore singing they might be listening to).  It reminds me that recent (within the last couple of decades) Russian experiments in breeding captive Siberian foxes have resulted in the virtually perfect domestication of foxes--an animal hitherto thought to be untamable.    But that aside (because, though interesting, it's irrelevant), it is to Mark Twain and his keen-tongued dissection of the Mother of Christian Science's billowy/pillowy prose-style that I owe my own use, and hyperbolic misuse (i.e., wrong, but deliberate, over-use), of the words "apodicticity" and "apodictic," which I have only since yesterday decided to adopt.  Basically, in my usage, it is the assertion of the inarguable (oh shut up) truth of certain legal and political presuppositions, which are held to be proved and demonstrated by their acknowledged outcomes.  Examples of Apodicticities:

1)  That Abraham Lincoln was (as, while assassinating him, his assassin said he was) a tyrant is proven by his having abrogated the First and Fourth Amendments, and denied the rights of Habeas Corpus and due process to his political opponents; by his prosecution of the Civil War (resulting in the loss of more than 750,000 young men's lives); and by his military invasion of the states of the Confederacy and destruction of the property of non-combatants.  Think how much greater as a nation (or as several nations) we would be if Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated four years earlier!

2)   Chief among the apodictic proofs that 9/11 was indeed an inside job, are the Patriot Act, and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.



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