Eventually, what I'm saying is, there is a certain energy, both peaceful and inexorable, that connects with everything, somewhat in the nature of a Passenger Liner.

Life aboard it is everything that the era that launched it can conceive of of leisured refinement and elegance. It is, while it traverses the emptiness of interstellar space, or the ocean, or the air, a world unto itself. Some men, ship's crew or licensed envoys, may spend most of their lives aboard; others only a few days--but there is no want, and no stinting, either of the necessities of life, or of luxuries. It might not matter (too much) if there are risks; boilers may explode, but there is always excellent coffee, hot and fresh, at any hour of the day or night, with inviolate long siestas in the afternoons.

I am evoking here the Kami (such as I have lately learned of) of the Flying Cloud (which, in its original shape and fitting, with inlays, was exquisitely--one might almost say daintily--beautiful), the Normandie, the Hindenburg, and the Grand Turk, the which, in Shinto, I may believe in, and, in the (not inconceivable) event of my being sincere and virtuous, may hope to see realized.  Which is pretty much what has already happened, for me, actually, in Colorado and the Pacific States with marijuana legalization, and everywhere with Gay Rights.  I wasn't collecting any Karmic Debt, but I very much wished for these things to happen--and I now have tea to drink and pot to smoke to alleviate my diabetic neuropathy.

Furthermore, I expect, as a sincere and virtuous devotee of Shintoism and Buddhism and American Transcendentalism, to see this Passenger Liner phase of human civilization realized (made real), with the full authority of a fucking Galactic Empire* behind it, starting about, say, a century and a half from now, for maybe a theoretical one thousand years, and maybe actually only five hundred years, of actual Civilization.  ¿Why not a Utopia with a built-in Historical Nostalgia Factor?  Like for example Classical Humanism?  Or say, Ruism?  ¡Gone With The Wind to the Stars!

I start back from that precipice with alarm.  No.  Really Not.  Still, something like this is true of Rome, with its tow'ring aqueducts and astounding fresh water supplies for everybody, and amazing poets and letter writers. But how can a man look another man in the eye and say, "You are my slave"? **...And, whereas the nasty, quite unnecessary business of punishing whole families, even the innocent grandkids thereof, seems to be a recurring legal solecism of Confucianists.  Really?  You think it wise or just?  How the fuck, you smug little Gook, do you arrive at that conclusion?  Again and again? Libya? Afghanistan? Iraq? Yemen?


*Shouldn't there be one?

**As Horace several times did, and understood the absurdity of, and wrote about with astonishing candor, but never once, that I know of, did the honorable thing and freed the man.