"John Lewis tells you something about voting rights and you say, yes, sir, and you shut the fk up."

Charles Pierce pithily dictates the sole method of showing respect. 

But actually, ironically, that kind of respect entails massive disrespect. You say yes and you shut the fuck up in his presence, and that means the only way people can have a serious back-and-forth debate on the subject is if they exclude John Lewis.

***

Pierce has a nice sidebar at his blog under the heading "About this blog." I read it for the first time, by chance, just now. The penultimate sentence is:

It will be the belief of this blog that, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the only correct answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is "No."

"The right rallied on Labor Day to celebrate 'National Empty Chair Day'..."

"... a show of solidarity with Clint Eastwood after his infamous address to an invisible President Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention last week."

Seems to me the world is full of empty chairs. How is any given chair supposed to acquire the meaning intended if meaning is intended? And contrariwise, isn't it unfair to all the other chairs that are just hanging around being chairs and not meaning to say anything?

AND: This has got me thinking about horror vacui:

In visual art, horror vacui (/ˈhɔrər ˈvɑːkjuːaɪ/; from Latin "fear of empty space", which might be represented by white spots), also cenophobia (/sɛnəˈfoʊbɪə/, from Greek "fear of the empty"), is the filling of the entire surface of a space or an artwork with detail.

The term is associated with the Italian art critic and scholar Mario Praz, who used it to describe the suffocating atmosphere and clutter of interior design in the Victorian age....

Research suggests there is currently an inverse relationship between horror vacui and value perception, and commercial designers are advised to favour minimalism in shop window displays and advertising to appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers, on the premise that horror vacui appeals more to poorer and less-educated audiences.

Perhaps I'm letting my education and affluence show, but I think empty is good. An unfilled space is complete in itself and yet also an opportunity. I think the horror vacui is somewhat male, and I am speaking from a vagina'd perspective.

"Which Christmas carol lyric depicts your life?"

A pop quiz:

a. “Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither.”

b. “BlackBerry on our hip and then it gave a little flicker. . . . Came to realize my homie Bieber hit me on the Twitter. Then I hit him back despite I had some food on my finger.”

That quiz (in the NYT) is really just a cute way — assuming the NYT is capable of being cute — for the NYT to tell you it knows about the pop recording "Drummer Boy," which, it asserts, is "excellent."

Having found the lyric genuinely amusing, I listened to the song and found it immensely annoying. I think I'd managed thus far in life to avoid hearing the voice of Justin Bieber. It's so irritating!... especially when accompanied by constant snare drumming, which is, apparently, regarded as essential, even when layering in rap, for anybody doing a new arrangement of that always awful song "Drummer Boy."

Which reminds me, if you ever feel like giving me a gift, and you think all you've got to give is that drum number you're threatening to perform, realize you are making a mistake. There's also the gift of silence. I'd prefer that. I know baby Jesus reputedly appreciated the gift of drumming — according to that nasty song — but consider the possibility that Jesus was just being nice. I know, politeness is a quality alien to infants, but — come on! — it was Jesus! Put the damned drum away.

What I like about the quiz, though, is that much as I identify with "Bring me flesh and bring me wine," I'm thousands of times more likely to eat while using a high-tech device than in front of a blazing fire.