I’ve been meaning to write this post since about an hour after posting the last one but then Claudia and I decided to go to lunch and take in a movie. Ex Machina had a pretty high Rotten Tomatoes score. When we got home I read from Dead Wake out loud to Claudia on our sun porch. I even told Art Johnston that as much as we had to talk about yesterday morning I really needed a little R & R from the Board.
“Vengeance” was the wrong word to use in my tightrope metaphor. I’m not really so Old Testament. Except that, just now, I discovered that this famous saying comes from the New Testament. I didn’t read enough to provide any exegesis on the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, Romans 12:19 KJV, but when he precedes it by saying “It has been written” he must be quoting the Old Testament for the sake of authority. I have an expert asleep downstairs but I really don’t need to wake her. The point is that I chose a word for that metaphor which really does not apply. It was such an obvious contrast to the word “magnanimity” (which, by the way, I misspelled) that I pulled it down from my mental thesaurus and popped it in without enough thought.
I don’t like to make serious contextual changes in posts after 24 hours or so lest my readers start thinking I change old blog posts willy-nilly to hide my original intent. I will change an obvious typo when it glares out at me. If I go back and find that I wrote “don’t chare a white” I’d have no problem dropping the h in what was obviously meat to be “care” or drop the e in that was meant to be “whit” or for that matter add an n to this sentence’s word “meat.” The last was obviously meat to be “meant.”
But even the word I should have used, “justice,” does offer up some of the same sort of ferocious resolve that I meant to convey. Our Board has treated a member unjustly. It has attempted to assassinate his character and force on him a huge legal bill to defend himself. Now that’s what I call vengeance. Our meeting to withdraw ourselves from a court hearing to remove him from the Board was much worse than a Rosanne Roesannadanna “Nevermind.” Had it been a simple rescinding I wouldn’t be harping on about it. Instead, the Board majority wrapped their execrable denunciation around their naked butts as if to say: the last eleven month’s were Art Johnston’s fault – don’t blame us..
I’m not interested in vengeance. I’m interested in letting the truth be told. That’s justice not revenge although it may feel the same to folks trying to cover their naked butts.
