Welcome to this Sunday’s Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. Today we target: Potpourri

  • Continuing to plumb “p” word possibilities, why potpourri?
  • Derived from the French pot pourri and translated “putrid pot”, is present day putrescence, potpourri-like, masked by blended language, mixed meanings, and outright lies?
  • Before, proboscis-like, probing further, should we note that the French picked up ‘pot pourri’ from the Spanish ‘olla podrida,’ or rotten pot, and, going back further, find the Latin word “putrescere”?
  • Does that etymology take away from or add to odors emitted from American domestic policy and performance?
  • Is the air freshened or soured by the: How do we loathe thee crowd, let us count the ways? Really, what crowd are you in?
  • Do sanctimonious sorrow and shallow sensitivity sweep the domestic and, certainly, the international scene?
  • Are we wary or weary of war? How about a just war?
  • How is a just war determined and how should it be prosecuted?
  • Who puts what into the pot?
  • When cooking up conflict, does the always, eventual foul mixture and outcome depend on capability and will?
  • Does the race not always belong to the swift or the struggle to the strong?
  • Do you side with those who say: “Maybe so, but don’t bet on it” or will raw power and perseverance prevail?
  • How do the destructive “objective conditions and subjective forces ” of Marxism-Leninism continue to play in the swirling political and societal power kitchens of conflict and thought?
  • When Napoleon commented: “In war, the moral is to the material as three is to one,” does that observation apply also to the host of policies and practices that make up the fabric of a nation, or of a world?
  • Is there a blend, a potpourri, of a defined and accepted morality with universal application?
  • Does Hemingway come pretty close: “What’s moral is what you feel good after. What’s immoral is what you feel bad after?”
  • Does the profundity of that potpourri-like proposition hinge on the appreciation that “after” is a big word?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The answers and actions are yours?