by va
Edgar Allen Poe has a story about a guy called M. Valdemar, who is hypnotised at the moment of his death so that he is able to narrate it from the other side of consciousness. Like such: "Yes; still asleep—dying." And such: "Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead." He goes on like this for seven months, when finally it is decided that he must be awakened, even though his awakening will precipitate his final dissolution. The story ends in the following slushy manner:
As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of "dead! dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before the whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence.
Not unrelatedly, Michael Gerson has an op-ed in the Post, claiming the mantle of eternal righteousness for "compassionate conservatism." For those who are curious, compassionate conservatism is a "conviction" that "government can be a noble enterprise when it applies creative conservative and free-market ideas to the task of helping those in need." Right. Please not to do us any fucking favors, amigo. Gerson ends his decomposition like such:
The moral commitments that underlie compassionate conservatism will not fade with the passing of a political figure, party or ideology, because these beliefs stand in eternal judgment of all ideologies, including conservatism. And no matter how hard you try, you cannot bury what cannot die.
WAKE UP, Michael Gerson! You have been deluded! WAKE THE FUCK UP!!11!
Above: Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?