Kia on NPR's foul language: "enhanced interrogation techniques," that phrase used flatly, as war on terror, or Shock and Awe, or all the other cant phrases are used by media deadened to language, let alone ethics, and their responsibilities as journalists, not to be balanced and above the fray, but to let the humanity be visible beneath the face of the jackal. Reminds me of Peter Karoff writing about "the moral dimension of philanthropy and social action." About sleepwalkers awakening. About philanthropy being as is poetry an end in itself, as virtues are. Who is listening? Strategic philanthropy, strategic marketing, strategic use of torture. Strategy has so dehumanized us that to watch a little tv news (not news anymore but casters of news) is to wonder what species of conniving animal we have become. In adjacent posts Kia talks about Victorian literature, her sensibility formed to another order, still capable of registering moral disgust. So old fashioned. An atavism.
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