the impiety of trial balloons

A trial balloon is a waste of a good piece of man-made material.

The problem with trial balloons is that the people who release them so they can gauge the reaction of the people watching don't really know where they're going or where they'll land for sure. So much time is spent on the prevailing winds that gusts and blasts are ignored in favor of popular prognostication.

Unless you want to place a secular government in someone else's country.

Next time the news reports the loss of yet another monument to organized religion at public place of institution I am going to remember that its being taken away signifies the intent to evangelize the enforced cooperation of someone who doesn't share those same symbolized beliefs by the removal of something someone else holds dear.

Freedom is an entanglement of various forms of subterfuge. Sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself for someone else. Sometimes it is they who are the sacrifice. The altar is pretty commonly understood to be impermanent, but people on both sides use it anyway.


-- the iconoclast is the iconography of the symbolic future --