Outlier

See me, pirate medicine healer, out on the deck, a waving myself to passing waves. Ah, feel the fresh breeze of the now particular immediacy. Such is the seduction of news, dancing out from behind the many waving veils of now. And, like the very dewy petals of human beauty, this fragile momentary marvel of relevant immediacy quickly succumbs to a withering irrelevance.

Obsolescence rules.

But there is a trick to be had.

In just one small moment, South Carolina Republican Congressman Joe Wilson became the new wave when President Obama, in his address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9, stated that extending health care to all Americans would not mean insuring illegal immigrants,

Joe (please forgive the intimacy) screamed out: "You lie!" The other Joe, Biden, said he was embarrassed. Most everyone seemed to agree that this outburst, whether true or false, was totally disrespectful. Even Joe Wilson thought so. And he apologized, once. It seems clear that it is un-American to call someone a liar. That behavior is an outlier of the measured political correctness of the here and now.

But what really interests this pirate hap- pened later, on television. John King, the anchor on the CNN commentary "State of the Union," posed an interesting question on that show. He posed it and reposed it to many people. He asked columnist and political strategist Donna Brazile. He asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. And others, he asked. King seemed quite taken with his question. And I am as well.

They all stuttered.

King, in the interest of justice, wondered the following. If Wilson was so wrong for implying that the President is a liar, then should not that same standard be applied stringently and logically to President Obama's words? Obama characterized talk of death panels pulling the plug on grandma as lie. Obama said this charge would be laughable if it were not cynical and irresponsible. This charge, he said, made by prominent politicians, is a lie plain and simple. Now Sarah Palin made that statement. So, King wondered, is not Obama calling Sarah a liar?

"If it's a lie, isn't she a liar? Connect the dots."

Whatever else is true or false in all this, it is clearly false to say that it is plain and simple.

Webster's Dictionary will not solve this issue. Now we must bow to the primacy of a good liberal education that has familiarized us with the comings and goings of philosophical waves.

Can you see this pirate, walking onto the CNN set, in full academic regalia, with eye patch and mortarboard jauntily slanted? And then, the philosophical sharing could begin.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. Let's talk gerunds. A gerund is a verb's action noun. It is the name of an action. Lying is a gerund. So, if there is a lying, must there be a liar?

In medieval philosophy, there are opposing positions regarding what I call the solidness of existence. Nominalism is that perspective which invites us to see that various things labeled the same have nothing in common except the name. There is only the name, nothing more. Realism, in contrast, proposes that the labeled entities have a solid, real, independent existence even prior to the world in which the labeling occurs. Conceptualism is a kind of middle ground in which that which is labeled exists in mind, but there only, merely imputed.

So with all this intellectual possibility, why are we seduced by the human trick of the mind that creates a liar out of a lying? We fall hook, line, and sinker, feeling somehow protected by the enduring, the dependable solidity of concretized certainty. Must the instance of lying make a liar, a punishable object of hatred?

For me, there is being outlier, a dancing in the waving, lying and truthing, fresh and new, throwing away mortar and boards and civility. There is no boredom in this being, but merely an ecstatic graceful playing, displaying. There is reveling in the tea party, all invited as merely imputed guests. There is being of mad hatters, jabberwockys, Cheshire cats and queens. The labels are flying, waving at the shore beyond going. We try on all the costumes as if it were Halloween. We love the wardrobe malfunctions. And, ah, the pirating abounds.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.