Day: October 10, 2006

No, that title doesn’t refer directly to our Command in Chief or to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

It actually refers to the A.P. article I just read at Common Dreams. According to the article “The Navy lawyer who led a successful Supreme Court challenge of the Bush administration’s military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been passed over for promotion and will have to leave the military.â€?

I wonder why he was passed over. Could it have been because he was an incompetent lawyer, unfit to represent the Navy’s legal department?

Doubtful.

Which leaves us to wonder why he was passed over for promotion.

Damn. A no brainer, indeed.

It’s past time to drive these bastards out of office.

It’s perhaps not surprising that a person of my advanced age should have a few habits, habits so ingrained that even I have no idea when they began.

Whenever I visit the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge, I stop in at the administration office AFTER I’ve walked the five and a half mile outer loop and check the list of recently sighted birds. The staff always seems amused that I read the list after I’ve already finished my walk. Of course, since I’ve only been walking Nisqually for a little over a year, I can remember when I started doing this.

But it wasn’t until today that I finally connected some dots and realized why I do it. The habit of checking what I might have missed actually stems from the way I read books.

I never read the introduction to a book until AFTER I’ve finished the book. I vaguely recall a long-forgotten teacher suggesting this years ago, but I know I’ve been doing it since I was a college underclassmen.

As a teacher I seldom, if ever, assigned the introduction to novels the class was reading.

Why?

I don’t like to be told what to expect or how to react before I read a book. It seems to me to be a mistake to go into a work expecting certain ideas to emerge. If you read the book, those ideas should naturally emerge. Either that, or the person writing the introduction misinterpreted the work.

Needless to say, this has worked well for me most of the time, or it wouldn’t be so ingrained.

Equally needless to say, sometimes I realize that it might have helped to read an introduction first, particularly if it turns out to be an insightful, sensitive introduction.

This is just to say, that tomorrow I’ll be discussing the the introduction to Bachelard’s book. It may well turn out to be my favorite part of his book.