This card of the "trading post" at Cave of the Winds, near Colorado Springs (ca. 1900) was printed backwards. Somebody put the negative in the enlarger jelly-side down, as it were, so that the image came out a mirror of reality, instead of a direct copy.
It got me to thinking. People do things bass-ackwards for the silliest of reasons -- they weren't paying attention to reality. Now, granted, I'm sometimes not very big on reality. On the downside of my illness, reality is warped and ugly, and on the upside... well, when I'm manic, there is no such thing as reality. But at least I know that what I do when I'm nuts has an effect when I'm less nuts. I live with my problems every day of my life.
That's why it bothers me when I see other, ostensibly sane folks doing the same thing I do when I'm dancing on the edge of another world.
Take elections, for example.
The miserably unhappy conservatives want to punish the Republican Party by, as somebody once said, "staying home in droves". They don't want to cast a vote for that moron who has already enacted some of the least fiscally responsible bills and budgets in history, so they promise to not vote Republican, ergo, not vote, next week.
Excuse me, but isn't that just shooting yourself in the foot, as well? You don't like fiscally irresponsible Republicans, so you encourage the masses to replace them with even less-fiscally-responsible Democrats. Pardon me while I set my living room carpet on fire to warm my feet.
As for the Democrats... well, what on earth are party leaders thinking with the Lieberman/Lamont thing? Did they really think that it was rational to run a guy off their ticket for his being "out of step" on one lonely issue? He's among the most liberal of the guys they had, and because the screaming goofballs on the extreme left made a lot of noise about the single issue (yeah, yeah, everybody hates war. Some people, though, recognize that finishing something is kinda important. Just ask your honey next time you wanna do stuff your mother doesn't want to hear about you doing), they ran him out of the party. And they don't seem inclined to make conciliatory noises, yet, even though there's a very very very strong likelihood he's going to get himself reelected.
And, what about America's news media? Wasn't there some sort of promise, a few years back, that they wouldn't rely on polls ahead of the election, any more, since they seemed to have a negative effect upon the accuracy of the news? News is supposed to be about what has happened, or is right now occurring, and not about prognostication. If I wanted to know who was coming out on top, next week, I could probably have just as good a response from Bullwinkle's bunyan than from MSM reports. Nah. Bullwinkle would beat them. And, yet, the MSM continue to report predictions, rather than events.
Except when it comes to war.
Then, they pull out all the stops to show the world through enemy eyes, without sharing the valor of real freedom fighters.
All suffering from having put the glass plate in the enlarger wrong-way up.
(BTW -- if you want to see the postcard rightside up, as I've photoshop-flipped it, click on the small image here:
. Right way around usually requires attention to detail.)
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