"As evocative as a fistful of fresh soil"

That "Super Mammoth Elephant Ear" bulb, a gift last May from Miss Kelly, is now the 900-pound elephant in the garden. The first unfurling a week or so ago, above. Then there's Katinka Matson -- whose heart-stopping "Peony" graces the title page of Edge, where participants, aiming "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Matson's works "aren't photographs, but were created by placing cut flowers on an ordinary office scanner and printing high-resolution images," according to a WSJ blurb. How come we can't get anything close on our ordinary home scanner?

"John Keegan is the world's best-known military historian because his books are alive with the sights, sounds, smells and feel of battle; they are as evocative as a fistful of fresh soil," writes David Gelernter evocatively in a rousing pre-Fourth-of-July "cheer" for five books about America, including Keegan's Fields of Battle. Googling Gelernter -- a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor of computer science at Yale -- we stumbled upon Edge, "a Web site that aims to bridge the gap between scientists and other thinkers." Good luck. The intellectual gap between scientists like Gelernter and certain other "thinkers" on the "nuanced" side of the aisle is gaping. Compare the professor's measured philosophy with the meretricious "insights" of  Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. First, Gelernter:

A community is not a community of disembodied spoken statements, in part because the most important aspect of the communication that people have is emotional, and one often communicates emotion not in terms of the text but as a subtext. The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn't a footnote. Too many computer scientists don't understand this.

The day lilies along the porch front are having -- like so many of our perennials -- their best year ever. Is it that rise in ambient carbon-dioxide levels reported by the Wall Street Journal to be making poison ivy more potent, "producing bigger leaves, faster growth, hardier plants and oil that’s even more irritating"? We say, bring it on!

Likewise, too many sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome don't understand this. Listen to author Westen's infantile mewling as "reported" in Newsweek by BDS victim Sharon Begley and made mincemeat of by a skeptical Ann Althouse:

Newsweek serves up the hot news that voters are swayed by emotion . . . and tries to sell us the laughable theory that Democrats, not realizing this blindingly obvious reality, have gone wrong by relying only on rational argument. Meanwhile, "the GOP has already mastered the dark art of psych-ops -- of pushing the right buttons in people’s brains to win their vote."

"Ridiculous," comments Ann rationally:

Hilariously, Newsweek claims that the reason Democrats and not Republicans are going to Westen for advice is that Republicans already know they need to use emotion. Never mind that Westen's book is plainly speaking to Democrats and advising them on how to make their positions more emotionally appealing.

These glorious garden images remind us of the words of St. Francis de Sales as related by Mother Angelica [via The Anchoress]: "One day [the saint] was looking at a rose, and he put his hands to his ear and he said to the rose, 'Stop shouting.' There is a power in the love of God. Most people today look at a rose and they don’t see anything; only a name, a color, a fragrance. But these great saints saw God in everything."

Al Gore, in the unwittingly self-referentially titled The Assault on Reason, comes to mind. An acknowledged practitioner of "over exaggeration" -- many of whose assertions in his movie ''An Inconvenient Truth'' have been refuted by science -- the man who would be savior soberly intones:

We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth.

Looked in a mirror lately, Mr. Gore?

Comments

[goomp]

The Al Gores of this world crave to be worshiped as gods and will do whatver it takes to achieve that goal. Their need makes them among the most dangerous of beings.

[mog]

He craves and makes a lot of money off his wacky theories, pseudo-science pays. Lots. Cause the clueless and nut-jobs buy into it. And those who should know better. Global warming is big business.

And your photography is gorgeous as usual.