vive le difference?

"To live! How sweet it is! How good! despite worries, husbands, boredom, debts, relatives, gossip, despite bitter pain and tedious difficulties. To live! It’s intoxicating! To love, to be loved! It is happiness! It’s heavenly." Over-the-top emotional outbursts should be cautionary. They never last. They pour out from overwrought imagination and passions such as reflected in this reading from George Sand, notorious for her immoral and often bizarre behaviors. Words ( in the millions ) from George Sand can often be dismissed as meaningless once one knows the story of her life. George Sand’s definition of liberty and freedom from tyranny includes freedom from permanent commitments to marriage, children, men and women. Her versions of love and life embrace both the intellectual and physical, mind and body but the devil is in the details. Hers was both an external and an internal conflict (and reconciliation) between love and the law. Her conflict resolution flaunted both passion and society. Her wellspring of words embellish her pursuits. I point this out today to show how much deeper is George Sand’s hedonistic life of self-satisfaction than our President-elect’s of demonstrable shallowness and absence of intellectual content. Non-literary and pro-pectoral, Barack Obama fills his daily schedule with zero sum gains. Evidence of his eloquence or emotion only flows via his speech writer when he reads from a teleprompter. Evidence of his lightweight life comes from hours passed at the gym, on the links and at the alley. ( He stinks worse than I with 20 yard drives and a 37 bowling score). I know my strong points and weaknesses; I have lined up my priorities. The same can be said for Sand and Obama, but who can celebrate their deviations from my norms?