Politics, Apologies, And The Nature of Eternity.

Woo, what a catchy title!

Firstly, the apologies are to you, my readers, for not posting very much (or very well) so far this year. I returned from my vacation to plug directly back into my 52-hour workweek (not counting blogging), and I have devoted what other time I have to immersing myself in politics, a subject I have gone on record saying I will not blog about.

I will say this though. We are in the middle (actually, closer to the beginning) of 30 days that will change the history of American Politics, America, and the World, and if you don't care about "All that political stuff", then it is past time for you to start caring. Get Educated, and Get Involved - in that order.

While I don't cover Politics on this blog, I do cover grammatical errors, malaprops, misspellings, and other word nerdiness, so when I heard the story of President Bush's recent "Wreath Laying Ceremony" in Israel a phrase jumped out at me.


Now, How the heck does someone "rekindle" an "eternal" flame? Maybe I am hazy on the nature of Eternity, but if the flame was eternally burning, there would be no need to rekindle it, would there? Did they turn it off just before the ceremony, so that Mr. Bush could re-light it?

If so, that would be like Symbolically planting a tree in someone's memory/honor into the hole from which it had just been dug up!

"This Flame (which I have just turned off and back on again), will burn steadily, forever* in the memory of those Jews who were needlessly and horribly killed in the death camps of the Holocaust"

*until some future evangelical non-Jew needs another photo-op, at which time we will turn it off again.

Maybe "rekindled" doesn't mean what I think it means; I didn't see the ceremony and know very little about it. Can anybody fill me in on what happened? Was it as disrespectful a thing as I think it was?