Houston, we have a white villain!

We live in a distraction-ridden world. Our everyday becomes a series of livelihood shards, trivia dumped on us and we peeping our way into others' existence. I can't shut down the advertisements lurking behind every window I open on the web. All I want is to write an e-mail in peace, without anything moving on my screen. I don't want to know how many balls are bouncing. I have no interest in açai berries. I don't want to find out what part of my brain I use and please, somebody hack that ballerina out of sight.


I was consulting the wisdom of Merriam-Webster on line, when alas, a 'trend watch entry' grabbed my attention by the balls. Such is the anatomy of my attention, it is a fragile beast. The word "phlegmatic" was associated with Julian Assange and the capsule featured a white haired, serene man wearing a grey suit and a red tie. The newly iconic image of Julian Assange.


"After WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested and kept in custody pending appeal, Assange’s lawyer described him as 'phlegmatic' in response to these events. Phlegmatic means 'not easily upset, excited, or angered.' The word derives, somewhat unpleasantly, from phlegm -- one of the four fluids of the body that in medieval medicine were thought to determine a person's temperament."


A tour de force on the part of the lawyer in question, a Freudian slip of the first degree, to associate your client with the bodily fluids he is held accountable for. Assange's image, so civil and poised against what appears to be a white column contrasts that of the usual suspects: bearded, disheveled Middle Eastern men against what usually appears to be a tent, a rugged hideout or an underground cell. Our villains and the nature of their crimes are changing. It is not the oil leaking into the Mexican Gulf that bothers US/us but information leaking out in downloadable forms, documents of behind-the-closed-doors done-deals, the delicate matters our naive composition would not permit us to grasp. It is a new ballgame where what flows is not one of the four fluids of the body but the massive, global archives of it in ones and zeros.  

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