Sir;...I love nothing better than when people begin to quote Greek philosophers... Not because I have read them all, or all any have written; but we can point to the Greece of Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle as a time and place as much in decline as our own... I have my favorite: Aristippus, who won hands down at the game of life...He took the spit of Dionysius II in his face, and his money in his purse... He bowed before the tyrant, and said he could not help that his ears were in his feet...He lived a long life, finding nothing worth dying for... And he told his daughter to never put a price on anything she could live without...This was the best child of Socrates, and Plato was the worst...So when you quote Heraclitus, you must understand, that as a moralist that I can see another truth through your words... Character is not just destiny..Character is also ethics... That is how the word ethics is often considered, and as custom, since we get our ethics from the same place as our community, with our identity...And our ethics reflect honor or dishonor back onto our communities... After a thousand years of effort by the Catholic Church and the laws she has spawned, people no longer think of themselves as representing their communities, or of the possibility that the community can be injured by individual action... So we are left trying to teach ethics as Socrates was trying to do, out of context, and out of the milieu where ethical behavior makes sense...When you say fail at life, if I may, what you mean is fail at relationships... Now, we know Mr. Gingrich has failed at marriage... Well, Marriage is a form, and forms often fail; but then, many have the good sense to abandon the form before it ruins the relationship... Do you love the person you are married to??? Then modify the form if it becomes a problem, and keep the love, which is by its nature, Formless...Government too, is a form, and so is party, and these forms structure our behavior and our relationships... We see the world through our forms, and they give us our sense of community and ethics... We see right and wrong through our forms... So if you hear some one like Mr. Gingrich make some outrageous statement in regard to right or wrong it may be that he is seeing things not through the form of humanity, but through the form of party... Clearly, Mr. Gingrich believes form is the cure...I believe form is the illness, and the cure...I believe old forms are the problem and new forms are the fix... Mr. Gingrich, in saying people should vote republican is saying that an old and failed form is the solution that it never was in the past....People are the solution, and people are the problem... We need our forms, and it is because we cannot change who we are, or our basic needs... When we do change, it is through the medium of forms...If the form of our dwelling does not suit us, we move to another form of dwelling...If the form of our government fails us, we change the form of our government...Surely, people must first change their minds at least to change their forms; but our tendency to hang onto failed forms because they are our comfort zones, even while they heap misery upon us, is common... People let their societies be destroyed because they cannot chuck old forms and build new...In fact, their societies die, and take many with them because the people are blind to their forms... All those who thought they could teach virtue, as Socrates said: that Knowledge is Virtue, were wrong...Communities are good, and community is also morality... There is no substitute for relationships in life because ethics spring from the emotional connectedness of people...The great advantage of barbarians at the gates of civilizations is that their relationships are more healthy and genuine, and those of civilization are merely formal... We need genuine relationships...That is how people and societies succeed at life...To this end, forms are as often the problem as the solution... All forms should serve the relationship..Many do not....Thanks...Sweeney

Thanks for your column, Mark. You can't hit the walk-the-walk theme hard enough with these hypocritical war mongers. They're always sneering at liberals, but when you take the country boy approach and shine a bright light on how they live their own lives while they're barking at us about how to live ours, their snouts start looking a lot like what you see on the front end of a dog in field full of cow manure.

Just great as usual;Mark,you mark the mark!

Geez; ....look at how many people hate Newt..I pity the fool, but I hate the voice...I figure only dogs can hear the full range of his thoughts, yet I do not discount the possibility of subliminable messages for the right...He talks and they nod...Whatz he saying??? It hurts my ears....Maybe I should buy a super galatic translationator... Thanks...Sweeney

Re: James A, Sweeney: It's not really about how people hate Newt. It's about how those who risk nothing in their own personal lives exhort others to risk theirs to attack phony targets in a false crusade against a phantom enemy.

And, on a more sinister note, look at how O'Reilly egged on the attacker of Dr. Tillman before he was finally shot down, and how the ultra right is now pretty much openly making its case to go after none other than the President of the United States. Have a look at Frank Rich's recent column, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14rich.html?em. Houston, we've got a problem, and this virus threatens the very soul or our democracy, just as it did in the sixties.