Clinical Ontology: Rafah and After

Samuel anointing David, Dura Europos, Syria, 3rd century CE.

I’d thought to craft a plan to perfect the UN's

double-blind—and peer-reviewed—experiment,

but with that Saviors without Borders marquee unfurled,

it quickly grew clear, the problem is . . . immense.

Stumbling haplessly from blunder to blunder,

my schemes to right it tore the world asunder.

What's a poor messiah at wits' end to do?

How far in the pursuit of justice can a meshugana go?

Locum tenens of the global order,

standing in for the old quack Pinocchio,

wracked by relief, I thought I knew.

Ontology’s the science of being,

and the key to all being's seeing

—also, you must not simply see but look, look, look, look, look, loo . . .

There’s no truth except in the looking,

the rest's all lies,

fiction—like scotoma of the eyes.

When one gets going, how the BS flies!

And maybe that's just what's needed:

the unique ointment in the Great Apothecary's black bag of safety salves, diffusing wrath.

I'll tell it to those giants in Gath and proclaim it in the streets of Ashkelon.

The wages of sin is death—that medicine is strong!

Memorial Day 2024