7 letter words are easier spoken...

(Image: Armenian Genocide Memorial)

With my head full of presidential soft shoe and Jonathan Safran Foer's luminous meditations, yesterday's presidential fudge, with a "perpetrator-less" wind of "atrocities" invoked and Samantha Power's ludicrous "assurances" dancing in my head, I may have a few more days of sludge to plow through. As with all things close to the heart and close to the hearts of those close to us, inconsistency and hypocrisy loom large, despite the fact that we all, at some time, are guilty of the very same soft shoe.

NPR hoohaw today brought reminders of the need to speak to the truth of things, the thing this time (just days before yesterday's day of not speaking to the truth of things) being a seven letter word: torture. Memos released, speak the truth, call things what they are, right? So long as the day isn't a Friday, or the 24th day of April, and so long as the word has no more than seven letters in it. Turkey: six letters, capiche? Armenia? Seven letters: admissible to the lexicon. It's that eight letter word that fouls the nest.

Much was made of Obama's trip to Turkey, and the assurances they (seemingly) extracted. Why not a trip to Armenia while in the neighborhood, to at least convey a sense of balance?