New Scrubs

In response to why the first two new episodes were 'serious,' creator Bill Lawrence replies, "I thought we got a little silly. In order for the finale to actually mean anything, the show has to be borderline real for people to give a s--t."

--one heckuva slipperly borderline, alright.

Bee Wilson tells, in the original 1880 story by Collodi, how when Cricket advises Pinocchio he'll never come to any good unless he buckles down and gets a job, the puppet grabs a wooden mallet and flings it so hard that "with his last breath, Cricket cried cree-cree-cree and then died on the spot, stuck to the wall."

Yipes.

Wouldn't you rather go, as Wilson continues, to where "becoming a real boy means being restored to the safe world of children in Gepetto's house rather than taking up responsibility and growing up as Pinocchio does at the end of Collodi's book?"

Or how about straddling both?

When we donned our Crackerjacks, standing in ranks for inspection, it was then that individualities surfaced rather than personalities categorized by fashion.

Dickens straddles as the young Scrooge exclaims while breaking up with Alice, "this is the even-handed dealing of the world. There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth."

Episcopalians straddle the Divine through liturgy enervated by the Holy Spirit.

Kurt Busiek's Morgaine strides in the opposite direction finally elaborating the overarching Trinity strategy, in 31, as "the Chaos Rifts are a manifestation of the world falling apart, because there is no real order, no real structure. It wants something - anything - to establish a hierarchy of rules, of command, of natural order. If we do that - through our dark arcana, our Pantheon, establishing our domain over reality - then we rule all. It's that simple."

--and what constituted in reality, the 'German idea of freedom,' - Freiheiten, per Jurgen Kocka, meaning the "freedom of corporate entities, self-administered towns, self-regulating guilds, aristocratic estates, and rulers of small territories, which is not antithetical to authorities but was compatible with subordination to them and with strong statist traditions."

---as if America evolved as a bureaucratic confederation of states under an Emperor lacking a mitigating national mythos of classic individualist republicanism.

John Ralston Saul concedes, in Voltaire's Bastards, "Marxism became the dreamlike answer to a real need in Western society but any one of a handful of other dreams might have done just as well. Walt Disney's, for example, riding in the front lines of mythology, converted America to a vision of itself in which the citizen is a viewer, the beliefs are cinematic assertions, and the leaders are character actors."

Exactly.

Magic Kingdom: Hall of Presidents.

--the slippery benign borderline which JD and I are driving over forwards and backwards all the time.