Today on the banks of the Mississippi

The Mississippi. I'm told that some police officers use the spelling of Mississippi as an instant sobriety test. I'm also told that officers in Dubuque use their city's name for the same thing. "D-u-b-b-u-u-uh, where. . .?"

There are three memorial plaques attached to three rocks on the south side of LeClaire Park. The first plaque is in commemoration of the robbery otherwise known as the Blackhawk Purchase Treaty. The second is for Antoine LeClaire. LeClaire functioned as an interpreter for the aforementioned muggi. . .er, treaty. Just happened to be at the right place at the right time, I guess. As a result of the treaty LeClaire wound up with a fair-sized chunk of land on the Iowa side of the river. Yep. He came to do good, and he did right well.

Interesting thing about the naming of the Quad Cities. LeClaire lived in Davenport, not in the town now known as LeClaire. So what's now Davenport should really have been LeClaire. But, fear not. Colonel Davenport did live in the area, on Arsenal Island. So, Davenport should have been LeClaire, and Rock Island should have been Davenport. Moline would be an appropriate name - it come from the French  moulin, meaning "mills."

And what should the present-day LeClaire have really been? Nothing much. OK, maybe Cody. Buffalo Bill Cody was the most famous person to come from that town. THAT'S something to brag about.

Ethics. Seeing those two commemorations of the plundering of the Native Americans just a short distance from the Rhythm City Casino, where Quad City retirees go to leave their money, made me think about ethics. Kant wrote about ethics, and he was fond of the term "imperatives", or whatever the German word for imperatives was. (With Kant you can never ever forget that he wrote in German, and lots of the shades and nuances integral to his explanation of his thought just don't translate. Not that Kant was all that readable in German, for that matter.) He wrote about hypothetical imperatives - situational - "If you're hungry you should eat" - and categorical imperatives, the imperatives that you would wish to be universal law.

I'm not necessarily on board with him, for two reasons. One is that I'm coming to the conclusion that there are very few true categorical imperatives out there. "Thou shalt not kill" - but if I come home and find a guy with a knife to my 10-year-old granddaughter's throat, and if I have a .357 delete button nearby - DEEElete. No prob. Thus the categorical imperative shows itself to have elements of the hypothetical imperative after all. What happens when two categorical imperatives clash? Now isn't THAT the ethicists' question?

Besides, I'm not fond of the term "imperatives" (conceding that, in the German the term may have a different shade of meaning than what I'm addressing. Wir nicht sprechen Deutsch.) Are ethics all about imperatives? I think ethics are what guide you when you are not governed by imperatives. Ethics involve actions taken when there is free choice of actions to take.

Dang the things that pop into my head on a walk. On a sunny windy day. By that great sobriety test, the Mississippi.