Now that our planet, a betrayed beloved, is strongly suggesting to us
that unremitting consumerism may just dig us a hole to hell, we might learn a new way of living from the resourcefulness of children.
Have you noticed how children build whole worlds with stick and stones, how they improvise, making magic circles, giving strange animals [...]
Of all the trumped-up issues that beset this presidential campaign elitism is the most slippery. Putting aside suspicion that it may disguise racism when it comes to Barack Obama, the word smells as a pejorative because its users are elitists.
Does it make sense for the quintessential power elitist Hillary Clinton to get away [...]
Shame has gotten a bad name in psycho-therapeutic circles where it’s reviled as a debilitator. I think it imbues life with tang and zest. We wouldn’t enjoy pheromones so much were they not spiced with shame (Adam and Eve, Albrecht Durer, inset). I confess I don’t much care for its tabloid aspects, but I [...]
Read More...“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought [...]
Read More...It’s always the ones we overlook who are changing the world in concert with angels. It’s the ones who want our attention for it we should distrust.
If we want men with fire in the belly who never flip-flop, we’ll get what we deserve, and we’ll deserve it in poverty, ill health and miserable dupedom.
A leader [...]
I have another entry for the Lost Story Department. Where does the Christian Right stand on Objectivism? Where does it stand on Ayn Rand’s idea of enlightened selfishness? (Now there’s a tortured term). It seems only fair to ask, because the Bush Administration, a slavish disciple of Randian theory, draws its most ardent support from [...]
Read More... A calamity has befallen me as a baseball lover. One expects calamities of old age, of course, but not absurd calamities. I’ve begun to find it too painful to watch the other side lose. It doesn’t matter which other side.
I’m a Yankee fan, and this season has been harrowing. There has been the exhilaration [...]
The guy who walks around behind you when you’re contemplating a painting in a museum is an aristo. The girl who chats amiably in low tones on her cell phone while walking in the street, smiling at strangers, she’s an aristo. The cop who bows with mock gravity at a jaywalking tourist at Fifth Avenue [...]
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Signor Dante, would you consider expanding hell
to survivors going through our things, judging
our minutest habits? May I presume your answer
would be a special circle for judges of such matters?
When I consider the great authority of deceit
I wonder how many new circles you would draw
or would you say nothing’s changed except
the illusion of change, which grows [...]
I lead a walking around life, one reason I don’t need to travel much. Hudson, New York, my county’s seat, is one of those towns fraught with chance encounter. It could be with someone, something, or an idea.
One day recently, when our Canadian friends had whooshed a cool breeze our way, I was walking [...]