As a younger man I thought that Mother’s Day was a perfunctory holiday. It seemed a formal obligation with minimalist, relatively unstructured requirement to express appreciation to one’s mom, and to motherhood in general. As the years have passed, Mother’s day as grown in my estimation. Now I view it as a sacred time,…
Life continues apace, society adjusts, acclimates to the idiosyncratic dismissal of the FBI chief. This was a out-of-nowhere Surd for us Americans. We’ve not had anyone in the White House who assumed tyrannical powers, since the Civil War. Lincoln was accused of arrogation of power when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus. But…
RECIPE FOR REMAKING A WORLD Ingredients: ugliness, unfairness, suffering, poverty, terror, rage, sadness, etc. Most of which is no one’s fault, the cause being diffuse, shared, distributed, so that blame cannot be focally assigned. A majority of us are touched by these circumstances, and feel that there is nothing we can do, no one…
First agenda item of the day: breakfast at Taste of Paris. Its a favorite Cafe and we look forward to the weekly visit. The waitstaff are always welcoming, familiar faces due to our patronage of many months. France has been much on my mind. Today they are holding a national election. At stake is…
Yesterday Thorsday, when the news feed came across that the House had passed the Obamacare replacement act, I was palpably nauseated. Predictably the Tribune front page of this morning featured a picture of the President flanked by his fawning palace guard, applauding the event in the White House Rose Garden. Emotionally this seems like…
THE DIAGNOSIS This generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. An increasing number of Americans agree that…
Climate change is manifest by extreme weather events. Over the past two days the backyard has soaked up so much water that a footfall instantly produces water welling up around my shoe. It’s 6PM and rain continues to fall. Recently I read that Anglo-Saxon England of the 10th century was also going through a…
A comment left by a friend last night reminisced on the Legend of King Arthur. The legend suggests that merry ole England was ruled by a chivalrous king and nobles. This could not have been further from the truth. We love our myths: American exceptionalism, manifest destiny and everyone’s favorite “the American dream.” The…
Am reading about England of 1000 AD. The book by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger is an enjoyable read of the conditions of life in the Middle Ages, dealing with Viking raids, settlements by the Norsemen, and the development of Christianity. I imagine the story as a time capsule sent to me from my…
