The college football season begins. Following an afternoon of immersion in drag racing at Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Wisconsin, I resigned myself to indifferently watching the game between Texas A&M and Notre Dame on channel 7. The commentators ballyhoo’d the start of the season, which features televised games in state-of-the-art stadiums viewed by millions,…
An important feature of Nietzsche’s thought is a cultivated intuition of a gradation, of a hierarchy from the base, common, mundane to the transcendent. A scale of values is a capacity for recognition of the sacred. Nietzsche seldom wrote any approving estimation of European Christendom. Here, he acknowledges that “the book” of Christianity has…
Wednesday, is midweek. The suffocating, dangerous heat dome prevailing upon outdoor activity for the last day or so has receded. It is possible to move about again, to enjoy the most basic of our animal-like freedoms, that of movement. How about a story? This story of New York’s MTA, of a city public transit…
Still pondering the car show. I recall the blue Lamborghini parked near the entrance to the show, at the intersection of State and 3rd. Ferrari is widely recognized as an uncommon instance of excellence, the high art of the automobile. Lamborghini is even more so, and one might argue the apex of a tradition…
Car show weekend in Geneva. Today, Sunday is the big show, the Geneva concurs d’elegance. Both sides of 3rd as well as side streets are parked with exotic collector cars and race cars of all vintages. This is an annual event. Sure it’s testosterone laced, a fashion show of shaped metal, painted, polished to…
Again I viewed night three of the televised speeches from the Democratic National Convention. As anticipated the parade of celebrities was preliminary to the headliner, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Walz’ nomination acceptance speech was a praise anthem to middle-class America. Does anyone know what “this” is anymore? Middle class is no longer cleanly…
This J. D. Vance clip has been at the forefront of media coverage of the election campaign. In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives…
“something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate” Those written words make me shudder. Do I detect an odor of a timeworn notion of destiny? I mean to say that even with the privilege of education, or perhaps of financial resources, of means – there’s a certain core that is untouchable by any circumstance, a…
Who doesn’t prefer approval, being well received, thought of with affection by one’s fellows. Nietzsche was no different than you or I. That variety of genteel, decorous social embrace, idealized in storytelling of the Victorian era is what we’d all wish, because then each of us has his/her place in the tribe without fissure…
People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes; they should finally learn impatience, so that big, fat, presumptuous mistakes like this will stop wandering virtuously and audaciously about. We’d like to believe we Americans are of all people the most humane. We want what is best, which we fervently believe…
