“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
To the strains of “I’m Proud to Be an American”, Trump emerges from the tunnel, a heaviness in his bearing. He is 6’2” tall and well over 250 pounds, a very big man. The first impression I have is that I do not think a 5’6” or 5’7” Trump would have been elected. Remember all those images of him at the Republican debates, towering over the other candidates? He […]
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Shakespeare understood the desire for absolute power, how it may come to invest itself in one person and how it destroys safeguards meant to protect liberty: “Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do … cherished institutions, seemingly deep rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a … Richard III or Macbeth” acquire power?” (1) In the 2nd […]
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Do we all grieve for people we have never met, whose deaths knock us down because of what they have come to represent to us and others? Two or three million Frenchmen and women are said to have come out for Victor Hugo’s funeral procession in Paris in May of 1885. Untold numbers lined the tracks to pay respect to Lincoln’s and FDR’s and Robert Kennedy’s bodies as they […]
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Pay too much attention to the world and it will make you frantic, then ridiculous, then deranged. At Story Time at work a little boy told the other babies that penguins make long bleats like goats. Then he brought his two hands together and flickered out his little fingers like flippers and ululated and we all joined in, 22 of us racketing and caterwauling like no penguin ever on […]
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