Enjoying the view from Limbo
I merely wish to draw the reader’s attention to Mike Lee’s comments upon leaving the Trump administration’s briefing on the military action against Iran. To insert only the simplest preface, I will say only that Lee, in his typically staccato, rapid-fire way, issues a straightforward reminder of what republican (small-r) government looked like before the Republican (big-R) Party, along with their millions of...
For those of us still clinging to some semblance of rational humanity, few things could be more disturbing — or, at least from my perspective in Limbo, more predictable — than the prospect of the world being caught up in a domino chain of competing doomsday cults. That is where we appear to be headed as I write, with the cult of Donald...
On a dreary January day, incessantly wet in defiance of last night’s promising forecast, the air is thick with pollution and cold rain. The mountains are obscured by the translucent sky, and all sensible paths to outdoor enjoyment dampened. Having lost my hat on the bus coming here (too focused on remembering my umbrella), I must spend three hours, uncharacteristically, with my stupid...
Some weeks ago, a student who knows a great deal about my character and interests contacted me with the urgent advice to run outside as quickly as possible, so as not to miss the gorgeous moonrise she was witnessing from a bus across town. Yesterday, the same young woman contacted me with similar urgency, at roughly the same late afternoon hour, to ask,...
I know the title of this post, referring to MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews gushing about his emotional response while listening to Barack Obama speak, evokes a gross image, and an even grosser level of puppy love politics, the likes of which so-called American conservatives and their media heroes used to mock relentlessly, when they were not issuing sincere dire warnings about the level...
Just twelve hours ago, I was saying “Let’s see Trump top this!” regarding Kim Jong Un’s fantabulous propaganda coup of riding a white horse around a snowy mountain landscape. Trump wouldn’t even have the guts to try to compete with such a beautiful bit of agitprop from his dear friend Jong Un. “He likes me,” Trump even mewed pathetically when reporters asked him...
Man, oh, man, if this video from North Korean state television is any indication, 2020 promises to be one of the coolest years ever! Kim Jong Un riding across the gorgeous Paektu Mountain landscape on a white horse! With his whole dang entourage riding along with him. Now this is my kind of propaganda video. I grew up on this stuff. I mean...
As regular readers may recall from past go-rounds, I feel a profound indifference about New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day that at times borders on downright disdain. There are several reasons for this, which I have explained before, but three of which I mention in passing here: I neither drink nor enjoy being around drunks. I don’t believe that changing to a...
The New Teacher is a dispenser of grades and ranks, an administrator of late modernity’s societal ordering and sorting system — essentially a bureaucrat or accountant. The Old Teacher was a guide of the soul’s desire, channeling a few young people’s restless and potentially self-devouring hunger into a happy and habit-forming quest for timeless and necessary understanding — essentially a lion tamer or...
If you were educated in a modern school, public or private, secular or religious, for all or most of the period from ages four to eighteen, you learned several thought- and character-altering lessons which you have carried with you throughout your subsequent life. None of these most important lessons are directly related to “school subjects” — you have likely forgotten nearly all of...
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