I have been thinking a lot about people who are deciding that not voting in the upcoming presidential election—or voting for a spoiler party with no chance of winning—is the only righteous thing to do in November. I have been searching for some way to express my hope that they will awaken from that belief …
I’m recuperating from arthroscopic knee surgery I had earlier this week. Not sure if it’s the pain or the drugs that are giving me a somewhat distanced perspective on our national shitshow of a presidential campaign, but suddenly the whole thing has the aspect of a miniature landscape viewed from a great height. As nearly …
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan “The law of unintended consequences is never broken.” I thought I would find many citations when I googled this, but since I found none, I’ll attribute it to myself. Quite a few people I know have been expressing …
I’d never heard the term “moral injury” until I read about it last week in a New York Times article about a crisis among doctors precipitated by the accelerating treatment of healthcare as a privilege rather than a right, a profit center rather than a social good. (This phenomenon rhymes with much I’ve written about …
I’m suspicious of nostalgia, even though I’m not immune to it. A glancing reference to the Sixties and I’m off on a magic carpet ride of reminiscence. Despite all of our youthful excesses and errors, I’m as imprinted with that era as a baby duck is with its mama. The flavor of nostalgia that especially …
It’s considered a little uncool these days to call out hypocrisy. The general idea is that leaders are expected to lie, and just as fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, officials gotta claim high purpose to cover low deeds. In many circles, the exposure of faux principles is more likely to be greeted by …
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Antonio Gramsci At a New Year’s gathering of friends last night, we spent the last hour before midnight sharing our answers to two questions: “What gives you hope?” And “What is your mission in 2011?” The answers ranged across the map of the human heart. Some people …
In my last essay, I wrote about class diversity. From an intensely personal perspective, I questioned the practice—just as prevalent in our national discourse as in the realm of family secrets—of entering into tacit agreements to normalize what should never be considered acceptable. I said that it was time to break the pact upholding the …
The phrase “culture wars” has been popcorning to the surface of the cultural landscape lately, the renewal of a trope from the late eighties and early nineties. Many people are perceiving a re-emergence of the eighties/nineties culture wars, in which art—especially art depicting homosexuality and/or religious images and artifacts—provides the setting for combat over freedom …
How much does the past constrain the future? To what degree are we bound by the chain of causality? In many forms—inherited guilt, pathways of desire, the freedom of art—the past week has brought these questions to my attention. The more I ponder them, the more I am convinced that the answer encompasses opposites. We …