I’ve seen it a few times now, an incipient meme. “If this were a movie,” people write, “no one would believe it.” “This” of course refers to the epidemic of surreality more than the virus itself (the latter being all-too believable). Yesterday’s news, for example, #IMPOTUS tweeting “LIBERATE!” in support of right-wing protesters against public …
Here are the things that have been going through my mind: Solidarity, The Velvet Revolution, the fall of Apartheid. Why? Because each of these represents a moment in history in which a critical mass of people awakened to the truth that the regimes oppressing them were far from the permanent and unshakeable authorities portrayed in …
What can console us in the face of the Great Unknown? I thought I understood that safety was always an illusion: any of us could be struck down at any moment. But having the illusion of safety erased, that’s uncertainty of another magnitude, so vastly out of proportion to the “normal,” default reality that words …
The maxim “the map is not the territory” was coined by philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who also said, “the word is not the thing,” perhaps inspiring Zen teacher Alan Watts’ dictum, “the menu is not the meal.” Experience is deeply affected by (and often confused with) the way we label it. One of Korzybski’s proofs was …
When Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announced a few days ago that he was exploring a 2020 run for President as a “centrist independent,” progressive social media exploded with reasons to reconsider. Op-eds proliferated, people began leafleting Starbucks and protesting at Schultz’s speaking engagements. A chief objection is the reality that Jill Stein, running as the …
Back in the day, I had a quote from Wilhelm Reich* over my desk: The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP? It was the resonant wisdom of this sentence and not the cult of its author that drew me. As …
What is “The Big Lie” and why is the Present Occupant of the White House so committed and adept at deploying it? When Hitler coined the expression “The Big Lie,” he meant it as an accusation against German Jews, charging them in Mein Kampf with falsely condemning Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff for losing World War …
Jews of my generation are trained from infancy to sense which way the wind is blowing. If you descend as I do from a long line of nomads and refugees—if your family tree is stunted, the branches disappearing into cracks in history, if the images of children being torn from their parents’ arms are imprinted …
I woke up shocked and scared, just like this, the morning after the 1980 Presidential election, when Ronald Reagan received 50.7% of the popular vote and nearly all the electoral votes, when Jimmy Carter got 41% and independent John Anderson 6.6%. I lived in a bubble of progressive consensus at the time, surrounded by people …