Trump lies, Guiliani rants, Hannity squirms, and poor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the pride of Ouachita Baptist University Ouachita Baptist University (2004), suffers the little children and the press because she finds out watching TV that everything she has been told is a lie. It’s a shame she didn’t come to that conclusion in the...
Continue readingPriapos, Ryan, and Trump, Elevated Humor or Exhausted by the Salacious Details?
Every once in a while the NYTimes allows a columnist to use an unfamiliar word. Allow me. Today’s word is “priapic.” It was used today by the loathsome, not to be rehabilitated or forgiven Bret Stephens who supported the Iraq war, the Bush tax cuts, and every Ryan-esque effort to hurt ordinary people. He...
Continue readingJust 20 Miles but a World Away, Creating Chaos or Making Peace
It appears that I grew up a mere 22.7 miles from Donald Trump. Just two bridges and a stone’s throw. Apparently that made a difference. I’m sure there’s more: economics, upbringing, religion, all the rest. But let’s here take up that difference of circumstance and community. Here’s a formative fact to my upbringing: “In...
Continue readingThe Conflicted Conscience
Today we learn of yet another chemical attack in Syria. There is no doubt that human beings are capable of incalculable evil. Such a fact drives those among us driven by conscience further into our inner conflicts. So a few words about America’s unresolved crimes and history, to give us pause as we think...
Continue readingHow Ya’ Feelin’? (Because Thinking is Apparently Optional.)
I have argued before that we live in a post-factual society where only feelings really count. Until you need to get your computer or your cell phone to operate— but that too evokes plenty of feelings. What we are following of late is government by feeling alone, by puerile impulse, by emotions largely made...
Continue readingLiving in the Post-Belief World, A Report from the Twitter Trenches
Earlier today I noted how my new Twitter Troll-Friends have twice (at least) made clear that the KKK was founded by Democrats. Are they ignoring every bit of history since Eisenhower, do they not know it, are they just in denial? Sigh. But as I think a bit more about it, the issue is...
Continue readingBig Buckled Freedom and Home on the Range, Why We Can Be Alone or Together But Not Both
This past week I met an amiable enough older man— one can’t get that much older than I am and still be ambulatory, so the impression of him being “older” was more than chronologically determined— smartly dressed, white haired, bolo tied, big bucket belt, and cowboy boots, all he was missing was the hat,...
Continue readingOn Love of Country, God, and Our Fellow Americans, A Reply to Rick Saccone, Donald Trump, and MAGA America
This is about Rick Saccone’s election night observation about we on “the left,” why he’s not wrong about me, and why we can’t compromise. Are you up for it? Let’s start with the idea that America is built on the constructive fiction of its Dream. I say “constructive” because the ideal expressed, well, it...
Continue readingThey Call it Stormy Twitter, Is Wednesday Just as Bad?
Having resisted Twitter for its reductive abuse of a complex world, I find myself fascinated by its sutra-esque qualities that imply everything from finely tossed shade to revelatory stupidities made explicit by the spelling and punctuation challenged. Trump’s followers are, sad to say, actually worse than he is —likely because he went to “the...
Continue readingWorld War Z in the House, Another Day at the Office
Thursday, March 1st 2018Sayeth The Lord, Another Year, Another MidtermOr Why Lamentations is my Favorite Book Today while a grifting carnival barking evangelical charlatan lies in state in our nation’s capital being eulogized by a president who just paid off a pornstar, my students will suffer their own reckoning with The Truth. They are...
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