Category Politics/Culture

Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus penned a line, “Ethos anthropoi daimon,” which most translators and the popular world of pithy, poetic phrasemakers have settled on meaning, “Character is destiny.” It’s a compact framing of what may be the most important truism applied to human beings and the struggles they endure to lead a meaningful and worthy life.

To wit: Above all and in the end, a person’s character will hold sway in how they conduct themselves and how they affect other people through the course of their lives.

Recently it occurred to me that the phrase may be key to understanding both Donald Trump, who in his every increasingly deranged word and action is no longer even pretending to be a person of decent character, and his followers...

A note from “Kamala Harris for President” among my emails this morning, under the subject line: “Is there ANYTHING we can say?”

“We are writing to ask—humbly—if there is anything at all we can say to convince you to make one more contribution to Kamala Harris’s campaign before our final FEC deadline ends. Please give us a chance to try: What if we told you that as you read this, we are getting outspent and attacked in several key battleground states? What if we told you that if we were able to increase our budget by just a bit, we’d be able to reach and turn out a lot of persuadable Democrats who don’t vote frequently—and that that could be the margin of victory?”

Another a couple of hours later from Hakeem Jeffries:

“I need to pull back the curtain and explain where things stand right now: There are 33 Red-to-Blue seats that Democrats are poised to win in November. Let me be clear:

– These 33 dist...

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”
—From Friedrich Nietzsche‘s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (1883)

The older I get and the more I am able to look back on history writ large, and the more I see that the age-old tussle between form and chaos, chaos and form, will be with us till the very end of time. (Although the question of whether there will ever be an end to time is itself a tussle among physicists that will likely be with us till, you guessed it, the end of time…) (If it ever arrives…)

Which reminds me anew of Kurt Vonnegut’s resounding shrug from “Slaughterhouse Five”:

“And so it goes…”.

The famously epigrammatic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche bathes the chaos within ourselves in the twinkling light of a “dancing star” in the quote above...

Full disclosure: I about cried when I came across the video interviews discussed in this post, a few precious tidbits of which I will share with you below. My near-tears were not from joy, though there was some of that, too.

Mostly, the little emotional roiling going on inside me in the moments after discovering the Mike Wallace interviews of more than 60 years ago was from sheer amazement.

Amazement that within my own lifetime, there was a time when serious discussion on matters of deep philosophical, legal, political, religious and cultural importance was presented on prime time television. Not near midnight, the time slot for today’s night owls to prowl the smart but comedy-based interview shows that cast more of an ironic, sometimes slashing eye on the affairs of the day rather than the sober back-and-forth discussion in which Wallace and his guests engaged.

Not during the dinner-time news hour in 35-s...

Has there been a stranger, more cataclysmic turn of events in recent American history than what we have been witnessing since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump just six dizzying weeks ago? It brings to mind the quote of unknown origin but frequently misattributed to Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”

The failed assassination, remarkable for many reasons including that it is almost completely out of the news now, marked the beginning of multiple events that have changed virtually every dynamic of the 2024 presidential race. Until then, the campaign had resembled a competition between severely out-of-tune orchestras under the unsteady batons of two aged, punch-drunk men, all of it witnessed by long-suffering patrons wondering whether they shouldn’t just go home and cancel what remained of their season tickets.

Then the shooting, followed in qui...