• Politics/Culture

    Hyper-Partisanship Run Amok! (From 1776 Onwards…)

    July 25, 2016 - By 

    Oh my, all that yelling and venom and gloating and ridicule, last week from the Republican convention, soon to be emulated, no doubt, when the Demos convene in Philadelphia starting today. (Though we can only pray their denunciations of the opposing candidate will stop short of calling for his execution or banishment to the gulag or, worse yet, to an everlasting intimate relationship with Lucifer, the very Devil himself, in the fires of Hell. That latter image begs the continuing question that served as a subtext throughout the presidential primary season: Is Ben Carson even a little bit sane?) I tell you, never…

  • Politics/Culture

    One Step Forward and a Sideways Slide: Racial Politics in the Obama Era

    July 19, 2016 - By 

    Hardly have time to catch our breath or remember the exact names and places of carnage anymore, do we? Orlando, San Bernardino, Charleston, Newtown, Aurora…was Columbine even in this century? (It wasn’t; the year was 1999, 38 U.S. mass shootings ago.) And most recently, Baton Rouge and Dallas. Begetting the question: Is our country falling apart? To which the short and direct answer is “No.” But it takes some doing and a substantial amount of reality testing to get there, given the long and vivid reach of modern media and the potent effect it has on our consciousness. If we…

  • Nature - Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Summer Fecundity

    July 2, 2016 - By 

    The not unpleasant smell of rotting fruit alerts the senses when one ventures into my backyard on these early summer days. “Our time is now,” that well-known maxim exhorted by coaches in pre-game locker rooms across the land, is nowhere more true than among the two prolific plum and pluot trees in said yard, which, like some urgent stream after a storm, can’t expel their bounty fast enough. I need a crew available at my immediate beck-and-call to scoop up the falling flesh that relitters my yard every day, no matter the removal effort that left it clear just hours…