• Politics/Culture

    Nancy Pelosi Goes Mano a Mano on the Border Wall

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    In the runup to the mid-term elections last year, I was among many Democrats who felt a bit queasy about the prospect of Nancy Pelosi returning as Speaker of the House, assuming the Dems took control of the chamber. Fresh start, clean slate, she’d been so demonized by the opposition as the quintessential radical San Francisco liberal—maybe we should start anew with a younger face who wouldn’t be yoked to the past so we could usher in a less encumbered generation of leadership. All of that was in the air, and I was breathing it in, not in great gulps, but tentatively,…

  • Personal Reflections - Religion

    Grabbing Grace and Giving It a Shake

    January 20, 2019 - By 

    (A brief reflection presented at this morning’s service at my Unitarian Universalist church on the month’s theme of “Grace At the End.”) It was my great privilege to accompany two people to their deaths from Lou Gehrig’s disease in my years as a Hospice volunteer. Their temperaments and response to their disease couldn’t have been more different. Diane approached it with a kind of equanimity and a retained sparkle in her eyes, which were about the only body parts she could move anymore as the disease robbed her of all other bodily function in the surpassingly cruel way that it…

  • Politics/Culture

    Year of Decision on the Trump Presidency

    January 13, 2019 - By 

    Every day, a fresh revelation, a new indictment, an ever more outrageous, rudderless expression of falsehoods, disdain, and amorality. Nothing is stable, nothing true, whatever was done or said yesterday or an hour ago is inoperative, a passing wisp descending to a graveyard where words go to be drained of all their life-giving blood. We live in an eternal, impulsive now of rampant, chthonic chaos, of bottomless depravity, of such clear danger to our national identity, our very character as a sovereign, self-examining people, that all else seems to pale in importance. One summons the angels that still beckon in…

  • Politics/Culture

    The Paul Ryan Bye-Bye Blues

    January 3, 2019 - By 

    i was handsome and smart or so the nuns all told me, eyes of blue with a winsome smile, a thinker, a tinkerer a fine midwestern demeanor but if all that were true, what’s up with these Paul Ryan Bye-Bye Blues? that ryan boy will go far, the farm folk all claimed d.c.’s a brutal place he’ll know how to tame a bright light in a dark time is what they said, solid and sober and steady of hand the world my oyster as i bestrode this land. so much promise and potential to share, a prophet of profit with…

  • Music

    A Happy New Year Gift From Eric Clapton

    January 1, 2019 - By 

    Last year, I offered up in this space on New Year’s morning a gift from the gods as they manifested (and continue to resound) through Ludwig van Beethoven and his “Ode to Joy.” And if there’s one bit of wisdom I’ve been able to accrue from my thrashings and bumblings about on Mother Earth over this now long-ish life, it is never to allow a good time or idea to go slinking off by itself into the dusky past. Instead, just slap a “Hey, what a lovely ritual!” or “But it’s a tradition!” tag on it so we have an excuse to celebrate…