When no less a classic cultural and political conservative than David Brooks declares it is “Time for a Civic Uprising” in his “New York Times” column Thursday, joined by his also moderately-inclined colleague Ezra Klein declaring on his side of the page, “The Emergency Is Here,” you know we are in a heap of trouble. Not even 100 days into Trump redux, we are now facing the fully flowering existential threat that most Democrats feared and warned about all through the fall election cycle, only to be dismissed because too many American voters, if one is to believe the polling…
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Nearly a century ago, the noted journalist, cultural critic, essayist, and—this is important: satirist— H.L. Mencken wrote of his fellow Americans, sounding very much like a British journalist dispatched to our sprawling land to take its pulse and assess its mood, “What makes America charming is precisely the Americans…They are, by long odds, the most charming people that I have ever encountered in this world.” Knowing better than to completely trust Mencken’s often pointed satire, I was waiting for a punch line or at the very least an elaboration of his almost chirpy salute to the American persona. It didn’t…
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Sixty-five years after his untimely death at age 46, Albert Camus remains one of the leading lights of existentialism, a philosophy that has its roots in the 19th century’s version of dark brooding intellectuals—names like Kierkegaard, Neitszche, and Dostoevsky. But existentialism really hit its stride in Post-World War II Europe, and the Algerian-born, French-identified Camus was and arguably remains its most eloquent spokesperson. Camus was born in 1913 in Algeria when it was still under the colonial rule of France. His father was a peasant fieldworker who died in battle in World War I when Camus was just a year…
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To be born female in this world since its very beginning is to have experienced a certain kind of powerlessness, sourced, very simply, in a relative lack of muscle mass and the particular burdens of childbirth. These brute facts of biology have dictated women being less effective hunters of prey, and thus subject to domination by their more physically imposing male counterparts and sometimes companions. (Talk about an old story…) But underneath that competitive imbalance lies an often latent, sometimes wayward, increasingly confident and directed ferocity. An inner strength gathering itself over eons now, cracking the foundations of male hegemony…
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There comes a time when every living thing begins to creak and leak. I include among those “living things” this very blog, which I—with considerable help from a few esteemed cohorts—breathed into being a bit more than 12 years ago, with a post on the novelist, essayist, and public intellectual Marilynne Robinson. A couple of years ago, the WordPress platform this blog uses informed me that its “theme,” the graphic design interface it sits on to convey the words and images here, would no longer be technically “supported.” That meant I would have to transition to a new theme, since…
