Since You Asked

Sad, ashamed, mortified. The organization envisioned by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to provide a place for sovereign nations to work out their differences short of armed conflict has been lectured to by a failed reality television star with a severely limited understanding of the consequences of global human suffering. Trump's foreign policy, to the extent that he has one, has the same objects his domestic policy has. More, more, gimme, gimme, mine, mine.  If you're my ally, feel free to chase whatever goals you choose, even if they doom the planet to a premature heat death.  If I think you're my enemy, nuclear annihilation is in your future. My parents watched the world descend into depression and then worldwide conflagration because of short-sighted knuckleheads like DJT who thought simple solutions existed for wildly complex problems.  They don't.  Humans sharing a planet with limited resources is a complicated and ever-evolving dance, not a negoti

It’s possible this actually isn’t Ross Lockridge Jr’s fault. That’s a pretty equivocal statement, especially when one considers the herculean effort Lockridge put into the writing of Raintree County. His original MS was 600,000 words, but pressure from Houghton Mifflin, M-G-M, and the Book of the Month Club obliged him to cut it by a third. Now 400,000 words, it still weighs in at a hefty one thousand plus pages. The effort to tame the work, probably compounded by severe depression, cost Lockridge his life. He committed suicide at age 33, soon after the novel’s publication in 1948. Ross Lockridge, Jr. But Raintree County, despite all that editing, remains a bit of a mess. It is at once indulgent, narcissistic, and even shallow, while still being a great read and a valuable polemic on the nature of government, the treatment of women, and the horror of war. So much of it is so good and so promising. Lockridge has a true, unerring, solid gold gift for narrative. The se

The Romans challenged the grammatically unclear with a simple question: “what would the Greeks do?” And Latin was born.   Magicae verbum .  Where wonder is commonplace, the spell holds words dear. We disarm you is e xpelliarmus .  Humans are a brave species, but sometimes require the  vulgaris fama  to perfect our craft—hence, strength in numbers, we picture the  populus  behind us, and let the stick wave. Expecto  I bring forth  patronum  a direct object.  When  we speak of this in the academy we call it  patronus, but everyone knows the accusative is the only way to bring the stag forth.  All alone, no crowd cheering then. I suspect that with Snape, nonverbally  superior , his dart was  expelliarmo,  first person singular,  scopum  Lockhart.   5/24/17

For safety the world does lecture the nobility of beings that make debit card purchases and Facebook posts.  Say it with me: Safety First.  Autistic in nature, thriving on predictability. Excitement, titillation, experience.  These bunch up as targets in the crosshairs of millennials, and the meeting of the careless with the mindless is sometimes announced with a distinct crunch. Is the pace of your life so pushed beyond beckon that now the lines in the Wal-Mart parking lot are just too trivial to paint within?  Must your un- avoidable self-importance hoard every millisecond? A tired mother in a minivan creeps down the lane. Striking cross-country, the blind Pontiac takes aim. 5/21/2017

I’m starting a little collection of things I’d like my fellow 25th District residents to know about their Representative in Washington.  The things Rep. Knight supports--complete disregard of climate change science, unrestricted corporate greed, and victimization of the poor--make him manifestly unfit to serve.  He must be unseated in 2018.  I’ll add to this from time to time as a form of therapy. News about Ol' Steve: September 6, 2017 Ol' Steve Reacts to Trump's DACA Announcement Many of the children impacted by the DACA program were brought to the United States and have known no other country. Their status deserves a thorough and thoughtful review. While the program may be ending, it should still receive attention by Congress. I encourage my colleagues to take the opportunity to now review this policy closely to see the impact this decision will have on the affected children.                                 --Steve Knight, September 3, 2017 Way to say no

I offer no explanations for the following.  If you want to use one of them, be my guest.

To paraphrase Will Durant, religions come and go, but superstition is immortal.  The ancient pieties will always rise to the surface; fairies, demons, elves, and ghosts lurk everywhere, and only a talisman known to be lucky (or better yet ecclesiastically approved) can ward off ill-fortune.  Even at the top of the world’s power structures, surrounded by experts eager to dispense rational advice, world leaders still manage to place their trust in fortune-tellers and astrologers.   Korea's former president Park Geun-hye entrusted state secrets to her personal shaman, a woman named Choi Soon-sil, who coincidentally is the daughter of one Choi Tae-min, who performed the same services for Park’s father, former Korean dictator Park Chung-hee.  Sort of a fortune-teller hereditary office.  Korean culture has a rich history of shamanic superstitions, and has only in the last century begun to shed them for more rational ways of seeing the world. Choi Soon-sil arrives for questioni