Persnickety

S anders' supporters, take heed! A write-in vote for Bernie is a vote for Trump! A vote for Dr. Jill Stein is a vote for Trump! Or so we hear. (Way too often.) And yet a vote for Hillary is a vote for the corrupt DNC. What to do? Up to this moment I've stood against the tide and advocated a vote for conscience. A moral stand for whomever you felt should be president. And if everyone did that--if everyone was informed--my guess is that Jill Stein would make a run for it. But the vast majority of people do not even know her name. Do not even know there is something called a Green Party. The media has black-balled her. No debates. Few interviews. Of course this is a chicken and the egg problem: She cannot get traction unless she gets some of the free corporate media bestowed on Trump. (The reader is left to form his/her own opinion if this has anything to do with Stein's anti-corporate platform.) Would Stein's platform appeal to all those millennials who supporte...

photo by Daniel Horacio Agostini Amanda Taub, in a recent Vox article ( The rise of American authoritarianism ) details an interesting theory regarding the popularity of Trump. It dovetails very nicely with something I've often said (to myself, as one never quite knows to whom one is speaking nowadays), that is to say that it is not Trump we all should be so concerned about, but rather it is the people who are supporting Trump who should demand our attention. [An aside: I do love Vox, but why, Oh why must nearly every paragraph be two sentences or less? Is this the norm now in digitized articles? Can we not handle large paragraphs with a development of  a thesis? Perhaps I am merely too Faulknerian...or persnickety.] I've read an article or two, or three, from the odd reporter who dared to visit a Trump rally. The reports are a bit on the scary side. How can people act this way? What way? Well, picture a convention in 1968 and you'll get a fairly nice portrait. It ...

Although evangelical protestants like to invoke as their model the early church of the New Testament, one that consisted of small fervent congregations holding worship ceremonies in homes or wherever, it increasingly seems to be jettisoning foundational theology for simple political ideology. To wit: A political position on the topic of poverty would, to a Christian concerned chiefly with Christ's Word, attempt to square the individual's responsibility and response to the poor with the conservative position that the poor are poor due to their own lax moral compass and laziness, that is, due to the individual's faulty preparation to modern life. This hypothetical Christian would have to ask himself what would Jesus do and say on the topic? There is ample proofs for this unfortunate researcher: the New Testament shows Jesus constantly concerned with the poor. The entire Bible contains over 300 references to helping the poor and needy. Indeed this may well be the central pur...