Persnickety

After a Trump Victory in 2020, How Would I React? With resignation. Allow me to explain. Resignation may be applied to someone who takes an unfortunate circumstance with grace and decorum, or if not with that level of charitableness, then at least a simple stoicism. I do not mean that. I mean the other definition: the act of giving up one’s position. If Trump and the Republicans win the Senate once again, the country will officially be a failed experiment. The American Empire will be over. We will have imploded, blown ourselves up from within, and not with a bang but a whimper, as Eliot said. The climate will then be well over the tipping point of no return. Our grand-kids will be doomed…humanity itself will have set the alarm to some centuries further on. And so there won’t be a whole lot to do anymore. We can—many will, no doubt—gnash our teeth, fulminate, march, and so on, but it will have been a case of too little, too late. They might as well save the wear and tear on t...

I've just come across a piece by J. K. Rowling, she of Harry Potter fame, and I wanted to showcase it. It is from years ago, concerning an election in the UK but I think it still applies, especially in the current dawn of the neo-fascist Trump era. So... From  The Times Online , J.K. Rowling writes: I’ve never voted Tory before, but . . .” Those much parodied posters, with their photogenic subjects and their trite captions, remind me irresistibly of glossy greetings cards. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more general elections have in common with the birthdays of middle life. Both entail a lot of largely unwelcome fuss; both offer unrivalled opportunities for congratulation and spite, and you have seen so many go by that a lot of the excitement has worn off. Nevertheless, they become more meaningful, more serious. Behind all the bombast and balloons there is the melancholy awareness of more time gone, the tally of ambitions achieved and of opportunities missed. So...

So what is evangelical Christianity? There are the basics, or five fundamentals (or more depending on your particular denominational flavor): Biblical inspiration and the impossibility of error within scripture; the virgin birth; Jesus' atonement for sin; bodily resurrection of Jesus; belief in Jesus' miracles. Okay, so that is a beginning. But at some time, not sure when but probably around the mid-century, something else happened, something that created a sub-set of fundamentalism: the evangelical movement. They still liked the five F's but seemed squishy regarding other non-fundamentalists, more likely to reach out, as Billy Graham did, to the youth. Youth for Life and like-minded organizations sought out the young with rock concerts (Christian rock concerts, but still) and Bibles that emphasized paraphrastic interpretations, emphasized form over content one might say. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Timothy Beal, a professor of religion at Case Wester...

“Our names may perish” said the boy, Kolya, at the funeral of the little peasant boy, Ilyusha, in Dostoevsky last masterpiece. And they will. Time will fly on by, like the sparrows that the boy wished to flock to his grave, to keep him company. The election now seems like a funeral, so that is why the reference to The Brothers Karamazov. And for those who dislike veiled references, I point out that the progressive movement which hoped to push the nation into the future space of its past promises, Ilyusha, the poor peasant boy struck down by a mixture of peasantry and bad luck, is that very same progressive movement; a movement that hoped to quell the poverty and homelessness of a sick, anti-Christian austerity, heal the earth from a despoilment of over a century of greedy oilmen, and finish the social movement built on equality and fairness for all: gays, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and the transgendered. It was all going so well. Until it wasn’t. Now we face the shov...

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 ...