March 26, 2015

Would you like some dialog with your coffee?

The slide or avalanche towards truth-as-I see-it continues unabated.  We have become an "as if" culture built around a subjective view of reality as the handmaiden of our own wishful desires and presuppositions.  Truth now service...

March 26, 2014

She's Baaaaack

She's baaaack. Actually, she, Mrs. Clinton, never really went away. Consider the last five years as an extended around-the-world progressive tour and road show; a pre-campaign "fact finding tour." But, she is now front and center on the...

June 24, 2013

An Embarrassing Truth

Embarrassing. Nauseating. Truly and breath-takingly ignorant. That would be the current fawning capitulation of the Republican Party regarding immigration. What is it about these "professional" politicans in the GOP that forces them to be constantly ...

November 20, 2012

The Color of Truth

Recently my retina let go in my left eye.  Part of the restoration process (still ongoing and somewhat in doubt) involves the injection into the eye of a gas bubble.  The increased pressure is meant to keep the retina flush with the back of...

August 19, 2012

Cant over Clarity

The true evildoers of our age are those who would willfully corrupt the Mother Tongue.  As a person who lives by the right use of words, I am grateful that early on in my academic career I happened upon two wordsmiths who shaped my craft ever af...

June 26, 2011

I Wonder...

I wonder what was going on that day in Imperial Rome... Was the Forum crowded with tourists from around the Empire gazing on the Tablets of the Law or buying trinkets from the locals? Was the roar of bloodlust to be heard at the Colosseum? Was the Se...

January 18, 2011

A tale of two earthquakes

For almost 200 hundred years the fault line under Haiti was still. Then, without warning, on January 12, last year, it shifted. On the Richter scale it was a 7.0 -- two thousand Hiroshima bomb blast. Buildings collapsed, shorelines sank, and 500,000 ...

January 8, 2011

Modesty: The Forgotten Political Virtue

"Man who sings own praises always out of tune." So opined that celluloid Confucian, Charlie Chan. Of course, that was then, this is now. The era of the humble cultural hero, Charles Lindbergh, and the reticient politician, "SIlent Cal...

December 12, 2010

President Obama's Speech Impediment

Our Dear Leader has a serious speech impediment.  Now, I'm not thinking about the mechanics of his highly overrated style and presentation, (see "note") but rather his apparent inability to pronounce a particular word: Creator.On three...

November 21, 2010

It's All the Rage: Islam and the Culture of Outrage

Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage? Well...not really -- the reason in this case being that you can't really imagine the Virgin Mary outraged, let alone perpetually so. Perpetually Sorrowful...Perpetually Supportive...Perpetually Interceding...But outrage...

November 7, 2010

The Unresolved

As a culture accustomed to sitcom scripts where all problems are neatly solved before the credits, we are uncomfortable with things that go on and on. We mistrust cyclical thinking and tend to get bored with repeated happenings. Sweet words to our ea...

October 19, 2010

Why I Miss W

There have been a spate of "Why I Miss President GW Bush" articles lately. Also, a killer t-shirt fluttered on the front display area of a Martha's Vineyard store during our current President's fourth or fifth (easy to lose count) summer va...

October 10, 2010

And One Came Back

The envelope was in my in-box in among advertisements, catalogs, notices; typical day, typical mail call. I opened it and out of a folded letter dropped a coin. One of my coins. An inexpensive aluminum coin about the size of an old fashioned silver d...

January 6, 2010

Changing definitions and liberal prejudice

My denomination's house organ had just published an article I had written on the whole issue of ordaining avowed and practicing homosexuals. Entitled, "Rev Smith Comes out of the Closet (It Was Getting too Crowded in There)", I thought it a...