Category: Politics and Society

  • The Bird and the Fish

    • David Holcomb, “Dialogue of the Bird and Fish“, 2014

    My painting “Dialogue Between the Bird and the Fish” will be finding a new home this weekend, and I thought this might be a nice time to tell the story that the picture illustrates. So, without further ado …

    A fly, hovering near the surface of a pond, finds itself suddenly the target of not one, but two predators: a bird who darts down from the nearby cattails and a fish who rises up unexpectedly from the depths of the water. Fortunately for the fly, his attackers are so startled that he has the opportunity to dart out of reach of either (only to be eaten later by a dragonfly — such is life).

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  • Truth and lies.

    • My copy is somewhat more up to date than this one.

    I was poking around among the bookshelves a day or so ago, looking for something to entertain me as the first cool weather of the season settles in, when I spotted my rather tattered Penguin Classics copy of the Histories of Herodotus.

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  • When in danger, When in doubt

    • The appropriate protective gear makes all the difference in the world.

    In the year 2000, the first full reporting year after West Nile Virus in the US was first identified, two people in the New York City area (total population just over 8 million) died from illnesses associated with the disease. News outlets went a little crazy: dead blue jays became more popular as establishing video on the nightly news than the Empire State Building or Rudy Giuliani or even the standard crowd-of-people-hurrying-down-the-sidewalk video that had been the staple of news stories about NYC since the invention of television.

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  • Bam. Pow. Kablooie.

    • How to spot the bad guys? Great vocabulary. Terrible fashion sense.

    Anguish. Antagonist. Annihilate. Adept.

    What do all these words have in common?

    Venerable. Veritable. Volcanic. Variable.

    I’ll give you a hint: I had learned to use all of them in a sentence by the time I reached the third grade.

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  • The price of pretty

    • No, it’s not what you think.

    Until the Church removed her from the calendar in 1969, July 20 long had the distinction of being the feast day of Saint Wilgefortis the Liberator, the protector and patroness of women suffering in relationships with abusive husbands.

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  • Unintelligible at any speed

    • Satan’s little helpers? The Kingsmen, 1965.

    In my younger days, my father often expressed concern that I was becoming prey to a languid intellectualism that he feared would leave me ill-equipped for life in the Real World in the unlikely event that I should ever shamble into it. In retrospect, he was probably correct: fortunately, he had a plan to address the problem.

    Jobs. Lots of jobs.

    No job was too small, too filthy, or too ill-suited to my temperament (which was, admittedly, opposed to work in almost any form) as long as it paid. From the moment I was old enough to get a work permit, Dad was unsparing in his efforts to get the most out of the twenty-dollar fee. Loading hay, working on a garbage truck, cleaning offices, flipping burgers: I was a busy boy.

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  • Skiing the Slippery Slope

    On a whim yesterday I wasted twenty minutes on a quiz on the Christian Science Monitor website: it was a condensed version of a test that 8th graders in a Kentucky school district had to take in 1912 to determine whether they were fit to proceed to high school.

    How hard could this be, right? This is test aimed at kids who are — what? Thirteen? In Kentucky, in 1912.

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  • See what you made me do…

    • The devil made me buy this dress …

    The thing that I find most disturbing about Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s ongoing meltdown is not the crack smoking, or showing up stoned at a charity function for wounded soldiers, or calling a south-Asian taxi driver “Paki”, or threatening — on video — to grab an automatic weapon and slaughter his political opponents. What shocks me most are his constant expressions of outrage and wounded pride at being called to account for his actions.

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  • In a Sea Rendered Great

    • Toss them a rope, or just enjoy the solid ground under your feet?

    Here’s a scenario we may all recognize:  Little Johnny comes home from school with a black eye and a split lip and his parents discover that he’s been in an altercation with the notoriously arrogant and bullying Jim-Bob from the mobile home park across the tracks. Johnny’s wounds are salved with an outpouring of parental sympathy and dire mutterings that “something really has to be done about those people.”

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  • An Open Letter

    • The first American whistleblower, Benjamin Franklin

    Mr President,

    In the early days of the presidential campaign season of 2008 I remember looking at the available choices and wondering who, among a fairly impressive cast, would be the man or woman who could stimulate a bit of interest – or even enthusiasm – in an electorate exhausted by disappointments.

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