“It was a likely story. But then, all of his stories were likely.”
– Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
In a somewhat pointless exchange on Facebook recently (but aren’t they all, usually?) a friend-of-a-friend, struggling to defend against a criticism of current US President Donald Trump, trotted out the “birther” trope: the assertion that Barack Obama was actually born in Africa.
Continue reading “A Likely Story”I was standing behind a woman at the grocery store checkout a couple of days ago, patiently awaiting my turn, browsing the tabloid headlines and marveling at the variety of lip balms that are available to today’s consumers, when I happened to glance down at the products that were at that moment being zipped across the scanner and into the bags.
Mountain Dew. Cheetos. Ground beef (a ten-pound package). Wonder bread. Hot Pockets (six boxes). Hot dogs (four eight-packs). Microwaveable breakfast sandwiches. Little Debbie snack assortments. Potato chips. Frosted Flakes. Frozen pizza. An explosion of colors, textures and flavors that have never occurred in nature.
All told, a hundred and seventy dollars worth of groceries, with collectively less nutrition than a pound of pine bark.
Continue reading “A mess of gooey, gluey, goodness.”I am of the age at which I can occasionally begin a sentence with “In my day …”
Don’t judge me: the decades since I was born on an Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1958 have been turbulent, and I feel that simply having lived so long entitles me to a pompous moment now and then. Vietnam, Watergate, Stonewall, the Civil Rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Reagan, two Great Recessions, two Iraq wars, two Arab-Israeli wars, the birth of Justin Bieber and the death of David Bowie, the rise of China, the fall of the Soviet Union … A lot of water has flowed under the bridge I stand on.
Continue reading “Blood on the tracks”
I don’t necessarily agree one hundred percent with this author’s conclusions, but the argument is cogent and timely today as it was more than a century ago. From the Notebooks of Mark Twain:
“A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can’t legally be a Christian and a patriot — except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart. The spirit of Christianity proclaims the brotherhood of the race and the meaning of that strong word has not been left to guesswork, but made tremendously definite — the Christian must forgive his brother man all crimes he can imagine and commit, and all insults he can conceive and utter — forgive these injuries how many times? — seventy times seven — another way of saying there shall be no limit to this forgiveness. That is the spirit and the law of Christianity. Well — Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. Word it as softly as you please, the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of the dog and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line or a hamper of fish or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise, and hear him split the universe with his war-whoop. The spirit of patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish, is just in man’s line, it comes natural to him — he can live up to all its requirements to the letter; but the spirit of Christianity is not in its entirety possible to him.
“The prayers concealed in what I have been saying is, not that patriotism should cease and not that the talk about universal brotherhood should cease, but that the incongruous firm be dissolved and each limb of it be required to transact business by itself, for the future.”
— Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”)
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During the first twenty years of my life, a time I mostly spent romping around the woods and fields of Sand Mountain (that’s in northeastern Alabama, for you heathens), I saw exactly two venomous snakes. One was a cottonmouth swimming in a catfish pond, who took one look at me and swam the other way; the second was a copperhead sunning himself on a rock next to that same pond. I was able to sneak up close enough to spy on the copperhead for about two seconds before he, also, detected my presence and bolted.
There are, in fact, four venomous snakes native to my home state: the water moccasin, the copperhead, the coral snake, and an assortment of rattlesnakes. (The latter two varieties managed to elude me for the entire two decades, despite my habit of placing myself very much in their way. To this day I’ve never seen a rattlesnake or a coral snake outside of an open glass tank in a church … but that’s a story for another day.) The majority of the snakes in the region are harmless to humans, or even highly beneficial, efficient predators on mice, rats, moles, and other farmyard pests.
Continue reading “Sweet Poison”
The ruler of the Aztec empire was called the “tlatoani”, which roughly translates to “the one who talks the loudest”. From the founding of Gran Tenochtitlan in 1325 to the final collapse in 1521, the Aztec civilization survived for a grand total of 196 years, during which time they had become so hated by all of their neighbors that even the rapacious Spanish invaders were embraced as the lesser of two evils.
Continue reading “The Loudest Voice”
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.
Continue reading “Truth and lies.”
When I hear politicians and pundits talking about the way Big Government is sucking the life out of this country, I can’t help but feel a smidgin of guilt: my family is one of those that has been robbing the taxpayer blind for the past fifty years.
We can start with my parents, who, as members of the United States Air Force, were living off the taxpayers when they met. They courted and were married (by a Justice of the Peace, no less; yet another piglet sucking at the taxpayer teat) and in the fullness of time my brother, sister and I all came along — clutched firmly in the arms of Big Government, as my mother gave birth to each of us in Air Force hospitals built, staffed and run at taxpayer expense.
Continue reading “Oh, is that my hand in your pocket?”
I’ve always considered myself something of a political animal, but I think this time I’ve wandered into the wrong zoo.
I admit that there’s a tendency, at my age, to find all kinds of unfavorable comparisons between life today and in my youth: the movies are not as exciting, the music is not as original, the tomatoes are not as tomato-ey — and the politicians I see today all seem to have come right out of the same factory somewhere on the outskirts of Shanghai.
Continue reading “Wild Kingdom.”
When I was a little boy, I quickly learned to stay abreast of the list of dos and don’ts that my parents maintained: as in Socrates’ conception of virtue, the rules might evolve from one day to the next, but the requirement to observe them did not.
Continue reading “Tattletale”