Monthly Archives: July 2018

Pap Would Have Voted for Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2018

“Last place aversion” accounts for white resentment of safety net programs. Huck’s father is an example of the process at work.

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Putin’s Seduction of Donald Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: July 19, 2018

Think of Putin as Satan, Trump as Eve, and Adam as the GOP in a reenactment of Paradise Lost.

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Tolstoy’s Love Affair with Mosquitoes

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2018

Abhorrent though mosquitoes are to me, Tolstoy finds a way to live with them and even arrive at existential insights.

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Thieving Raccoons

By Robin Bates | Published: July 17, 2018

After undergoing an attack from thieving raccoons, I turned to a wonderful raccoon poem.

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A Poem To Console the Losers

By Robin Bates | Published: July 16, 2018

As if losing to France weren’t bad enough, Croatia had to receive its second-place medals in the rain, bringing to mind Laforgue’s poem “Sad, Sad.”

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Salomé, a Female Revenge Fantasy?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 15, 2018

Spiritual Sunday  The salacious story of Salomé (a.k.a. Herod and Herodias’s daughter) is today’s Gospel reading so here’s a strange and unsettling poem written by Anne Killigrew in the late 17th century. I can’t decide whether it is a feminist revenge fantasy or a drama of  sexual frustration. If John the Baptist has been admonishing […]

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France vs. the Little Engine That Could

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2018

Which World Cup story do we root for? The little engine that could or redemption after humiliation?

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Fishing in the Mind

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2018

Thursday Can art be so vivid that it supersedes actual experience? Billy Collins makes such a claim in “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,” where he conjures up images that may resonate with those who fish, even though Collins isn’t among them. His own experience, he freely admits, comes from museum paintings. Art precedes life, […]

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Blake on Trump’s Breast-Feeding Attack

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2018

With yet another Trumpian attack on poor children, I turn once again to William Blake.

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