“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt memorably told a nation in the midst of its greatest economic crisis. As I look at America today, I see a lot of our politics dictated by fear. It is as though the unscrupulous and the irresponsible are stampeding us into extreme positions. Some want […]
Tag Archives: Barack Obama
Alyosha Karamazov’s Plea for Straight Talk
Is it just because I’m an Obama supporter or has political rhetoric reached new levels of inanity? And the rhetoric I have in mind is not that of Tea Party supporters, which is not new. I saw such self-indulgent calls for revolution coming from the left in the early 1970’s. No, I’m thinking of the […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, political rhetoric, politics, Republicans | Comments closed
The Civil War in 2011–Still Underway
Film Friday I found myself fuming at a film that I showed to my American Film class this past week. My reaction caught me by surprise because the movie is almost a hundred years old and I have screened it many times before. Why did D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) get under my […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, politics, racism | Comments closed
Hope: Invisible before Us and Still Possible
At the end of yesterday’s memorial service remembering those who died in the tragic Tucson shooting, the president of the University of Arizona read a poem by W. S. Merwin, recently named our poet laureate. I found a copy of it on the University’s Poetry Center website, along with the following wonderful quotation by Merwin […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "To the New Year", Arizona shootings, death and dying, W. S. Merwin | Comments closed
Obama, Idealist or Realist?
2010 in Review There was an interesting dust-up last week amongst conservative intellectuals following the release of some more Richard Nixon tapes. Henry Kissinger can be heard making the following cold-blooded remark about Soviet Jews in 1973: “Let’s face it: The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Foreign Policy, Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, Michael Gerson, Modest Proposal, politics | Comments closed
On Obama, Lincoln, and Compromise
Saturday’s New York Times had a column by African American novelist Ishmael Reed attacking those leftists that are excoriating President Obama for his willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts in return for a second stimulus package. What particularly galls Reed is that many of these critics refer to themselves as Obama’s base (as in, […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Flight to Canada, Harper Lee, Ishmael Reed, politics, racism, To Kill a Mockingbird | Comments closed
Into Valley of Death Rode the Democrats
The Democrats’ “shellacking” at the hands of the Republicans last week (the description is President Obama’s) has me thinking about Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade. But perhaps not in the way that you think. Tennyson’s memorable poem commemorated the insane charge by the British cavalry against Russian machine guns at Balaclava in […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Charge of the Light Brigade", A. H. Tennyson, Election, Heath care, politics | Comments closed
How the Rich Cry Poverty, Austen Style
John Kenneth Galbraith, noted economist and author of The Affluent Society, used to read Jane Austen before he sat down to write. He wanted to achieve the author’s light ironic touch in his own work. Yesterday another liberal economist had me thinking of Austen. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who writes for the New York […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Class, Economics, Jane Austen, Paul Krugman, Sense and Sensibility, Tax Policy | Comments closed
Obama Finds a Balm in Gilead
Marilynne Robinson I’ve been meaning to write for a while on Marilynne Robinson’s mesmerizing 2006 novel Gilead. I learned recently that it is one of Barack Obama’s favorite novels, which gives me an opportunity to explore how a work of literature impacts someone that we all have a stake in. This isn’t meant to be […]
