Will Trump escape all accountability? Literature weighs in.
Posted in Brecht (Bertolt), Dante, Fielding (Henry), Gay (John), Hardy (Thomas), Voltaire, Wilde (Oscar), Wilmot (John) | Also tagged Beggar's Opera, Candide, Dante, Donald Trump, Henry Fielding, impeachment hearings, Importance of Being Earnest, Inferno, John Gay, Oscar Wilde, Threepenny Opera, Tom Jones, Voltaire | Brecht has the perfect poem for Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Some say teachers should, like soldiers, should put their lives on the line. This A.E. Housman poem brings up the question of whether even soldiers should do so when there sacrifice will be meaningless.
Posted in Brecht (Bertolt), Brooke (Rupert), Housman (A. E.), O'Brien (Tim), Owen (Wilfred), Seeger (Alan), Tennyson (Alfred Lord) | Also tagged "Charge of the Light Brigade", "Here Dead We Lie", "I Have a Rendezvous with Death", "Soldier", "Strange Meeting", A. E. Housman, Alan Seeger, Alfred Lord Tennyson, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Galileo, Rupert Brooke, school reopening, teachers, Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, Wilfred Owen | When William McRaven asked, out of sympathy with John Brennan, that his own security clearance be withdrawn, he behaved like Brecht’s poet in “Burning of the Books.”
Thursday As some Americans harden their hearts against Central American immigrants, shrugging off the 2600+ children who have been separated from their parents, the six children who have died in (or immediately following) border patrol custody, and the cages in which people have been housed, we would do well to remember how in 1942 America […]
Friday Recently the Washington Post reported that Trump just told his ten thousandth lie, a fact that barely raised eyebrows since we have become inured to his incessant falsehoods. Bertolt Brecht describes the normalization process in “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain.” Imagine that you’re hearing the 10,000th lie for the first time–which is to […]
Wednesday – May 1 Despite incessant GOP attacks on unions with their Orwellian-named “right to work laws,” increasing income inequality may push Democrats to aggressively push for more actual workers’ rights. I was struck that Joe Biden, in announcing his presidential bid, said he was “sick of this President badmouthing unions.” Later he tweeted, “Labor […]
Monday In an important debut article for the Atlantic, former New Yorker writer George Packer mentions a Bertolt Brecht poem to illustrate the threat that the GOP currently poses to democracy. The article contends that Donald Trump is the logical culmination of the Republicans’ 50-year descent into an authoritarian, white identitarian party. According to Packer, the descent […]
Trump, like Mac the Knife, is an escape artist extraordinaire. Might a presidential pardon save him as a reprieve saves Mac?
