Saturday – Passover I asked my poet friend Norman Finkelstein for a good Passover poem and he alerted me to this one by Harvey Shapiro, found in Mountain, Fire, Thornbush (Swallow, 1961). The Passover seder, of course, revolves around remembering, and Shapiro’s poem points out that remembering was already part of the initial Exodus events. […]
Tag Archives: history
The Unbearable Lightness of Donald Trump
Czech author Milan Kundera warned about how dictatorships thrive off of our forgetting. In a “Rolling Stone” article, Charlie Pierce argues that forgetting has led to the rise of Donald Trump.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Donald Trump, forgetting, GOP, Milan Kundera, politics, Presidential Primaries, remembering, Unbearable Lightness of Being Comments closed
History’s Zigzagging Narratives
This Stephen Dunn points out how we see history as a series of narratives. Sometimes our heroes are those “too unhappy to be reasonable.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged historical narrative, politics, Presidential Primaries, Stephen Dunn Comments closed
Don’t Know Much about History
Nixon Waterman’s 1902 comic poem about students’ ignorance of history is probably still true today.
