Wednesday As the Trump administration’s treatment of children at the border continues to horrify the nation, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist comes to mind. There you have another child caught up in a nightmare where ideology overwhelms basic humanity. Whereas most of us see the death of a child as overwhelmingly tragic, it serves the agendas […]
Tuesday What are we to make of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone’s flamboyant behavior following his arrest by Special Counselor Robert Mueller for lying to Congress about his contacts with Wikileaks? I think back to a passage from Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man that I applied to Trump during the campaign but which applies equally […]
Dickens would have a field day with the Trump administration’s decision to separate children from their families.
Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Chinua Achebe, John Milton, and Thomas Hardy see through men like departing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
In “1Q84” Murakami describes novels as holding out the promise to solve our problems only we can’t quite make them out.
Supply-side economics has been ravaging the economies of such states as Kansas, Louisiana, and, to a lesser extent, Wisconsin. The GOP governors sound like the poor house’s Board of Directors in “Oliver Twist.”
Charles Dickens had a tangible impact on how the poor were treated. “Oliver Twist,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” and “Christmas Carol” literally changed public policy. Few other authors can boast so much.
I’ve written a lot about Paul Ryan and his aspiration to be a John Galt figure. Now that he is Speaker of the House, I review other literary parallels I’ve drawn over the years.
Thursday Normally I would be delighted with a New York Times article that matched up presidential candidates with works of literature, such as Ted Cruz with Beowulf, Hillary Clinton with Persuasion, and Bernie Sanders with Around the World in 80 Days. This piece, however, strikes me as so uninformative that it’s all but useless. I’ve tried […]
