There was a lot of talk about Sarah Palin’s “Mama Grizzlies” this past election season. The image, which conjures up mothers fiercely defending their threatened young, has never made logical sense to me as a rightwing symbol. After all, shouldn’t mothers be fighting fiercely for social safety net programs (which Sarah Palin attacks) and against […]
Tag Archives: politics
Palin, Mama Grizzlies, and the Wife of Bath
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, Sarah Palin, Wife of Bath Comments closed
Fixing the House that Jefferson Built
I offer my apologies to my regular readers for having written a series of very long posts this week. To give you some relief, I offer up a political poem by my father, who is a master of light verse. As he did in a poem that I ran in a previous post (you can […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "House that Jefferson Built", Environmentalism, Nature, Scott Bates Comments closed
Obama, Don’t Mess with My Kitsch
I have been continuously bewildered by the state of political discourse in this country over the past two years. The vituperation that normally reasonable conservative intellectuals have unleashed against President Obama has struck me as, at times, unhinged. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Czech author Milan Kundera has provided me with […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Kitsch, Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being Comments closed
It’s Been a Mad Tea Party
Tuesday’s election gave us a chance to assess the effectiveness of the American Tea Party movement, which has fascinated not only the American media but people around the globe. For liberals like me, at times Tea Partiers have seemed to resemble less the American colonialists dumping tea into the Boston Harbor and more Lewis Carroll’s […]
Political Campaigns, Unbearably Light
We have heard a lot of heated rhetoric in the course of this election season. Words have soared and people have become impassioned. Now that voting has occurred, we can only hope that our newly elected representatives will make the transition from (in the famous formulation of Mario Cuomo) the poetry of campaigning to the […]
Election Got You Down? Read Johnson
By the end of today in the United States, some will be celebrating and others will be rending their garments and gnashing their teeth. While I am not one to underestimate the significant of elections—I think voting is one of a citizen’s most important responsibilities—I also caution everyone not to become (in the words of […]
