America’s fate: civil war, fragmentation or collapse?
Today after the distressing events and death in the Capitol building of Washington DC that interrupted the process of confirming electoral college votes, I am reposting this piece from five…
essays, notes and poetry against cultural decay
Today after the distressing events and death in the Capitol building of Washington DC that interrupted the process of confirming electoral college votes, I am reposting this piece from five…
My repost today comes from 22 April 2018, and seems relevant to the difficulties we are experiencing in our distressed republics today. I also posted something of a follow-up post…
Historians (and I am one) will search for cultural archetypes that explain the strange delusions of power that have inflicted a captivity on the citizens of Melbourne and Victoria. In…
“The former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born…. A day will come when our societies once again will know hours of creative effervescence during…
There is increasing talk of a looming civil war in America. There has even been a website – anewcivilwar.com – established to track the increasing speculation on civil war by…
The descent of the American Republic into one of the outer circles of hell is occurring before our eyes. Within a week an outrageous case of police brutality, enclosed within…
The psychology of power is enigmatic and poisonous, and it infects more than just the ruthless and the mercenary. Principled men and women of medicine succumb, even at their moment…
Today I am posting the last (for now) of my reposts from earlier, retired blogs. This post comes from 2010 and is a reflection on Vaclav Havel’s thought, then still…
Writing in the New York Times (Jan 10 2019), David Brooks proposes the “remoralization of the market” as the correct response to economic populism. In an America besieged by Trumpism and Never-Trumpism, by…
This year has had no coherent themes for me, and perhaps that is why I have struggled to write posts with a clearly signposted judgment on 2018. Only now it…
What are we to make of the phenomenon of identity politics? Here are some exploratory theses. There is a vast debate on the merits and meaning of identity politics today. This…
I have made many visits to mental health hospitals over the years, almost all of them in support of my mother who suffered for most of her adult life from severe mental illness. The experience of these institutions humbles the mind. It teaches us how each of us is a “preposterous hodgepodge, uniquely arranged” – in the words of the great Inga Clendinnen who knew the gulf between the experience of the well and the sick – “a more significant division in any society than class or gender or possibly even homelessness.”