Tag: America
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Happy Fourth Eorlingas
That’s me at our local No Kings rally back in June. It’s the energy I’m bringing to Fourth of July this year, what with the United States government having been taken over by orcs, goblins, and all manner of Mordor-worthy villainy. May we the people soon topple their treachery and an Aragorn-esque leader one day…
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Biden his time
Continuing my tradition of doing a presidential postmortem for the outgoing commander-in-chief (see Bush and Obama and Trump), here are my brief and bumpy thoughts on the brief and bumpy Biden era:
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Towards a better masculinity
The Washington Post essay by Christine Emba called “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness” has made the rounds over the last month, and for good reason. Emba takes stock of the currently tenuous state of American masculinity, with insightful commentary from Of Boys and Men author Richard Reeves and professor Scott…
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On a beach waiting to witness
A poem ⁂ On a beach waiting to witnessworks of fire thundering forth for the Fourth of July,sparklers burst against a cloudy sunset—the flames of liberty burning out fast. Darkness descendsand the main event announces itselfwith flash-bangs against the firmament:Declarations of incandescence,self-evident in their light, loudness, and pursuit of happy viewers. United they fall,a coterie…
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On Paper Trails and Typewriting Females
I just finished reading Cameron Blevins’ new book Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, which I learned a lot from (see my full book notes). One thing that popped out to me was the role of women in the Post Office’s workforce. Women made up two-thirds of all Post…
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Marveling at masks amidst the plague experience
In his latest column “Are Face Masks the New Condoms?” (paywalled), Andrew Sullivan reflects on how difficult it is to change pandemic-induced behaviors: With HIV, as with Covid, a transformation of the facts did not necessarily mean a transformation of psychology. Human psyches take time to adjust to new realities; fear and trauma have a…
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4 lessons from the Trump years
It’s been a tradition on this blog since its inception to do a kind of presidential postmortem for the outgoing commander-in-chief (see Bush and Obama), assessing both the political takeaways and my personal life during their administration. (I planned to publish this on Inauguration Day, but as the actual end date of the Trump administration…
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Mitigating 2020 tarnished legacies is our reality
Magazine mashup from American Libraries, Jan/Feb 2021. More mashups here.
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We Americans
This Fourth of July, the words that are echoing in my mind more than any others are the lyrics of “We Americans” by The Avett Brothers, from their recent album Closer Than Together. They beautifully capture the cognitive dissonance I feel about being an American, and even made me tear up the first time I…
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Statues and ‘Star Wars’
In an email thread about the controversies surrounding the removal of statues, I suggested we relocate all statues to museums and use the space for parks and Little Free Libraries. But that’s destroying history! First Amendment! Statues aren’t history, as this Twitter thread by Elle Maruska articulates well: Statues are mythology. Statues are hagiography. If…
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America’s greatness is great
Alan Jacobs: Yesterday my son, who works in the Chicago Loop, saw a woman on a bicycle get hit by a car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but she was knocked to the ground, dazed. He ran up to her to see if she was okay and pulled out his phone to call 911 — but…
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Long Quotes on the ‘Prairie Fires’
Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is about 150 pages too long, and spends a lot more time with Laura’s daughter Rose than I expected or desired. But the first third of the book, with the Ingalls family and Laura as a young adult, was quite illuminating. (Great Scott am…
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The Big Short in 3 quotes
Michael Lewis, The Big Short: 1. “What needs to be remembered here,” he wrote the next day, after he’d done [the trade], “is that this is $100 million. That’s an insane amount of money. And it just gets thrown around like it’s three digits instead of nine.” 2. “In retrospect, their ignorance seems incredible—but, then,…
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From defeat, not victory
In his book Washington’s Crossing, David Hackett Fisher writes about how the colonists responded to the dark days of the American Revolution in 1776: This great revival grew from defeat, not from victory. The awakening was a response to a disaster. Doctor Benjamin Rush, who had a major role in the event, believed that this…
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Trump’s Razor
Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible yet to say which explanation for his behavior is true, but it seems highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system — a…
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Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era
Got Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era as an unexpected Christmas gift from my dad. Given our shared appreciation for and history in the Northwoods of Wisconsin (though not in lumberjacking or songcatching unfortunately), this was a delightful read. It’s partly a reprint of Franz Rickaby’s 1926 collection Ballads and Songs of…