What is a case? A case is never a real person. A case is a series of characteristics abstracted from persons; it is a model of those characteristics that a potential client must display in order to qualify for the attention of a bureaucracy. —Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience By the time this ambulance made [...]
Not long after Bob Dylan’s conversion, I heard him give a radio interview. For obvious reasons, I always considered him a tough challenge in such settings. He can be moody, unpredictable, combative, and cryptic. In this discussion, he was true to form. That, and Dylan continually strummed his guitar in the background, muffling both the [...]
I often ask my students why the 20th century, and now the 21st, produced no great epic poems. I have yet to receive an answer, any answer. After 30 years of such questioning, I suspect I never will. So here, in desperation, I do what I seldom do: I give them the answer they never [...]
“Any damn fool can pull a strike. It takes commonsense to avert one.”–Joseph Frederick “As in other warfare, victory in a strike is to the strong, not the just; and often noncombatants suffer most.”–W. H. Hutt Strike One When a strike happens, almost everyone loses, whether businesses, or consumers, or workers. […]
Stars Through the Clouds, by Donald T. Williams In the preface to his long historical poem Old King Coel, Adam Fox, former Oxford Professor of Poetry, former Canon of Westminster Abbey, and former Inkling, wrote that in it he had “used verse and rhyme in a traditional way, since the experimentalists do not seem to have [...]
You might recall the awful option faced by the title character in “Sophie’s Choice:” Pick one child or the other. It’s not a choice any mother wants to make. No matter what she chooses, her loss is unutterable. Nor would any child want to make the same choice in reverse: “Mommy or Daddy, Sally. [...]
“The thing that is in danger is the whole structure of society, and it is necessary to persuade thinking men and women of the vital and intimate connection between the structure of society and the theological doctrines of Christianity.”–Dorothy L. Sayers, “Creed or Chaos?” “But what is a practical joke in a world of nonsense, [...]
The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values.–George Will I. The Tragic Vision of Life I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties. In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock [...]
Michael Bauman “The department of defense is a sinecure, a massive, unfathomable, black hole for taxpayer dollars that has never been, and perhaps never can be, plumbed to its hellish depths.” If Chuck Hagel really were qualified to be Secretary of Defense, and if he had the insight and courage necessary for the [...]
When debating communism, I often encounter those who do not know exactly what it is. My answer is the one known by millions and millions: arrest, purge, gulag, and death. That’s communism. But the knowledge of communism gained by those who live under it (that is, those whom communism has not murdered) is vastly different [...]