Education should be a reason to come back.
January 2010
Doubtless he is a proud example of a high-level commitment and an educational system that aims to produce deracinated, placeless individuals.
A homogeneous global consumer culture flattens its victims. And, perhaps in the same vein, our meanderings around the dying furniture capital of Yecla turned up nothing: virtually everything on display fitted what has become the decorative style of contemporary Spain: the sort of stuff one might find in a Copenhagen dentist’s office.
We need not rely with some desperation on the Hope that is a gift, if we can gin up optimism of our own sort.
What if we had more states?
Obama is suffering because whether or not it is true, he seems not to understand what is going on around the country. Whether or not it is true, he seems uninterested in making his proposals understood. As a result, he seems distant – the kind of guy who doesn’t really get you as a person – and the first thing that he must use to bridge that seeming distance is speech.
A stay-at-home congress may serve constituents better.
If you walk the same route at about the same time every day, as I do, you develop a certain familiarity with the automobile culture that perfumes the public air. You can rattle off in your head the license plate of the red Ford coming your way, unless it’s that other red Ford, in which case you know that the driver, a somnambulant woman leaning into her steering wheel, mouth agape, is already, at this early hour, wearing her cell phone.
This will not last. Greed consumes everything, until it finally consumes itself.
In 1973, the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton abortion decisions. Together, they represented a serious defeat for the unalienable right to life, the constitutional system of federalism, and the principle of democracy.
A friend of mine with a penchant for self-effacement said “There’s just not enough time to get the work done and procrastinate.” It is not that he only works well under pressure, he only works under pressure. He reads voraciously in history and poetry when neglecting his dissertation, and (to be honest) drinks too many gins and tonic over good conversation. In our modern age his habits fall under the general category of wasting time, along with, well, just about everything not productive or immediately relating to a “useful” end.
But as a profound poet trying to make a comfortable living I can’t really trouble myself about that fit audience though few. . . . Were I to start thinking about poetry in the social context, I’d be sliding down that slippery slope toward place, limits, and liberty. And then what? Localism? God help us!
Here is the great secret of my generation: What our parents gave us as a gift we have received as an entitlement. No one is not grateful for an entitlement. Indeed, everyone is resentful that it is not larger. Worse, we are resentful of everybody else’s entitlements because they compete with our own. Politics because a matter of getting as large a share of the pie as you can, while giving as little as you can get away with.
Things are a little different now that it’s led to universal bankruptcy…
I tend to think that slippery sidewalks are a sign of a broader pattern, in which people are less prepared to take responsibility for the inconvenience of ‘gray areas.’
Ethanol and the fashionably skeletal may be connected.
