This is being written from my wit’s end. It feels as if I write from the middle of Bedlam. These United States of America have become a madhouse. To some degree they always were, but, in the last thirty years, insanity has worsened acutely, dramatically, exponentially. Today we are poised in a moment of calm […]
Recently a writer struggling with mentality, and needing to pose as if proposing a useful idea, wrote an article claiming that a need to believe in God may be inborn, that is, hard-wired in the human nervous system. I’m much more inclined to suppose cultural evolutionary survival as a basis for metaphysical ideas than genomic […]
Religion as exemplified by the three “Book Religions,” Judaism, Christendom and Islam, has always been a substitute for knowledge, courage and personal integrity. It works, or fails, as a crutch, a shield, a warm blanket or a tool of navigation in life. Religions have tended to become the enemy of spirituality, not its source. Spirituality […]
Quite a number of otherwise intelligent citizens here in Benicia take so limited a view of life in this world that they mistake personal, near-term gain for lasting, universal good. To shore up a personal interest in the corporate carbon-fuel complex, they latch it on to community benefit, as if the town’s finances justify playing […]
So far, no one gives U.S. strategy against ISIL its proper name: Aerial Guerrilla Warfare. Between congressional conservatives and President Obama’s team exists a war of ideas about war. The conservative idea, as usual, is rooted in traditional images reaching back through european history and practice to the Classical Era, even as far back as […]
In view of the legislative charade in this week’s Senate session on amending the U.S. Constitution to overturn Citizens United, I shudder at the travesty of its fanfare and abject failure. This is so deeply distressing I feel physically sickened. (1) Our whole political life plays musical chairs on deck of the SS Leviathan, […]
My blog post essay in late November, 2013, was titled, On Changing Ideas. It follows that I should now write on our national illness, a culture of death, a national stagnation caused by fixed ideas, comfortable habits and narrow outlooks. Conservatives and tea-party types should avoid reading this, for they are, and will be, happy […]