Retired English prof (Ph. D., UNC), who likes to garden, blog, pursue languages (especially Spanish) and to share in serious discussion on vital issues such as global warming, the role of government, energy alternatives, etc. Am a vegan and, yes, a tree hugger enthusiastically. If you write me, I'll answer.
It’s important we find time in a busy world to pursue what gives us joy.
Over a lifetime, it’s been growing flowers and hostas, studying languages, reading and writing. Arthritis has ended my gardening days, but those other interests compel me still, especially the reading of books that stretch my mind, grant me new awareness, and open unanticipated conversations.
I discovered reading early, resorting as a youngster to the Montgomery Street library—it’s still there—to escape Philly’s sultry summer streets, foreclosing on a boredom that promised mischief.
Reading became another world, generating deliverance from what might have become a narrow mindset, igniting new vistas redolent with expectation, though often tinctured with youth’s unbridled idealism
Favorite writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, taught me “that is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
America has a stubborn tradition of banning books. The First Amendment may guarantee free speech, but we’ve never stopped trying to police it.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses were once blacklisted. More recently, schools have targeted Harry Potter, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, TheKite Runner—and, with no sense of irony, 1984.
This isn’t new. Aristophanes’ 2,500 year-old comedy Lysistrata, in which women withhold sex to end war, was banned here from 1873 until 1954 under the Comstock laws. The crime? Mailing “lewd” material.
Easy to blame the Right. But the Left has been just as eager to censor.
In California, a liberal bastion, To Kill a Mockingbird was pulled from schools for its depiction of racism.
Progressives mirror conservative groups like Moms for Liberty. Campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books and Disrupt Texts demand the removal of classics: Huckleberry Finn for racial slurs, To Kill a Mockingbird _for “white savior themes,” Little House on the Prairie for its portrayal of Indigenous and Black people. EvenHarry Potter is shunned—not for witchcraft this time, but for J.K. Rowling’s views on gender.
The real answer isn’t banning. It’s conversation.
Read the books. Put them in context. Argue about them. That’s how we confront uncomfortable truths—and maybe even learn something from them.
The recent raid on the home and office of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, ostensibly to search for classified documents, reiterates a familiar narrative about Donald Trump’s abuse of power.
The raid is seen by many as a form of political vengeance against a former critic, ironically mirroring the very charges on which Trump himself was indicted for illegally possessing classified documents after leaving office, some of which reportedly contained nuclear secrets.
Bolton, in turn, exacted his own form of revenge by publishing his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, despite Trump’s feverish attempts to prevent its publication.
The book is intriguing for its revelations, among them, that Trump expressed his surprise to learn that the U.K. was a nuclear power and his confusion as to whether Finland was a part of Russia.
Further, that he asked China President Xi Jinping’s help with his 2020 reelection campaign by increasing US imports of agriculture products, while expressing approval of China’s concentration camps for Uygur Muslims and willingness to overlook the Tiananmen Square massacre and other civil rights issues.
Bolton says that Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, meanwhile withholding $400 million in military aid.
He hasn’t changed any, as his recent fawning over Putin in Alaska clearly demonstrates—incompetent, vindictive, narcissistic, autocratic and worse, willing to sell out his country to secure his personal interests.
I read a lot, but the genre that makes my heart beat faster is poetry, doubtless because I’m a very feeling person.
A lot of what I read these days purports to being poetry when it isn’t.
I know I’m reading poetry when it becomes more than it is, words taking on nuance beyond themselves.
Often I find poetry in music. Take, for example, Bono’s “Grace,” transcending a girl’s name, to becoming extended metaphor of redemptive goodness:
Grace It’s the name for a girl It’s also a thought that Changed the world And when she walks on the street You can hear the strings Grace finds goodness In everything
Another example would be the Beatles’ haunting “Eleanor Rigby,” exemplum of loneliness, or disconnectedness, hidden amid the crowd, but profoundly present:
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been Lives in a dream Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door Who is it for?
All the lonely people Where do they all come from? All the lonely people Where do they all belong?
James Dobson, the evangelical founder of Focus on the Family, and advisor to three presidents (Reagan and the Bushes), has died at age 89.
I do not mourn this disseminator of hate—he denounced President Clinton yet supported convicted sexual felon Donald Trump.
He vilified gays, same-sex marriage, and transgender equality, branding the gay rights movement “a particularly evil lie of Satan.”
In 2004, he absurdly warned that legalizing same-sex marriage would open the door to “marriage between a man and his donkey.”
His propagating “conversion therapy” continues to do irreparable harm.
At its peak, his radio broadcasts aired on 1,500 stations, reaching some 500,000 listeners weekly, while his 70 books, many still in print, sold an estimated 50 million copies.
I want to step back from writing about politics, at least for now. We all have our views, and too often—much like professing religious beliefs—we run headlong into barbed-wire intolerance.
Some find distraction, even intoxication, in endless hours of media; others in sports; still others in hobbies that bring both pleasure and mastery—or in the familiar solace of alcohol.
I prefer reading, not just any kind, but what helps me grow and be more aware I’m not alone. Lately, it’s been nature memoirs, especially like H is for Hawk. I want to get back to my beloved Thoreau and not least, Wendell Berry. I miss Tolstoy.
Of course, we shouldn’t extract from nature what really derives from our imposed views such as we find in Wordsworth’s poetry. Nature, as writer James Rebank reminds us, “isn’t all butterflies, sunshine and healing.”
Still, whenever I step outside the human world, there descends this quieting solace, and I think myself made whole again.
I’m registered as a Democrat, but am switching to Independent. While an incipient coalition of congressional Democrats has begun voicing opposition to sending arms to Israel—given its genocide Gaza policies— it’s far from enough.
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich aptly expresses my view of our current political morass: “There is no longer a Democratic Party as such. There is a big financial machine called the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee. On the Republican side, there’s a bunch of absolute zombies that follow Donald Trump. That’s what we have today. We don’t have two governing parties as we did before.”
But I’m also troubled by the increasing infiltration of Leftists into the party such as AOC and Mamdani, who some have hailed as “the future of the party,” active members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
As I write, 250 DSA members, running largely as Democrats, now hold office at federal, state, or local levels. Read its platform. Advocating seizing the means of production, defunding police, open borders, dismantling our armed forces, should send goosebumps up your spine. Both parties must abandon the peripheries and embrace the center.
Next year, America will mark its 250th birthday. Unfortunately, this historic milestone is likely to be politicized, with competing narratives of our past reflecting the deep polarization of our present.
But this need not be our path. If we are to bridge rival ideologies and transcend partisanship, we must come together—not in denial of our differences, but in honest recognition of both our shared ideals and our collective shortcomings.
As true patriots, we can celebrate the birth of a free nation while also acknowledging the ways in which we have fallen short of the Declaration’s enduring promise: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Our nation was forged in both hope and violence. The challenge before us is not only to remember, but to reckon. To share openly what we love about America—and what we do not. And to commit ourselves to remedying the ills that still confront us.
History taught from the periphery, filtered through rigid ideology or simplified into monolithic narratives, is intrinsically dangerous. It rests on a priori assumptions and is too often promulgated with dogmatism. True understanding requires nuance, humility, and courage.
In a very real sense, our genesis as a nation continues. That reality carries both hope and foreboding—hope, if we can get the conversation right; foreboding, if we fail to heed the lessons of our past. As Jefferson warned: “When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.” Politicians, take heed.
With this in mind, I eagerly await Ken Burns’ six-part PBS documentary on the American Revolution this November. It may be a vital first step in rekindling the national conversation we so urgently need—and in recovering the promise of the American dream.
The news media has found its current raison d’être in Trump’s reneging his campaign pledge to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, leading to myriad conspiracy theories.
This happens, of course, whenever a tourniquet gets applied to information sources. My own thinking is that Trump’s pledge was a calculated “hoax” of his own weave in which he’s now entangled.
As Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s high profile defense lawyer, informs us, “I was Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer. I know the facts, some of which I can’t disclose because it is privileged or subject to court-imposed sealing orders. But what I can disclose makes several important things clear: that Epstein never created a client list. The FBI interviewed alleged victims who named several ‘clients.’ These names have been redacted. The courts have also sealed negative information about some of the accusers to protect them. Neither the Justice Department nor FBI interviewed alleged victims who named several ‘clients.’ I know who they are. They don’t include any current officeholders. We don’t know whether the accusations are true.”
What remains troubling is that key portions of this testimony—especially the names—were redacted. As a result, we may never learn the identities of the public figures who may have participated in Epstein’s trafficking ring, one of whose victims died by suicide in April.
As for the alleged thousands of extant videos showing public figures engaged in sexual activity, these claims appear to trace back to Attorney General Pam Bondi. She, too, promised to release Epstein-related materials supposedly sitting on her desk. Yet, like Dershowitz, PBS investigators found no evidence such videos exist (AI Overview)
What cannot be easily dismissed is the disturbing nature of Epstein’s death:
His cellmate had been removed shortly beforehand.
Guards did not carry out their cell surveillance rounds.
Two minutes and fifty-three seconds of the cell video were erased (wired, July 15, 2025).
All of this won’t deter the politicians and media from churning their conspiracies. It makes for great political theater. Politics, of course, has never been blameless of gamesmanship, frequently without limits.
House speaker Mike Johnson’s adjourning the House early for a six-week hiatus serves only to thicken the conspiracy broth.
Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images) Susan Sontag (Photo by Deborah
Taking photos is now so universally accessible via our smartphones that we’re likely to take it for granted.
Until recently, it required buying a dedicated camera, inserting a film roll, setting the lens, then waiting—perhaps a week or more—to see the results of a distant lab.
I think of photos as a freeze on time, lovers as Keats reminded us, still fresh in their youth; sons and daughters, children still; parents and grandparents as we remember them. But photos, buttressed with videos, do even more, providing a window on what ails us.
Susan Sontag in her splendid book I’ve just read, Regarding the Pain of Others, argues that the visual not only helps us remember, but sensitizes us to the plight of those who acutely suffer while we warm ourselves under the blankets on cold winter nights, our bellies full. A moralist and cultural critic, she takes on the scourge of war’s ravages, a predominantly male enterprise it seems, unleashing the human capacity to inflict limitless evil, often with impunity.
Photography reminds us of Hiroshima and Nagasaki viewed aerially following their atom bomb devastations, incinerating 200,000 civilians within minutes; of emaciated prisoners released from Nazi death camps, the residue of 12 million exterminated; of ethnic strife in Bosnia in 1992, culminating in Srebrenica; of the dead and dying of 9/11; the machete butchering, killing 500,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. We cannot afford to let their horrors be relegated to the dumpsters of oblivion.
I remember Vietnam and My Lai (1968) and the American massacre of 500 villagers, the burning of their village, that consolidated American resistance to a needless, barbarous conflict consuming 64000 allied lives and 900,000 Vietnamese, ending a president’s re-election bid. Without film crews, we would have lacked evidence, much like when unleashed Soviet troops raped 130,000 German women after taking Berlin.
The trail is long. Much of Sontag’s narrative isn’t pleasurable reading to be sure, but without photography’s capability for exactitude, man’s inhumanity will never be addressed and perhaps, though distantly, vanish like slavery from the human repertoire. It is our duty not to turn aside, but remember and, beyond acknowledgement, understand war’s antecedents and protest their repetition.
I mourn Sontag’s passing from us in her prime—her cerebral introspection of what ails us, delivered always with compassion and unceasing hope that we can and will do better.
After reading her book, I thought of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, desperate for food, killed daily, many of them women and children. As I write, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) informs us that 900 Palestinians seeking food have been killed since mid-May. Unlike other conflicts, the foreign press has been banned from access to Gaza.
I think, too, of Putin’s accelerated nightly aerial assaults, on Ukraine, targeting civilian infrastructures: hospitals, ambulances, apartment buildings, shopping malls and, by day, farmers plowing their fields.
Photography offers documentation. Sontag was right: without photography, we are denied access to the truth and the scourge of war is assured its continuence.
Brimmings: up from the well 