Opinion

The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx 1852

While it is very late in the life cycle of Homo sapiens, with extinction now due to consign us to Earth’s fossil record I would like to make a belated pitch for the importance of the human individual and why nurturing each individual’s uniqueness is so important even if it is now probably too late.

When you’re in the position of nearly 9 million New Yorkers, where your mayor and your governor hate each other, you wonder what it would take to bring them together. If you’re one of those New Yorkers, where your two top leaders are planning on presidential bids, you’re waiting for the rhetoric to start. Just days after the end of the 2018 general election, it did.

We face a world of multiple wars some leading to direct global power conflagrations and others that begin as regional conflicts but quickly spread to big power confrontations.
We will proceed to identify ‘great power’ confrontations and then proceed to discuss the stages of ‘proxy’ wars with world war consequences.

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.  The desolation lies there, not in the facts.
— John Berger, “A Man with Tousled Hair” in The Shape of a Pocket, May 11, 2003

Un peu d’humour aujourd’hui….

British author and social commentator H.G. Wells may have coined the expression that originally popularized World War I as The War that Will End War, as his book, based on articles written during that vast military conflict, was titled. In any case, in one version or another, the expression was one of the most common catchphrases of the Great War of 1914-1918 and has survived as an expression, often used with a grimace of sarcasm, ever since.

I’m done with my graceless heart so tonight I’m going to cut it out and then restart.
— Florence and the Machine, Shake It Out
I brought all this
So you can survive when law is lawless
Feelings, sensations that you thought was dead
No squealing, remember that it’s all in your head,
— Gorillaz, Clint Eastwood

We need an objective evaluation of the President’s foreign and domestic polices – the means, the goals, their results and consequences. The Trump performance requires we discuss the style and substance of foreign and domestic policies.

They say they can’t believe it, it’s a sacrilegious shame
Now, who would want to hurt such a hero of the game?
But you know I predicted it; I knew he had to fall
How did it happen? I hope his suffering was small.
Tell me every detail, I’ve got to know it all,
And do you have a picture of the pain?
— Phil Ochs, “The Crucifixion”
You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
— Goethe, Faust