Skip to main content

Questions for a Sunday two weeks before the election

 Why does CNN have links to Saturday Night Live skits on its front "page"?  That's the best we can do? The media lives to perpetuate itself.

More to come. 

I just wrote a rant and mistakenly erase it, or didn't save it correctly. It compared Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, which I taught this morning, to the supposed need for abortion at all stages of pregnancy for any reason. In Abraham's time child sacrifice was common to appease pagan gods. Today is it done to appease the god of self, prosperity, career, and convenience, so that women can have the freedom to have the same irresponsible sexual freedom (they believe) men have (and some do). Some abortion protections are needed, and those can be debated. But one party, and maybe the second, believes any protections for the unborn are the end of democracy and civil rights.  

I also wrote how it strikes me that anti-Trumpers who used to be Republicans can come off very pompous and self-righteous in their Facebook posts, riling their "friends" who are Trump voters in order to .... what? Appear open-minded and smarter?  It's not their position, it's their expression of their position. The medium is the message (the medium being cutesy Facebook memes). 

I am not a Trump fan, never was, but January 6 sealed the deal, and even less since he has changed his mind on pro-life issues to "broaden his electorate," yet he can't act like a decent human in his rhetoric to do the same.  

We live in an extremist, black-white, either-or culture wrapped around personalities, one that represents incompetence and the other lack of character. And we are supposed to choose? Fortunately we don't have to, if we aren't worried about winning.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek.  But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same).  Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Books I Have Read Lately

 Retirement means more time to read.  One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poem of the Day

 Vision Driving on a busy highway designed to relieve traffic on a busier one, My glimpse lands on a mound of color in the turning lane ahead. I see a human body. That is not what it is, but what my mind perceives. The envisioned body is wearing a bathing suit, and it is female. It is deceased of course; half of it is legs with pale skin, half is a mix of red and blue and yellow. My heart tightens; my eyes, which need to look elsewhere, are captured. I go under a traffic light and the pile transforms into a towel twisted into some elongated shape, either thrown and dropped from a vehicle. Why did I see a corpse in the way of oncoming cars? Are my eyes failing me? My corrective lenses? My imagination? My expectations? Is it too much true crime television? Who knows? And what if I had seen a human form that metamorphosed into a towel? --- This is more about a concern of aging, not to show my poetic skill. I write one or two (or fewer) poems a year. ...
Post a Comment
Read more