Poems of the Week: Light Verse and Doggerel
“The Profane Ballad of Ecclesiastical Reform”
There’s only way with recalcitrant clerks,
Saith experience under the sun:
Category: Access
How Did Ex-CIA Czar John Brennan Get Into The Company?
I laughed when I read ex-CIA Czar John Brennan’s gripe that taking away his security clearance was “part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics.” I once had a security clearance. Although not as high as his, it was pretty high, Top Secret-Special Intelligence. When I was training to be a Russian linguist and radio intercept operator, 1978-89, the FBI talked to everybody in my background, asking such questions as: Did you ever vote for the Communist Party-USA? They talked to my next door neighbor, and receive a glowing report. “He’s been...
The Road from Damascus, Part I, By Charles C. Yost
From the beginning, the goal that Dr. Fleming and I envisioned for this series was self-knowledge through discovery of the Christians from whom we have come to be alienated by schism. Let us try to understand, then, how it was that brethren and disciples of Jesus Christ became strangers to one another.
Wednesday’s Child: The $5000 Question
All my philosemitic friends love this joke, so I’m going to tell it without fear of infamy. The fact is, this is only my second joke in 156 posts, and I have a good sense that by now the gentle reader may well be more tired of my own humor than of other people’s.
October Surprises Coming
In American political parlance, an October Surprise is something launched to affect an election just before voters go to the polls, this year on November 6. There also are run-ups to the October Surprises, such as Vyshinsky’s – I mean Mueller’s – witch hunts against President Trump’s associates, which have had nothing to do with Mueller’s portfolio to look into non-existent Russian rigging of the 2016 election.
Wednesday’s Child: The Errant Way
While invoking Conrad or Nabokov would be a bit of overkill, the fact is that passing for a native in a language other than one’s mother tongue – in my own case, moreover, a native whose literary persona is distinctly curmudgeonly – invites comment. In particular, it is often said that learning a foreign language any time after puberty, as was Stalin’s case with Russian, condemns the learner to a lifetime of subtle humiliations. Stefano, a friend from London who has been almost absurdly kind to me over the years, has now got it into his head that he wants...
The New God of AltRight
Why would a kid attracted to AltRight fall for Jim Morrison, Freud, and Nietzsche? Why wouldn’t he? Morrison is simply a latter-day Peter Pan on acid, the perfect model for displaced white kids who don’t know who or what they are
Wednesday’s Child: A Touch of Autobiography
I was raised in a world of sedentary feats, in a cultural microcosm which deliberately undervalued experience. More than that, it treated experience as a kind of monstrous blemish upon the face of thought, a defect that was deemed the more ungainly for being the more noteworthy, unexpected, or rare
