The Chorus, who have been obtuse throughout the play, have misunderstood Ajax’s parting words as a change of heart instead of a rueful admission that he misjudged the world he has lived in. The drama becomes more intense, when a messenger comes in to report on Teucer’s hostile reception in the Greek camp, and on the instructions he had received from Calchas the prophet NOT to let Ajax out of his hut.
“Resolved, That the Earth is Flat” was in my youth the stalking horse of high school and university debating societies, probably because to people of college age the proposition sounded startling enough to make them tingle with anticipation of controversy. Besides, since not one among them believed that the Earth was actually flat, deep down they were pleasantly certain that the outcome of the vote would in no way change their lives, and so on to law school they went. They have debates of narrower scope these days, as many of them, upon finishing law school, clerking for important judges,...
Although President Trump’s foreign policy was far from perfect, it certainly was an improvement from the peristaltic globalism it replaced. If Joe Biden becomes president – something still not certain, despite the Main Sleaze Media’s suppression of alternative narratives – we’ll be right back to bombing and invading.
For several decades I have plagued teachers and school principals with a few basic questions, without finding anyone of them who could give a reasonable answer. Until these questions are seriously addressed, there can be no significant improvement in education. It is not as if they are trick questions. They are the kind of queries that would be made of any human activity that absorbs to much time, energy, and resources.
The gentle reader may recall how once I waxed eloquent in lauding sloth, a vice that has done much to save Greek antiquities in Sicily. Vandalized in Greece by energetic locals, who routinely used the marble to build their rustic hovels, in Sicily these noble structures have survived largely intact for the simple reason that our peasants were too indolent to steal. That, anyway, was my working theory. More broadly, sloth is one of the few things that stand between man and the picture of man portrayed by Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. Always scheming, always inventing, always eager to...
Perhaps it is only now, towards the end of 2020, that some of us are beginning to see this year as the best one in recent memory, perhaps in our entire lives. But that’s only possible if you’ve really been reflecting on what is truly going on this year and you’ve taken the time to diligently compare perception with reality.
On this website, four years ago I warned Trump about hiring these retread generals, including Gen. John Kelly, who as chief of staff sabotaged the president. The only one who turned out to be loyal to Trump’s policy of implementing a needed change in foreign and defense policy was Gen. Michael Flynn – who was prosecuted until the recent pardon.
We live in a culture gone mad on theory: theories of sex and family, theories of government, and, inevitably, theories of education. A debate has raged for centuries over “the future of education.” Early American liberals like Noah Webster insisted that a democratic society needed a suitable educational system, divorced from the classical tradition that encouraged aristocracy and elitism.
A haunting image was making the newspaper round the other week, which I am certain the gentle reader, if only out of a corner of his eye, has noted, perhaps even musing to himself that one of these days this photograph would get a mention in Wednesday’s Child.
“Pollsters always lie, as we know, but apart from that, polling should be a major felony because it is based on the degrading fallacy that it is important to know what people want and that political–therefore social and moral–questions can be treated as a popularity contest.”
Augustan England
