a spring poem by e.e. cummings
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, Part One
The folly of opinions–and the people who have them. This is a revised version of the original essay that was published in somewhat truncated form in September, 2006.
Guns ’n’ Grammar
The late Charley Reese got the gun issue right: “Some might say the Second Amendment is obsolete. Our own century shows us that it is not. Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot and Mao all saw to it that people were disarmed prior to commencing their reigns of terror and tyranny. God forbid, but Americans, too, could find themselves some day having to choose between submission or resistance to a tyrant.”
Another Spring Poem by William Wordsworth
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind
Historiography for Damocles: Nikolai Berdyaev’s End of Our Time, by George Bagby
The modern age, argues Berdayev, has ended with the catastrophe of the Great War and a “New Middle Age” is upon us, where all will eventually choose between religious belief and the ersatz religion of ideology.
A Spring Poem by Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Shakespeare on Spring
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
Wednesday’s Child: Voters in Peril
I met Badri Patarkatsishvili once, in a nightclub where I was taken by Boris Berezovsky. With Berezovsky himself I’d had a cordial relationship going back to the first days of his flight to Britain. Sasha Litvinenko I also met once, at the famous press conference he gave in London about his book, banned in Russia in 2003 and since 2015 on the Federal Roster of Extremist Materials
California Sanctuary Utopia
California remains a land of increasing contradictions. Consider how California’s dominant Democratic politicians are resisting federal immigration laws.
