In Divided Washington, Americans Have Highly Negative
Views of Both Parties’ Leaders
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/04/07/in-divided-washington-americans-have-highly-negative-views-of-both-parties-leaders/
Sharp rise in share of the public saying the country is unable to solve its major problems
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/04/07/in-divided-washington-americans-have-highly-negative-views-of-both-parties-leaders/
Sharp rise in share of the public saying the country is unable to solve its major problems
US conservatives love to warn of creeping fascism.
Do they understand what it is?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/13/us-conservatives-love-to-warn-of-creeping-fascism-do-they-understand-what-it-is
Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson notes:
There is nothing new about fantasies of peril or heroism. Boredom might be a factor among the fairly prosperous, especially as they enter middle age. Resentment is a stimulant. But there is something strange, even weird, in the climate we are seeing now that evades explanation in conventional terms.
Americans have argued for generations about the deleterious effects, if any, of an active central government. Once the peril was that one morning we would all wake up communists. It was a furious and intractable debate that led to character attacks and so on, but no one mentioned civil war. There is a virulence in our present divisions that hardens and sharpens them radically.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/13/us-conservatives-love-to-warn-of-creeping-fascism-do-they-understand-what-it-is
Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson notes:
There is nothing new about fantasies of peril or heroism. Boredom might be a factor among the fairly prosperous, especially as they enter middle age. Resentment is a stimulant. But there is something strange, even weird, in the climate we are seeing now that evades explanation in conventional terms.
Americans have argued for generations about the deleterious effects, if any, of an active central government. Once the peril was that one morning we would all wake up communists. It was a furious and intractable debate that led to character attacks and so on, but no one mentioned civil war. There is a virulence in our present divisions that hardens and sharpens them radically.
Promising Signs for Free Speech on Campus
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/opinion/free-speech-campus-universities-promising-news.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/opinion/free-speech-campus-universities-promising-news.html
The Second Coming by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
Turning and turning in the widening
gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?