A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
I start with the American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota), Thomas Stearns Eliot (Missouri), Ernst Hemingway (Illinois), Saul Bellow (Illinois), Toni Morrison (Ohio), and Bob Dylan (Minnesota).
But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed,
all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God
and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were
first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo
Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a
mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life
of a community. His many essays and lectures
were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics
have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he
saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words,
the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators
were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well
known to committed democrats like Emerson.
But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of
this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified
common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the
real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the
truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by
society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the
Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of
knowledge.”
That writer, of course, is the late Mr.
Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and
Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older
conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and
the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of
Mr. Berry’s life.
Among the several things that helped turn my life around and gave me the means of putting together the shards of myself, it was Thoreau. The above essay ties Berry with Thoreau and that now makes sense to me and gives depth to Wendell Berry’s Nine Rulesby Ted Gioia.
Gioia's essay provoked this response from my friend KH:
It is an age of
specialization. I used to be able to work on my car, now I can’t. OTOH,
they’re much safer, fewer people are killed in them and they’re
spaceships compared with 25 years ago.
We used to think pagers were amazing. Now we have a computer in our hands.
I’m
concerned with Big Tech but that’s a failure of government to regulate.
Standard Oil and the railroads were once big tech. Then came TR.
If
you want to move to a farm in Kentucky and live off the land, you can
probably eschew all of this. The rest of us have to live in 2026.
The
Nobel Peace Prize winner and presidential hopeful, María Corina
Machado, may choose not to publicly criticise President Trump, whose
support she needs if she hopes to come to power. Others, though, have
been more forthcoming.
"You
chose to use the power of the United States not to liberate
Venezuelans, but to ally yourself with our oppressors," said Venezuelan
economist, Ricardo Hausmann, on social media, directing his comments at
the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
"You
opted to push through an asset seizure, an unconstitutional agreement
with an illegitimate and oppressive government, instead of using the
leadership of the United States to first restore constitutional order
and democracy," he said.
The lack of an imminent election in Venezuela – or, indeed, any clear plan towards one – strikes many opponents as a betrayal.
How Trump Uses Dormant Laws to Amass Power (The New Republic) both scares me and makes me pause at the efforts made by the Administration's lawyers to find obscure laws to bend to their purposes.
The
Trump administration’s enthusiasm for reviving moribund laws to
accomplish its policy goals should inspire Congress to consider
repealing or revising them. Trump and his allies have inflicted plenty
of harm by violating federal laws during his second term. Another
important problem is when he abuses and misuses existing laws. If
Congress is interested in restoring its own primacy in our constitutional order, it should reconsider its own past missteps, as well.
Both
of the court revivals illustrate the problem. While federal law
authorizes the use of prize courts, they have not meaningfully existed
since the Civil War. The Union Navy blockaded Southern ports throughout
the war and seized military and civilian vessels alike. Once captured,
the ships were typically brought to Union-held ports for disposal by
prize courts. In 1863, the Supreme Court rejected legal challenges to the Southern blockade and upheld President Abraham Lincoln’s authority to seize and sell ships and goods acquired from it.
As
Bloomberg noted when it reported on the prize courts’ revival earlier
this week, the courts fell into disuse after the Spanish-American War
ended in 1900 and were moribund after World War II. They reflect a
nineteenth-century understanding of naval warfare where both a nation’s
navy and private citizens acting as privateers could capture vessels on
the high seas. The changing nature of naval warfare helped render these
tactics obsolete: The average American boat owner these days would have
an easier time sailing to the moon than capturing an armed enemy
warship.
A Congressional Research Service report in 2024
noted that Congress abolished prize money for private citizens in 1899,
and any proceeds from prize court cases now go into the Treasury’s
general fund instead. The Trump administration’s plans, though still
vague, appear to be centered on creating a faster, easier legal pathway
to sell captured Iranian oil. This may be riskier for the administration
than it looks, since it will give federal courts an opportunity to
directly consider whether the ships and goods were lawfully seized. As
Lincoln’s own experience showed, such cases can allow judges to consider
legality of the war itself. The sixteenth president prevailed; the
forty-seventh might not.
We’ve been under no illusions. We recognized, from the start, that
America has changed. Early last year, I observed that the decades-long
process of steadily increasing integration between our economies was
over. Our government understood before many that America would transform
all of its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of
tariffs on its closest allies, and use economic integration as a weapon.
We recognize that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.
Like everyone else, I first met Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He was also the reason to watch Times Square, Congo and Earth Two. He almost salvaged The Three Musketeers. Here are the items I collected for this post from last week.
A legislature at war with education sends a signal to potential
employers that they will have trouble finding a skilled workforce.
Siphoning money from public schools that teach accurate science and
introduce children to the diversity they will encounter in the workforce
in order to fund religious academies is one bad sign; waging war
against once-storied public universities by insisting that vetted
scholarship is really “liberal indoctrination” ensures that
intellectually curious students will either depart Indiana upon
graduation or avoid the state entirely and enroll elsewhere.
A legislature that ignores both medical science and women’s rights by
banning abortion (and effectively criminalizing medical assistance for
emergency pregnancies) sends a message to doctors and women considering
employment in the state. In the wake of that travesty, even companies
that are already located here are finding it difficult to recruit
workers–male or female–from families still in their childbearing years.
Excuse the raw data dump. These are articles and cases that I have been reading lately for my research project on state constitutional law. I need to clear out my tabs!
I got a bit walking in, but missed the bus twice so gave up on a trip to Payless.
Worked on the research project.
Went to the convenience store in the afternoon and met a dog named Tex.
Got tired after eating a pizza from Domino's and slept from 6 to a little after 8 PM.
Wrote this post.
After Making Landfall rejected:
Thank you again for submitting your work to The Ex-Puritan.
As
editors, we’re forced to select an extremely small number of works from
the hundreds of great submissions we receive each quarter. Submissions
for this issue were once again excellent, and numerous. Although we have
to pass on your submission this time around, we’re truly grateful that
you thought to send it our way.
All the best in your future writing. Warm wishes and good luck!
Samuel, thank you for sending us your work. We appreciate the chance to read it, but it's not right for us at this time.
Keep writing. Keep reading. Keep being awesome. And best of luck placing this elsewhere.
We
kindly ask that you wait one month before submitting again, regardless
of which genre/category you submitted. Submissions that do not follow
this guideline will be replied to unread.
