Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Government Theft

Here is my State of the Union Address:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

— Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Sunday, January 16, 2011

The Achievement of Empathy

This speech was made possible because a father, confronted by the death of a nine-year-old girl, imagined the unimaginable—the death of a daughter—and from that desolation summoned the strength to speak of hope.



There's something peculiarly moving about seeing a president—or at least this president—sigh.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

2.0

Haven't found it helpful to stop writing. So this will continue to be what it's always been: a record of my bewilderment. Now, more bewildered than ever, disappearing is dishonest.

Also it's been nice to revisit this archive—an anthology from a year of my life—and I imagine with satisfaction continuing it permanently, if only for my children, as the distance between us inevitably increases over the years.

And I've read some good books recently and I'd like to think about them, now and then. (Life, by Keith Richards, was fantastic.)

So the punchdrunk boxer officially announces that he's coming out of retirement (once again). Pretenders: you've been warned.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

TFTD

I think that nowadays there seems to be a deficit of wonder.

— Tom Waits