Blog Archives
WOULD SHAKESPEARE VOTE FOR TRUMP & VANCE? In a scene from Shakespeare’s first smash hit, Richard III, two professional killers are sent to murder Richard’s brother George, the Duke of Clarence. One of them says to the other that he is starting to have pangs of conscience about his work, while the other says that is a very bad idea if you are in the assasination line of work. They kill the Duke of Clarence anyhow. It’s not an important scene, but it does illustrate that Shakespeare can’t pass up the chance to illustrate the messiness and self-division of human life. We must make a living, but we also have a conscience. Both make demands of us, and there are no easy solutions. Trump and. Read on »
A Mindset List® for the Class of 1999 They were born in 1977 and entered college in 1995. Elvis Presley, Joan Crawford, and Bing Crosby have always been dead. Ye and Tom Brady have always been alive. The president’s younger brother has always had his very own Billy beer. The Force has always been with someone, somewhere, sometime. Spain has always been a democracy. The murderous Son of Sam has always inhabited the body of a black Lab in Yonkers, New York. Egyptian presidents have always been visiting Israel. There has always been a Department of Energy. Sarah Barasch has never confused Tom McBride with John Cougar Mellencamp. The Panama Canal has always been controlled by……..Panama. Shawn Gillen has always been a prcocious teen-ager in Chicago. Uranus has always had rings. An Read on »
How Donald Trump Became Bill Belichick on Steroids Golf is Trump’s game, and presumably those bone spurs that got him out of going to Vietnam would have prevented him from playing football. But the key to his political success with males has been…. the great all-male sport of football. Football is about ardent loyalty and fierce hatred. Bear faans loathe all things Packers, and of course vice-versa. You aren’t really a Bears fan unless you hate all things Green Bay. Trump males are receptive to the idea that it is not enough to love Trump. You must also despise everyone who gets in his way, from Hillary Clinton to George Cloney to the cast of HAMILTON. Football is about winning. The late Packers coach Vince Lombardi Read on »
THE OLD-COLLEGE-TRY LIST for the Class of 2028 The college and university class of 2028 will enter classrooms this fall. They were born in 2006. They have never shared the planet with Betty Freidan, Shelley Winters, Kirby Puckett, Abu al-Zarqawi, or Peter Benchley. “Friend” has always been a verb, and “tweet” always a click. Barack Obama was elected …to the Senate. Terrorists thrived from India to Iraq. You could watch a video on your wrist. People were still going to Blockbuster stores. People made lists and put them in buckets. Tony Blair was becoming the incredible shrinking prime minister. A meal in the college dining room that cost five dollars the year they were born now costs about $7.79 today. 1 They Read on »
The Make America Great Again movement is *Hyper-Traditional. Nothing more needs to be learned. American ideals about more perfect unions or created equal need not be updated to apply to minorities, immigrants, and homosexuals. *Instinctual. Praise is heaped on spontaneous instinct without reflection, action without rationale, and “telling it like it is” whether true or false, with or without evidence. *Hyper-Masculine. Guns and violent takeovers are highly valued; assaults against women are not disqualifications. *Super-Nationalistic. Fortress America needs no justification for its actions, and non-Americans of all sorts are not to be trusted. *Anti-Difference. People with brown, black, and yellow skins are a source of suspicion and a demographic threat; and different opinions that oppose the party line are not tolerated and Read on »
Bad Housekeeping: The Obsession with Cleanliness in American Political Life By Tom McBride I grew up with a couple of clean-freaks, and they would often say that their entire marriage was happy based on their mutual obsession with sanitation. They were also neat-niks, but this was just another version of their love for cleanliness. This is also an addictive theme in American politics and probably in politics overall. We’re all familiar with the struggle in American cities to rid New York or Chicago of corrupt political machines, with their dirty ward heelers and cops. Good government types, or “goo-goos,” as Tammany Hall derisively called them, were all for clean, transparent government–an emphasis on transparency that Windex itself would envy. But the drive for cleanliness Read on »
he Always-Never List for the Class of 2027 Born in 2005 (Please send comments/questions to mcbridet@beloit.edu) While this year’s new college students were being born, Johnny Carson and Rosa Parks were dying; ice caps at the North Pole were slowly moving towards what may be a summer devoid of ice; The 1918 flu strain was being revived in a lab; George W. Bush was preparing for what would prove to be a rocky second term; Hollywood was going nuts on sci-fi and fantasy flicks; the Chicago White Sox were suddenly unbeatable; Saddam Hussein sat helplessly in a courtroom; and a video called “Meet Me At the Zoo” was uploaded to an upstart new internet site called YouTube. This is all but Read on »
The Po-Mo Putin The alleged war criminal isn’t so bad once you see what he really is. Vladimir Putin would not like Post-Modernism, a trend from the decadent intellectual salons of France that quickly spread like a domineering blob to the rest of Europe and North America. He would see its slippery relativism as perilously consistent with non-binary-sexual preferences and other germs that America and the European Union wish to smuggle into the Motherland and that might be lurking, even now, in Nazi Kiev. He would not like this sort of thing. It is unclear whether or not he knows what it is. Less mysterious is what he would think of it. But can he do without Read on »