Don’t you think there is entirely too much discussion in the followup of the Supreme Court’s obscene debacle concerning Hobby Lobby? Me too but it does suggest that there is a lot of meat in what SCOTUS shyly refers to as a limited ruling. The thing that has me shaking my head, however, isn’t the crassness or stupidity of the court or the hypocrisy of Hobby Lobby, but rather the regular folks that are defending and supporting this expansion of corporate power as if it was going to make their lives better. It isn’t. But just like everything Obama does being reviled, no matter how good for the country it might be, so too do the duped Americans who must support anything their distant masters tell them to. So don’t look behind the curtain and one day you’ll wake up and wonder where your Democracy has gone.
Tag: The Daily Beast
Syphilis is not a character in Ulysses
When I was studying literature at the university I formulated several rules, some of which are reasonable, and a few that are probably just curious observations and not strong enough to be rules. The first was:
All great English literature was written by an Irish author.
You can provide all the exceptions you want but look carefully and you’ll see I’m not exaggerating too much. The second was:
All great English poets were either syphilitic, consumptive, or diddled their sisters.
This one is more anecdotal than factual but was quite obvious in the period of literature I was concentrating on (now I would add drug use but back then I was so innocent).
Now we have new evidence that the greatest novelist in English literature (who was actually Irish and quite naughty) was clearly suffering from syphilis. According to my rules-that-are-not rules, this makes James Joyce that much more admirable, in a literary sense. If a venereal disease was causing his loss of sight, I suggest that it sharpened his inner vision, heightened his sense of language (especially the sound of language), and gave Samuel Beckett the opportunity to become the great author he was. Here is the blurb from The Daily Beast and the link to the original article in The Guardian:
Continue reading “Syphilis is not a character in Ulysses”First they came for the women …
If You Think You Can Talk To Your Mother Like That, Then You’ve Paid Attention To The Way I’ve Subtly Degraded Her For Years
Commentary By Jim Travis
Listen up, young man, because I’m only going to say this once. You have been acting more and more disrespectful to your mother lately, and frankly, she’s at the end of her rope. Between snapping rude profanities at her to making ungrateful demands, you’ve treated her more like a servant than the woman who raised you. Your mother has noticed it, I’ve noticed it, and all I have to say is that if you think you can talk to your mother like that, then you’ve certainly paid very close attention to the subtle ways in which I’ve completely torn down her sense of self-worth for years.
A Celebration of Reading 