Category: A New Dark Age

3.31.2025 – top security aides

top security aides
amateurs they are – new week
new dimwit roundup …

I really really want to get away from comments about the current administration – both from a desire to look away and from a growing feeling of need to be self-preservational, nevertheless, some of the best word play in today’s media concerns the new administration and I started this blog to recognized unique use of words … so there you are.

In todays Conversation, a back-and-forth commentary on the past week between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens in the New York Times, they write:

Bret: If President Trump were, well, someone else entirely, he’d be the one buying Jeff a drink for keeping the nation’s military secrets to himself for as long as they needed keeping — and then exposing Trump’s top national security aides as the amateurs they are.

Gail: A new week, a new dimwit roundup …

Mr. Stephens is a conservative, it should be noted.

Sorry to say we are talking about the security team that manages the safety of the United States and not, shall we say, the Chicago Cubs of yor, the lovable losers of 108 seasons between the World Series victories of 1908 and 2016.

Baseball teams that raised losing and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory to an art form.

A new week, a new dimwit roundup …

It would be funny.

It would be comical.

If it wasn’t true.

3.30.2025 – be called on to give

be called on to give
last full measure could never ..
understand, define

Adapted from this passage:

The road ahead was long, and it was to lead them to worse than they had had: to Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, to Gettysburg and the Wilderness, to the sickening meadows at Cold Harbor and the squalid trenches around Petersburg; to the ultimate misery and bleak wisdom that lie at the end of all the roads of war.

They were on their own now, fighting for something they had not been asked about; they had made the victory through which the war had been given its lasting meaning, and now they would have to go on to the end of it, marching doggedly to the dark fields where they would be called on to give the last full measure of a devotion which they themselves could never understand or define.

From Mr. Lincoln’s Army: Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Volume One by Bruce Catton (Doubleday & Company, inc., Garden City, NY, 1951).

I find it hard to accept that the last full measure fought for during the American Civil War was going to end up where we are today.

Maybe our turn is coming to sum a last full measure of devotion to something we cannot understand or define.

3.26.2025 – blinding clarity

blinding clarity
how vital to live in a
free society

My chance encounter with George Lincoln Burr was the greatest single thing that ever happened in my life, for he introduced me to a part of myself that I hadn’t discovered.

I saw, with blinding clarity, how vital it is for Man to live in a free society.

The experience enabled me to grow up almost overnight; it gave my thoughts and ambitions a focus.

It caused me indirectly to pursue the kind of work which eventually enabled me to earn my living.

But far more important than that, it gave me a principle of thought and of action for which I have tried to fight, and for which I shall gladly continue to fight the remainder of my life.

EB White in a Memorial Day speech at Cornell, May, 1940, reprinted in E.B. White: A Biography by Scott Elledge, (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1986).

According to Wikipedia, George Lincoln Burr (January 30, 1857 – June 27, 1938) was a US historian, diplomat, author, and educator, best known as a Professor of History and Librarian at Cornell University, and as the closest collaborator of Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell.

Wikipedia sites that Mr. Burr’s battles were in the Warfare of Science with Theology.

Not like today’s war with the current administration and a free society.

The fight is still vital.

3.23.2025 – what it must be like

what it must be like
live where feel antipathy
to your own country

In the article, The New Yorker at 100: ‘We live in a world of misinformation … a lack of verification. Our readers want what we do’, written by Andrew Anthony for the Guardian, the editor of the New Yorker Magazine is quoted thusly:

Even so, [David] Remnick says he’s not experienced anything before like the second term of Donald Trump.

“It’s not one event,” he says. “It’s 10 events a day. It’s 20 astonishing posts on Truth Social in a given week.

I lived in the Soviet Union for four years and one of the things that always emotionally struck me was what it must be like to live in a place where you feel such antipathy to your own country.

One feels a sense of shame to hear one’s own president brand a heroic figure like Zelenskyy a dictator, and to see how he deals in an opposite way with Vladimir Putin.

But how to cover that on a human level, on a factual level, on an institutional level, is a challenge.”

Growing up in America, I remember a joke told about a feller in China who wanted to move to America.

When he applied for his visa, he was asked, “Don’t you love your Country?”

“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Country!”

“Don’t you love your Government?”

“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Government!”

“Don’t you love your Leaders?”

“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Leaders!”

“So why do you want to leave?”

“I want to live somewhere where I DON’T HAVE TO SAY THAT!”

Why does it feel like we are going to find out what it’s like to live outside that somewhere.

See more Thurber Drawings at For Muggs and Rex.