Even though we are not in the Christmas season, Charles Dickens’ classic Christmas Carol could not be more timely. The novella recounts the comedy of Ebenezer Scrooge, a grouchy miser who undergoes a torment on one Christmas Eve in London, visited by the ghost of a former business partner and then three ghosts who reveal…
The coronavirus quarantine is the scariest political event of my lifetime. It feels dystopian. So what better way to spend my time than by rereading one of the biggest dystopian classics of all time, 1984? Yes, I pulled my dusty copy of George Orwell’s classic from my shelves. I hadn’t touched the book since 1986,…
Continue readingOrwell breaks down leftist sexual dysfunction
In his classic poem “Thanatopsis,” William Cullen Bryant ponders death. The title means “the gaze of death” in Greek. A long tradition in poetry and art holds up the genre of thanatopsis, reflecting on what it means to die. To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A…
Continue readingWilliam Cullen Bryant explains why America is freaking out
Think of southern belle Scarlett O’Hara crying out with glee, “we’ll plant more cotton; cotton oughtta go sky high next year!” She says this upon hearing the news that a bloody civil war has ended and her confederacy has been crushed. Gone with the Wind is quickly sinking into the murk of untouchable cinematic history…
The March 26 headline on Newsweek stated that the US military would not reveal data about how many COVID-19 cases have occurred among the troops. This brought to mind a few plagues that shaped history in the past, simply as a point of reference. The Trojan War Thanks to nineteenth-century archaeological discoveries in Turkey we…
In Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story about the fall of the House of Usher, a mysterious narrator goes to visit his old friend Roderick who lives in a once-glamorous, now decaying mansion. Roderick has a strange psychological ailment where he’s hypersensitive to virtually any stimuli like noise, light, or smell. Our narrator — let’s call…
If you’ve never seen Goodbye Lenin, you have to run out and watch it now. Especially if you are conservative and quarantined during the coronavirus crisis. This delicious 2003 film, directed by Wolfgang Becker, focuses on a young East German man living through the end of the Cold War. Alex’s idealistic mother really believed in…
Continue readingGoodbye Lenin and Goodbye Hayek: Libertarians
In a March 24 article at the Intercept, Lee Fang reports disapprovingly of a “Trump cabinet Bible teacher” who talked about the current pandemic in terms of the wrath of God poured out. Certainly in the current environment most people would react vehemently against any person who seeks to frame the pandemic as willed by…
Locked in, like most Americans, I have spent more time than usual with my thoughts and memories. My otherwise silly degrees in Political Science, English, and Classics, have boosted my spirits during the current tribulations. I’ve studied narratives and historical moments that deal with plagues. So as I retreat into my bookshelf I get reminders…
Continue readingAmericanus Rex: We’re Living a Sophoclean Tragedy like Oedipus and Antigone
My post-academia projects have brought me back to some corners of my bookshelf, which I have neglected for far too long. One such treasure is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, a novel so iconic it seems sometimes cliché to mention. Published in the early 1850s about life in a colonial Puritan town some two hundred years…
