March 2021

23 Mar

Posted at 10:27h in Uncategorized

In looking back through the posts of this blog, I realize that I first mentioned the Coronavirus on January 26 of 2020, and by March 1 these posts were running hard on the subject--and we were also surmising that no one would be done with it as summarily as almost everyone was predicting. So many miseries later, we now are actually in a situation where we can at least imagine, if not seriously consider, where we go from here. The past is prologue, because history has a lot to teach us. I'm glad to recommend two books here: one is Frank Snowden's impressive Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, and the other is Plagues and the Paradox of Progress by Thomas J. Bollyky. Interestingly, neither book prophecies what most people apparently seem to assume—that life will go back to approximating whatever "normal" was. Give that one up...

15 Mar

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Laid low last week by an acute case of food poisoning, I swam in and out of cognitive ratiocination in a fog of rolling nausea. But I had some insights on race, precipitated probably by news of the reliably unchangeable British family–which of late is happily more changeable. These insights, such as they were, are on whiteness—and on families. But the American version, with two major characters. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s first secretary of state (1789–94), second vice president (1797–1801) and, as the third president (1801–09), the statesman responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. An early advocate of total separation of church and state, he also was founder and architect of the University of Virginia and the most eloquent proponent of individual freedom as the meaning of the American Revolution. Sallie Hemings (1773-1835) came to Jefferson's Virginia estate, Monticello, as an enslaved infant, part of...

01 Mar

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

I once inveighed against the American system of government, longing instead for the parliamentary system that permitted the bringing down of an administration whenever enough support for that could be mustered. Oh, think of that! The United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate are in fact modeled respectively on the British House of Commons and House of Lords, the Senate having longer terms, being originally selected not by popular vote but by each state legislature, and assumed to be further removed from the popular politics of the so called "rabble," thus better insulated to consider great matters of the nation. The US Senate was designed to represent the states--that each state would stand in a relationship of equality with the others. It was an expression of federalism. The US House of Representatives was designed to represent the nation. It was the expression of democracy, representing the...