Category Archives: Commentary

Freedom Crawls

9/11/2005 – 8:19 pm

I’m in Washington, DC, a city I have not visited since the fall of 2000. Things here are very different from the place I once knew. I remember riding my bicycle on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol; today barriers and fences and police preventing access are everywhere. The fourth anniversary of the September 11, […]

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Two Americas

9/8/2005 – 9:40 am

Events the scale of Katrina and its aftermath stretch the bounds of cognitive thinking so I’m turning to metaphysics to make sense of what’s happening. There are two Americas which exist in the same physical space, but which have only brief spatial and temporal overlaps. Katrina has opened a door and is letting one America […]

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Selfish Ignorance

9/1/2005 – 7:50 am

Now that Katrina has passed through and left misery behind her, should we search for a moral message? Were the burst levees a judgment on the sybarites of New Orleans? Was the devastation of the Gulf Coast a rebuke to seaside casinos? Maybe Katrina was divine retribution to some of the reddest states of the […]

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Something Must Have Happened

8/25/2005 – 8:19 am

In Vermont, you can bring your beer and soda cans and bottles back to the store and get a nickel for each. The deposit law doesn’t cover juice, wine or bottled water, only carbonated beverages. Seems odd, but there it is. Adrienne and I don’t drink many carbonated beverages, so when we have two or […]

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On Wedgies

8/18/2005 – 9:31 am

Summer is in full throat. Cicadas drone through the day, crickets are loud every night. Pairs and threes of teenagers walk through the evening neighborhoods, their voices drifting through the window screens. At summer camp, wedgies must be getting out of hand. Experienced camp administrators know wedgies play a regulatory role in the living organism […]

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The Crossroads Fish

8/11/2005 – 9:29 am

Menhaden are small, bony, oily fish, members of the herring family. Most people would go out of their way to avoid eating them. (Some old Germans, like my dad, eat them pickled on New Year’s Eve. Supposed to bring good luck.) The rest of us don’t eat menhaden, except when we do. Oil from menhaden […]

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The Turning Point

8/4/2005 – 9:08 am

According to his obituary in the New York Times, King Fahd bin Abdel-Aziz of Saudi Arabia urged Saddam Hussein to retreat from Kuwait in the days following Iraq’s 1990 invasion. The Times reports: “Then Dick Cheney, the defense secretary at the time, visited the king to make the case that Saudi Arabia stood a good […]

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