By Joel Bowman, on October 26th, 2019% The first time I encountered the expression, May you live in interesting times, it was attributed to Robert Kennedy, who had supposedly called it an “Ancient Chinese curse.” The idea is/was that the kinds of events that make times interesting are usually unpleasant: wars, famines, earthquakes, serious storms, and so on. A headline to the effect of “Neighbors fight to the death over a petunia patch” will create more interest than one stating, “Neighbors cooperate to raise petunias.” An old saying in the newspaper industry (and radio, TV and Internet news as well) is, If it bleeds, it leads.
It . . . → Read More: Living In Interesting Times
By Joel Bowman, on February 16th, 2019% We (humans) are doing all sorts of damage to Planet Earth. Humans have always been careless about their garbage. In primitive times, when a tribe accumulated a lot of waste in one location, the tribe simply relocated to a new place. We have, however, run out of new habitable places. We believed, of course, that we had been told to “be fruitful and multiply.” That probably made sense at the time it was originally said, as in those days there was a lot more space than there were people, and life was short and brutal for most people. The best . . . → Read More: No Planet B
By Joel Bowman, on June 23rd, 2018% Going to Hell in a Handbasket is an old saying typically used to describe a situation heading for disaster. That seems to be the current situation in the United States. In many ways, the States reached its zenith during World War II because everyone—at least nearly everyone—worked together for the common good. This is not to say that everything was wonderful during that time. We unjustly imprisoned Japanese Americans and excessively rewarded those whose companies produced munitions we needed for the war effort. In doing so, we created what has become the military-industrial complex.
President Eisenhower, who had been . . . → Read More: The Handbasket to Hell
By Joel Bowman, on June 10th, 2018% A long time ago (1959) in a land far, far away (France) a playwright named Eugène Ionesco wrote The Rhinoceros. In the play, the citizens of a provincial French village turn into rhinoceroses. The most common interpretation of the play is the Nazi takeover of France in the 1930s. The Rhinocerisation of the citizenry in the play symbolizes that takeover. When I was watching TV news last night, I had the weird sense that the United States is currently undergoing its own process of rhinocerisalion. While we watch our friends and neighbors become rhinos, we exclaim the equivalent of the . . . → Read More: The Rhinoceros
By Joel Bowman, on February 19th, 2018% A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
When it came to the Second Amendment, those who wrote the Constitution had this in mind:
Given their concerns at the time, it’s easy to see their reasons for including the Second Amendment in the Constitution. They were not sufficiently prescient to envision the AR-15. It’s cousin, the M-16, was the weapon U.S. soldiers carried in Vietnam. The M-16 is fully automatic (pull the trigger, and it fires several rounds), whereas . . . → Read More: Second Amendment Blues
By Joel Bowman, on January 1st, 2018% Last year, 2017, ended not with a bang, but a whimper. While how the current year, 2018, will end is still unknown, the world in general and the U.S. in particular, are not on a good trajectory. While some countries are doing reasonably well, most are not. Even in the States, the microcosm of individuals and places doing well, doesn’t change the macrocosm. I am not worried about the planet as a whole. Earth has survived mass extinctions in the past, and life has continued. The life forms, however, changed. It is as though the planet was saying, “Well that . . . → Read More: 2018 Ready or Not
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