By Joel Bowman, on March 2nd, 2019% Ignorance is bliss is a common saying for good reason: We have to think about things to worry about them, and most of the time we are preoccupied with our day-to-day activities while we remain ignorant about major problems that may be just around the corner. A related saying, The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, suggests that we can adjust to an uncomfortable familiar, whereas a new situation might cause worse problems.
One of the things about democracies is that people get to elect those in charge of governance with regularity. With every election, the . . . → Read More: Ignorance and Bliss
By Joel Bowman, on October 14th, 2018% I’m old enough to know that the U.S. hasn’t always enjoyed a peaceful political process. At one point, we had a major bell curve, with the right and left extremes representing only a few, and the big bulge in the middle consisting of those with more moderate views. We now seem to have bimodal distribution with the big bulges representing the extremes. The divisions lead to class conflict, which at its worse can become class warfare.
Class warfare begins when the division between rich and poor is extreme. The poor outnumber the rich, and when they decide that they . . . → Read More: Civil Unrest
By Joel Bowman, on August 18th, 2018% We seem to have been voting for the “lesser of two evils” for a long time. Back in the days of the Vietnam War and the associated political unrest, a musical group calling themselves The Fugs wrote and performed a song entitled “Wide, Wide River.” The song focused on the concept of voting for the lesser of two evils:
Two of the musical questions in the song were, “Why must we always be voting for the lesser of two evils?” and “Was George Washington the lesser of two evils.” The person with the best answer to those . . . → Read More: Lesser of Two Evils
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 February 5th, 2018% I have borrowed the title of this blog from Shakespeare’s play, Richard III. Richard III was not a nice man, although the real Richard was probably not as evil as Shakespeare and others have made him out to be. He was the last king of England to actually lead his troops into battle and died in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Shakespeare portrays him as evil, and he may well have been. Medieval kings had a tendency to be corrupt and cruel, and someone I have quoted before, Lord Acton, famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts . . . → Read More: Winter of Our Discontent
By Joel Bowman, on January 13th, 2018% An English poet, Thomas Grey, ended his 1742 poem, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, with what has become a well-known aphorism: “where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.” The part that’s quoted most often is, “Ignorance is bliss.” Considering ignorance bliss has a long history. One of the central stories of both Judaism and Christianity is Eve’s being tempted by Satan to eat the fruit of knowledge and then persuading Adam to do the same.
The theme has been important to me for a long time. The title of my 1974 Ph.D. dissertation . . . → Read More: Ignorance Is Bliss
By Joel Bowman, on January 6th, 2018% I have borrowed the title for this blog from a song by . . . → Read More: Another Brick in the Wall
By Joel Bowman, on December 27th, 2017% The expression, May you live in interesting times, is usually considered an ancient-Chinese curse. Whether it’s true that it is an ancient Chinese curse is doubtful, but the part about the curse definitely seems true. The reason the expression is considered a curse rather than a blessing is that interesting “times” result from political intrigue and wars rather than from peace, happiness, and tranquility. We (and that includes the mass of humanity at this point) are living in interesting times. Charles Dickens begins his great novel, A Tale of Two Cities with the following paragraph:
It was the best . . . → Read More: Living In Interesting Times
By Joel Bowman, on August 14th, 2017% With apologies to James Baldwin for appropriating his title: If people could actually “spin in their graves,” my guess is that he would be doing a very rapid rotation at this time, as would, I think, Abraham Lincoln and many others who have done their best to make the United States a better country than it has been in the past. We have taken at least one big step backwards with the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am both angry and sad that “white nationalism” is on the march, and that the Ku Klux Klan is crawling out from . . . → Read More: The Fire This Time
By Joel Bowman, on April 2nd, 2017% The original impetus for this article was the North Carolina Bathroom Bill. I am writing this from the perspective of a male who has been sharing bathrooms with women all my life—not always at the same time, of course, but most of the time, people use bathrooms one at a time. There are exceptions, of course. Public bathrooms (airports, highway rest stops, restaurants, and other public places). If you have ever flown anywhere with a woman, you know that when people exit the plane, men enter the men’s room, take care of business, and exit. In all likelihood, the female . . . → Read More: Stuff That’s On My Mind
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