​Or even a fourth? How exceptional we are with our two-party system! Not that I advocate creating a dozen or more splinter parties as we see in some other countries. But having only two parties can cause extreme splits with little room, at least nowadays, for practical compromises that serve the people. I remember learning that a two-valued orientation leads to simplistic black-and-white decisions. Something is either good or bad, right or wrong. There’s no room for nuance. But perfection is not a human characteristic. So, shades of gray are almost always called for...

​Nothing intrigued me more—or scared me more—in my childhood than the thought of aliens. “Thought” is the operative word, since I never really saw any except in the movies. But those ones were inevitably mean and powerful, a frightful combination for a little kid. I especially remember two movies. One was among the earliest of the short-lived 3-D films, The War of the World (1953), based on H.G. Well’s novel. I remember the early scene where the spacecraft has landed. The National Guard, well weaponed, is out in force to confront it. A Catholic priest, crucifix in hand, approaches the vehicle. It fires its ray gun and wipes out both priest and soldiers. The other, whose name I’ve forgotten, stars a boy of perhaps 10 who wakes up one summer night to see, through his wide-open window, scary aliens in his backyard. The rest of the film, the contents of which I no longer recall, goes from one frightening episode to the another. Fortunately, near the end, the original sighting turns out to be a nightmare from which the boy finally awakes. It’s still dark out, however, and as he glances out through his open window, guess what! Those same scary aliens are there, this time in reality. I must have slept for a month or more after that with my light on and the door open...

Usually, I start these blogs with words and end with a related meme. The words, so to speak, are the main dish and the meme the dessert. I use memes as related illustrations, as a kind of coda. But this time is different. The meme is the theme and says it all. Here we have a surveillance camera in the unmistakable form of a pistol. Arms and a country I sing. My song is a minor-key dirge. What the legion was to Rome, guns are to America: not the right to life, but the right to take life. Guns are not the American dream but the American nightmare. They are ubiquitous, and they are used, too often fatally...

​Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but loss makes us sad. Several years ago, I bought a hand-knitted multi-colored wool scarf from a nonprofit association I’m a member of. The creator of the scarf had donated it to the organization which then auctioned it off in a fundraiser. Having seen the scarf online and having immediately liked it, I sent in what turned out to be the winning bid. A week later my lovely new acquisition arrived in the mail, just in time for the cooling weather. I wore it proudly for two seasons. Then one day it wasn’t hanging in its usual spot. I looked everywhere. I called the gym. I called the church office. I checked both cars and every possible nook and cranny in the house. Nothing. It was simply gone...

​I write this blog on July 4th, 2022, the 246th anniversary of our nation’s Independence Day. As an intellectual with a doctorate from a major university, I find myself criticizing lots of things, not least my country. Back in the 1960s as a recent college graduate and, after 1966, a Ph.D., I was saying not “Right or wrong, my country!” but “My country, if right support it, if wrong correct it!” The latter has been my position ever since. I suspect the same is true of many of my fellow educated Americans. As a group we tend to be allergic to the hyper-nationalism that blinds us to our shortcomings as a nation and makes improvement difficult. Indeed, we are all called by our Constitution to help create “a more perfect Union.” Nothing human is perfect a-priori. Continuous improvement through collective effort is the order of this day and beyond...

​Growing up I heard a good deal about Macy’s. My mother, born in 1903 in southern New Jersey, was the eldest daughter and one of eleven children of a Jewish immigrant farmer family from Belarus. She had done fairly well for herself, having attended Ohio State University until sometime in her junior year and had then gone to New York City to start a career. To this end, she soon found herself in what she called Macy’s Basement Training Program, and by the time she met and married my father in 1929, she was an assistant buyer for what she referred to in her best Scarsdale accent that mimicked her sister-in-law Jeannette’s, Ladies’ Foundation Gahments...

​Next Stop—New Haven, CT, for My 60th Yale Class Reunion, June 2-5

​Okay. Nota bene: The “WE” in question has just one “e.” This is an important distinction, because in this case, size really does matter. The rest of this wee essay will explain why...

It was supposed to happen two years ago. Covid happened instead. So, it actually took place this year, the first weekend of June 2022. We’re talking here about my 60th Yale Reunion. The last one I had attended, with my late wife, Simone, was the 25th. Lots had changed at Yale in the intervening 42 years. For one thing, this reunion, which I went to with my second wife, Cedar, was farther away. We traveled this time from Boulder, Colorado, rather than St. Paul, Minnesota. But that of course has nothing to do with changes at dear, old Yale...

​There are two buildings on the Yale University campus that were no more than 50 yards from the dorm complex (Jonathan Edwards College) where my wife and I stayed for my 60th College Reunion. Both of them played important roles in my life. Now I’d like to tell you about what happened in them in chronological order...

​Today is Tuesday, June 7, 2022. Cedar, my wife, and I are visiting her brother and sister-in-law near Boston. As part of my daily wellness routine, I’ve just come back from an hour-plus walk, the last 40 minutes of which I did on my own and could thus walk faster than with family and friends. I did however stop here and there to take photos of New England houses I liked. After all, I’m on a road that runs alongside Lake Boon in Stow, Mass, founded in 1635, just a short drive from Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Midway in my mini-hike I begin to notice American flags of all sizes and configurations, from little ones adorning doors and fences to large ones above garages or atop flagpoles. It’s a veritable festival of red-white-and-blue patriotism. Yet Memorial Day is now behind us, and the Fourth of July is still a month away...

​The ancient Romans had a word for it—three, actually: Nomen est omen. Literally, “the name is ominous,” that is, full of deep meaning. The Hebrew word for name, SHEM (שם), also means “nature.” So, when the Third of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures forbids one’s taking the Lord’s Name in vain, the meaning is much larger and more significant than simply using a synonym for the Deity in a profanity. Rather, it’s more like living so as to disrespect the Creator, others, and ourselves. On a more temporal note, when we have just met someone and they remember and use our name while we have forgotten theirs, we have a feeling of embarrassment, even shame. It’s as though they value us more than we value them. Oy!

​Whenever the pre-Christian me passed a church with a sign assuring me that Jesus saved, I always wondered what that savings entailed. I eventually learned that Christ saved the bodyless dead from burning eternally in hell. Then I thought, how can a fleshless spirit burn? Without a nervous system, how could they feel? What was the point, then? Would the unsaved dead simply be upset because they were thrown into the everlasting fire pit? Further, how can you throw a spirit anywhere? The question also comes up about whether you can hurt a ghost’s feelings?

​I recently had a conversation with a German neighbor. I asked her if she knew our nearby German friend. Not only did she know her, but they were both from Hamburg. I mentioned that our mutual friend’s father had been a well-known Lutheran pastor there. “Ach,” she replied. “My husband is a Lutheran too, but I’m a nothing.” “Hardly a nothing” I responded. “If there is any justice in the universe, we’ll be judged by our actions, not our memberships.”...

​University towns have lots of advantages. Ours, Boulder, Colorado, is home to the main campus of the University of Colorado (C.U.), the state’s flagship institution of higher education. Every April for decades now, C.U. offers a weeklong gift called the Conference on World Affairs. Public figures join academic and lay experts on panels or give keynote speeches on topics related to current events. This year, unsurprisingly, many of the dozens of presentations focused on the war in Ukraine. The thousands who attend these free offerings come not only from the Boulder area but from around the country and even from abroad. A year or two before the pandemic, I attended a keynote on the future of electric vehicles.

​Here I’m of course riffing off that old Sunday-school bromide, “How do I know? The Bible tells me so!” Well, it is true that the Bible tells us lots of just-so stories. Every college graduate will know that the so-called “inerrant Word of God” is plenty errant. Sportin’ Life in the Gershwins’ great American folk opera “Porgy and Bess” tells us in song that “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” One of his first pieces of evidence is, ahem, the Biblical assertion that Methuselah lived 900 years. Okay, the Bible is protein-rich in truths; they just don’t happen to be of the scientific or academic-historical kind. But this little blog is about how truth can be buried in language. Here are three examples...

A good question! Good Friday, as even non-Christian Americans know, is the day on which Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. It is also the day on which observant Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and perhaps others spend three hours, from noon till 3 pm, in church. In this so-called Tre Ore [Latin for “three hours”] service, they are presented with sermonettes on the last seven words Jesus is said to have uttered from the cross. In some of these services, a classical ensemble—in our congregation this Holy Week, it was a string quartet—intersperses the seven corresponding movements from Josef Hayden’s dramatic Last Seven Words of Christ...

​Thomas Hardy, the late-19th-century-early-20th-century English novelist, is famous for such works of fiction as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Additionally, he wrote poetry, with a first volume, The Poems of Thomas Hardy, published in 1895 followed by Late Lyrics and Earlier in 1922, six years before his death. One of his later poems, clustered under the rubric of “Satires of Circumstance,” took its inspiration from the April 12th 1912 sinking of the Titanic. In that work, called “The Convergence of the Twain,” the two things referred to were the supposedly unsinkable ship, on the one hand, and the iceberg, on the other. That fated and fatal coming together resulted in a score of Nature one versus Humanity zero. The novelist-poet lived up to his family name, moreover, for he died at the ripe old age of 87 ½, a huge achievement for an Englishman born in 1840...

​John Donne (1572-1631)—Anglican priest, English Metaphysical poet, and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1621-31)—has a Holy Sonnet with this startling line, “The first minute after noon is night.” Talk about the relativity of time! Because I had a hand operation for carpel-tunnel syndrome recently, I too have experienced the phenomenon of no time having passed. I’m on the operating table. The anesthesia enters my vein through the IV. I feel a pressure inside my skull, and in an instant I’m out. Then, not a second later, I find myself mysteriously recovering in the room where I’d been prepped. From my perspective, no time had passed. Yet the reality was, it was an hour later, the operation was over, and I was lying there with my left hand all bandaged.

​A current go-to term is mindfulness. You hear it in conversation, you read it online. The concept makes perfect sense. Be here now, not in yesterday or tomorrow. The old-fashioned adjective, mindful, is a synonym for thoughtful. You know, think before you act. Turn your mind on and ponder a matter before you say or do something connected with it. Off-the-top-of-one’s-head speech or action often leads to personal regret or even harm to others.

​An admirable quality of the Japanese is their unwillingness to show off. This manifests in many ways, most notably in home architecture. The outside of their houses is rarely ostentatious. A McMansion in Japan would stick out like a sore thumb. But go inside, and although there is a tendency toward minimalism, costly ceramics and lovely wall scrolls will adorn the interior. The lovely inside contrasts sharply with the bland exterior. I noticed the same tendency in Morocco. One of my meditation brothers is the scion of a well-known French couturier family. At last count he owned eight houses, apartments, or farms around the world. For my honeymoon in 2011, he gifted my new wife and me with a two-night stay in his mansion in Marrakesh. His house, inside the walls of the old city, was as modest and nondescript as its neighbors. But go inside, and it’s like moving from blurry black-and-white to sharp, glorious color. After meeting the staff of eight, who would be at our beck and call for the next 48 hours, we were taken by the head housekeeper on an extended tour. We learned that the current king’s sister had sold this mansion to my friend in appreciation for his funding of an orphanage in the nearby mountains...

​One of Mark Twain’s many bon-mots concerns smoking cessation. “It’s not hard to quit smoking,” he said. “I’ve done it hundreds of times.” Well, I feel the same way about dieting. I don’t know what happened. When I was a little kid, I was rail skinny. My parents were so worried they consulted with the pediatrician. How could they fatten me up? By the time I was 11 or 12, though, things had changed dramatically. They were now taking me to Barney’s, a men-and-boys clothing store in New York City that specialized in garments for the big and stout. Awe, as the Hawaiians say. It’s the Polynesian equivalent of Oy Veh! Now my worried parents were calling the pediatrician about something quite different....

​Okay, so the literal translation from the German saying—one of many pieces of folk wisdom I learned from my first mother-in-law—leaves something to be desired. But stay with me. For those of you with some German, the original goes Die Strafe fällt auf den Fuss. Our equivalent proverb would be “As you sow, so shall you reap.” In other words, we’re talking about Karma here: cause and effect. The Hindu concept adds the idea of reincarnation. So, if you were a wife-beating husband in this life, for example, you might merit rebirth as a beaten wife. It’s kind of a cosmic camper-counselor day. The hope is you’ll learn not to abuse your spouse in your next life....