“The past is inevitable”  —Delmore Schwartz, Poet

I’d Never Thought of it Like That

          though it’s likely to come, tomorrow’s not set,
…….. this day’s loose ends twist in the wind
………like kite tails in blue jerked at the end of present’s string,
………they’re codas no one can sing—
………the future’s not something on which you should bet

only now sings real arias

if I stand on the bridge in the middle of town
where the river splits in bow waves at abutments
beneath my feet as the bridge’s foot in the stream
becomes a ship’s prow plowing north to nowhere,
the riverskin gives back an early crimson sky,
an oscillating rendition of itself—
in the otherwise slick mirror of the stream below
I catch a glimpse my rippled head in flames
of pleated clouds

                     I am its aria

as I turn and walk off I get it,
the past is inevitable
and set

Jim Culleny, 12/17/15
Photo: The Bridge of Flowers
by Martin Yaffee

by Michael Liss

I have here in my hand a list of 205 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy. —Joseph McCarthy, February 9, 1950

Seventy-four years later, that phrase, from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Wheeling (West Virginia) “Enemies Within” speech, still has the capacity to remind us of an era when America’s faith in its own institutions was challenged almost to the breaking point. It was a time of bullying and blacklists, screaming headlines and wild accusations. “McCarthyism” became the byword for a type of paranoid style in politics where the power of the government is turned on the individual for merely exercising his or her rights.

The speech itself is neither eloquent nor subtle. The former amateur boxer wades in with both fists. It’s likely even built on a lie—there was no list—at least not one McCarthy would let people look at. There was no precise number. There are multiple versions of the speech, some have it at 205, others 57 or 71. McCarthy liked the mystery—part of his peculiar genius was his ability to mangle the truth in a way that left reporters eager for more.

Of its political impact, there can be no question. Wheeling vaulted the relatively unknown (and frankly often disliked) 41-year-old first termer to national prominence, a place he would occupy without pause for most of the next five years. Read more »

by R. Passov

Summer of ‘22

In a coffee shop a short train ride north of Manhattan along the Hudson River, there’s a vigil. A group, drawn from neighboring villages, is watching a someone slide to their end. Though long in the making, the apparentness is recent – severely distending belly, shrunken arms, swollen legs, gaunt face.

Basi, close to his real name, is a nickname sometimes used. There’s nothing special about him. He’s in his late 60’s with two grown children and well into a long-term suburban marriage, the kind where you stay while doing all you can to get away.

His first coffee shop was across the street from the shop in which he tends his last days. We come by. We sit, we order – double macchiatos in my case, espresso or cappuccinos for others. Basi sits with us, too infirm to move. Thankfully a nice young woman – Julene – patiently works the counter, handling orders along with critiques of her barrister shortcomings.

Read more »

Noah Davis. Isis, 2009.

More here, here, and here.

by Gunnar Heinsohn (translated by Rafaël Newman)

The past weekend marked the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The following article originally appeared in German in Die Welt magazine on April 29, 2022. It is posted here in a first-time English translation, with the permission of its author and in his memory, during a period in which the meaning of genocide is being discussed with new urgency.

Following his initial genocide—committed from 1999 to 2009 in Chechnya—Vladimir Putin has now embarked on a second, under the pretext of preventing an alleged genocide of Russians in Eastern Ukraine. A historic first.

Putin evidently sought legal grounds for a war of aggression, and all his experts could come up with was the UN Convention on Genocide. Under article 1, the Convention’s Contracting Parties—147 states, including Russia—are obliged to “prevent” genocide, not merely to punish it. Such a provision does not exist even for the prevention of an ordinary civil war. Putin’s accusation of genocide, leveled at Ukraine, and his strict avoidance of the terms war and invasion, can be explained by the will to embellish his monstrous project.

Like all murders, genocide requires intent and planning. A spontaneous massacre may leave 1,000 dead, but legally speaking it is still a case of mass manslaughter. Premeditated genocide, on the other hand, though it be hindered after “only” 100 people have died, has nevertheless produced 100 victims of genocide. This is a crucial legal distinction. Read more »

by David Winner

1976

All sixth-grade summer, the name of the Greek historian Xenophon pounded in my ears like a minor chord banged upon a piano.  I had borrowed a book by him from my father’s shelves but misplaced it in the last days of school. Fearing the wrenching disappointment that accompanied misplaced articles and forgotten tasks, I would slip nervously past the empty space in the bookshelf where Xenophon belonged. An English professor rather than a classicist, he would hardly have need for it, but still might sense its absence like a missing limb.

   2021

The night before my father’s last health crisis, Hurricane Ida came to Brooklyn.  My wife, Angela, and I heard lightening, wind, distant branches crashing downwards, but next morning’s mild weather made it seem like the storm had underwhelmed.

I was playing with my computer the following morning, waiting for 8:30, the hour at which I had been calling my father each morning since my mother’s death ten years before when the phone rang.  434, my father’s area code, but not his number.

Ninety and frail, he’d been struggling alone in the old house in which I grew up.

“Your dad,” said Rick, the man who drove him around and took care of his yard, “isn’t doing so good.  He wants you down here right away.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Cars in front of the train station of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, during a brief but heavy snowfall last week.

by William Benzon

I read a great deal of Bertrand Russell when I was in my teens. I read various collections of essays, such as Why I Am Not A Christian, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, and Marriage and Morals, some of which my father had stored in a box in the basement, along with Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, a book or two by this guy named Freud, though I forget which one, and some others. I also Russell’s – dare I say it? – magisterial A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, which I purchase myself, a big thick paperback with a white cover. It was cited when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

It was from Russell more than anyone else that I got the idea that philosophy was a grand synthetic discipline, which I liked. Putting things together, seeing how all the parts interacted, that had immense appeal to me. And so I became a philosopher major when I enrolled in The Johns Hopkins University in 1965. I enjoyed an introductory course called, I believe, Types of Philosophy. Edward Lee’s course in Plato and the Pre-Socratics was wonderful as well; Lee was young, charismatic, and loved Mahler, as I did.

Then there was a two-semester sequence in the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes up through Kant. Maurice Mandelbaum taught the first semester, outlining each lecture on the board and then delivering on the outline. The lectures were so clear that you almost didn’t have to read the primary texts. The second semester was taught by a visitor from Chicago, Alan Gewirth. A different experience, like pulling teeth. Gewirth did the pulling and we students offered up our teeth. Ouch! But perhaps more pedagogically effective than Mandelbaum’s clarity, more Socratic, if you will.

By my junior year, however, I had come to realize that philosophy, as it is practiced in the academic world, is not what I had imagined it to be from reading Russell’s essay. It was another specialized discipline that had long ago abandoned any attempt at a broad synthesis. Fortunately, I had discovered literature, and Dr. Richard Macksey, whom I’ll discuss in more detail later. I’d always loved to read, and Macksey’s free-wheeling and broad ranging intellect appealed to me. I took four courses with him, plus an independent study on I forget what, and did a master’s thesis on “Kubla Khan” under his supervision. Literary criticism became the rubric under which I put things together. And why not? Literature expresses the world, and so couldn’t one study the world under the rubric of studying literature?

Well, no, if you must ask. By the time I’d figured that out – it didn’t take but a year or three – I was committed to an impossible intellectual project. I remain so committed. I will end this essay by arguing – it’s more of an earnest suggestion, really – that perhaps, if we do it right – of which there is no guarantee, and many signs that we’re botching it – we can harness these marvelous new machines to the job of synthesizing (human) knowledge. If we succeed, we’ll find ourselves in a whole new world, perhaps one where it is not at all obvious who is harnessed to what and to what end. I will, however, proceed indirectly. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Global migration has been remarkably stable for decades. Despite that, media coverage of immigration tends to give the opposite impression. In the US, for example, there’s always a “crisis at the border.” But if there is a real crisis it’s not about the number of immigrants coming into the US relative to population. The  percentage of the US population born outside the US is on the rise now, but it has never gone below 5% or above that 15%. The US does have more immigrants than any other country “by a wide margin” – and the rate of immigration has been trending up since the 1970s. But the percentage of immigrants living in the US relative to population (14%) is similar to the number living in similar countries like Canada (20%) and Australia (33%). And then there’s this from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office: “In our projections, the deficit is…smaller than it was last year because economic output is greater, partly as a result of more people working. The labor force in 2033 is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

In a recent book, “How Migration Really Works,” Dutch sociologist Hans de Haas argues that the real immigration crisis is political and arises from what he calls the “paradox of immigration.” The problem is that there are three demands always in play in immigration debates. (i) We can’t reduce people’s rights to work or settle at the risk of disrupting the smooth running of the economy. (ii) We have a moral obligation to respect the rights of immigrants, including officially unauthorized immigrants, to fair and humane treatment. (iii) We should respect, or at least can’t resist, the political will of the majority of citizens who oppose immigration. The problem is we can do any two of these, but not all three. Simultaneous pressure from both the left and the right has reduced the Western political approach to immigration to, Haas argues, “bold acts of political showmanship that conceal the true nature of immigration policies.” In the U.S., as Duncan Black puts it, immigration “is an issue completely untethered from whatever the reality of it is, and people mostly don’t care until conservative media/politicians are telling them to care and then they get enraged…They aren’t mad about immigration, they are mad about what they see on television.”

One small contribution that ethics might make to this political morass is to examine our moral obligation to allow immigration – or not. Read more »

Who Spoke First?

who knows from where the echoes come,
who knows who forms the echoes?

if, in a canyon, I speak loudly enough
that echoes come,   I
might think it’s me,     I
am the maker of echoes,   I

belch a series of wave forms
toward a mirror of cliff and
hear myself return on ripples of air,

it’s simple. but what if I too am an echo,
a mere echo of echoes, an echo of something
with an infinity of mouths.

who was it that spoke first?

Jim Culleny, 2/18/24

by Nils Peterson

This is what Abraham Lincoln said.

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility.” [Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862]

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save our country.” [Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862]

“It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says ‘you toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” [Lincoln-Douglas debates, 15 October 1858]

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” [from a handwritten note]

And from a modern editorial, “Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart. Lincoln was capable of understanding both the greatness and the limits of Thomas Jefferson and the founders and still come out at the end embracing the American experiment for ‘giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.’ And so should we.” [Editorial. NYTimes, 7/4/15] Read more »

Sughra Raza. Let Me Just Absorb Today.

Digital photograph, October 2023.