By Eric Le Roy
First, I support no ideology under this shining sun. You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right, and vice versa. All my life, I have involved myself in civil discourse with all comers. Often it has seemed modestly productive, although rare is the occasion when I’ve noticed any radical shifts of opinion. Most people, including me, walk away with our convictions … Read the rest
My friend shared an article with me today, and for a minute I could almost hear the choir warming up. Not the church choir—the political one. The kind that turns diplomacy into a superhero movie, where history is an impatient editor and the messy parts get cut for runtime. The article’s own author is more careful than the headline energy around it: he says Trump’s claim to have “ended … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
‘We have fallen in the dreams the ever living
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.”
(Yeats)
My life at an advanced age vacillates between flashes of murderous rage and periods of unaccountable serenity. When I sense the futility of thinking that anything much is going to change during my ‘golden years’, I … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
