In a previous column, I reported how President Donald Trump is under water on public approval ratings, showing the lowest first July approval rating of any president in the modern era. Today, six weeks later, he’s still under water. Donald…
Language and politics
This year, 2025, is the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men, first published in 1925. World War I had ended seven years earlier, in 1918. The next year, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, and in…
Religion and politics
I’m all in when it comes to separation of church and state. That’s why I oppose posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and wherever else legislators are clamoring to do so. That is The…
Two great divides
I titled my last column “Divides” because as I said there: “Divides confront us daily. The digital divide, political divides, economic divides, class divides, educational divides.” The focus of that piece was the divide between the world of television commercials…
Divides
Divides confront us daily. The digital divide, political divides, economic divides, class divides, educational divides. You can probably name some others. I still have cable TV. I’m not into streaming. Cable TV has commercials. Most mornings the Today Show is…
Elon, empathy and immigrants
On Feb. 28, Elon Musk took aim at “empathy” on a Joe Rogan podcast. He said empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Barely one month later, April 1, in a New Yorker interview, Al Mohler, president of Southern…
Numbers, numbers, numbers
According to the Cleveland Clinic website, arithmophobia is a negative response to numbers or numerical tasks that some people exhibit — a condition that evokes such reactions as chills, nausea, heart palpitations and dizziness. I hope you are not one…
CONTROL Inc.
It’s all about control, not about balancing the federal budget, not about bringing down inflation, not about “waste, fraud and abuse.” President Donald Trump is all about control. Let me count the ways: The Kennedy Center. The president purged the…
Putin’s asset
Stories matter. Narratives rule the day in this era of social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Here’s a narrative that often gets lost in the daily breaking news. It must have started in November 2013, when the future president’s…
Ronald Reagan and the Whole Trump
Just 10 days after Donald Trump’s inauguration for a second term, I wrote these words: The Pine Belt News: “On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of the paramilitary members who had been convicted of…
Exiled
Right now, I’m feeling like I’m in exile — sent there by the last election, sent there by the president’s actions these last seven weeks, driven there by the cruel antics of his sidekick, Elon Musk. Most readers of this…
Is this what you voted for?
On Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of the paramilitary members who had been convicted of (or who had pled guilty to) seditious conspiracy for their part in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S….