Consuming Community, Consuming Our Selves…

There come times when what asks to be done is for there to be silence. This can seem harder to accept than many other demands the moment makes on us. We have momentum. We consider our habits valuable. We expect and we expect others do too. Expect a certain “output.” This gets tricky when the

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in a few days…

… mostly in a single night. In it we find the yet unborn Twentieth Century – and its long tail, cracking like a whip over us even now. No need for any more warnings than that. By then others had already begun to populate dystopias and pronounce prophecies: Milton, …. What if a culture could

It’s a crime, part II

Must we be pure? Whenever we confront the depths of our corruption we hear this whining plea. Ego deflates us, How can I meet such a standard? A false question. We are what we are. We will do what we feel we must do. What is in question is what do these questions mean? Who

Political Theater

Policing the norms The dynamic in a dysfunctional family maintains itself through elaborate procedures that perpetuate their norm by maintaining a mythology that celebrates the systemic abuse that holds it together. The ongoing dramatizations of these myths maintain their power. Each member has a role to play. And, so long as we remain enthralled by

Sincerity

We are lost without sincerity. To be immersed in lies; to constantly dissemble; to be treated as an object for someone else’s purposes; is to find our selves in the utmost precarity. An apocryphal tale whose source I can no longer remember sticks with me. It’s of a moment of first encounter between a North

This Means War!

Rufus T. Firefly scuttling center stage to make his pronouncement…. There’s always a hidden glee behind the crowd’s reaction. “Before, I had to hold it together. Now? I can let go. A free pass. No resort is too extreme. We’re at war.” The next stage is the rush to, “Get in the fight!” After all,