“The economic situation during the Biden administration eroded and degraded the average American’s ability to participate in the life of the nation as an economically self-sufficient citizen.”
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Category: Essay
On the Trump Coalition
Itching for the Infinite
“Further examples abound, but suffice to say, at least as far as these prominent modern thinkers were concerned, epicureanism for the masses does seem to denote something quite real.”
What Europeans Don’t Understand about Trump
“Those Europeans who shake their heads in disbelief at President-elect Trump and his success would do well to consider things, including themselves, from an American and, even more so, a global point of view.”
Appreciating America’s Distinctly British Heritage
“The United States’ British roots also have value because they provide a link to a history older than any homegrown alternative the United States possesses.”
At Home in the War
“At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home.”
Notes on Kitsch: Janice Harrington’s “Yard Show”
“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”
These People All Know Each Other
“Charles Krauthammer used to pride himself on not going to cocktail parties, instead preferring to be at home with his wife quietly reading, writing, doing whatever. And he was probably better for it.”
Winds of the Great Shame
“And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind.”
How to Read Poetry
“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”
Why Most Americans Didn’t Buy the Harris Campaign
“Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted.”
The Dead Are Difficult: Jenny George’s “After Image”
“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”
The Dueling Cases for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris
A Merion West contributing writer and editor respectively make the case for each candidate for President of the United States.
The Discontents of Capitalism
“Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?'”
Blues Run the Game
“Jackson C. Frank didn’t find what he was looking for in his own life, it doesn’t seem, though it may have become increasingly out of his control. He would be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which hardly partnered well with his pre-existing depression.”
Wrackable as Arguments: Anne-Marie Turza’s “Fugue with Bedbug”
“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”