1. The poor guy needs a steady paycheck
2. We don’t want to make Vladimir mad!
3. The whole Bill of Rights deal is too much bother anyway. As long as we have our Netflix and DoorDash…
4. We won’t have to listen to his stupid talk show for at least another four years
5. We’re a nation of masochists who have a pathological need to be injured, insulted, ignored and condescended to by our elected leader
6. Did Herman Cain really die for nothing?*
7. Those ICE agents in our cities are so handsome in their purty uniforms and shiny boots!
8. He’s really, really, really going to give us a free wall and a vaccine and a healthcare system ten times better than Obamacare this time!
9. To punish Melania for not nipping this thing in the bud four years ago
10. Are you crazy?? For God’s sake get off your behind and vote for Biden!

* no, I don’t think it’s funny either

When someone says of a new technology, that it will free up workers so they can focus on critical tasks, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.

How good a wine tastes and how well a car runs has nothing to do with price.

It’s hard to come up with a pithy bit of wisdom that, upon reflection, isn’t just a useless platitude. Hey, that’s a good one!

You cannot kill off a dangerous misconception just by presenting the truth over and over again. Holocaust deniers, climate-change deniers, people who think vaccines cause autism—they aren’t necessarily stupid or even uneducated. They have an emotional need to believe in something that satisfies their resentments and insecurities.

It’s a bad idea to start a conversation with your loved one with the words “You always” or “You never.”

If someone tells you the system is fair, it’s a safe bet the system works well for them.

If you’re lucky enough to reach a certain age, you start to understand a little of what it’s like to be the lone survivor of a cataclysm. We’re all passengers on a ship loaded with family and friends, heading straight for an iceberg called “time.”

“Born-again” Christians are cheating. Of course you’re going to ‘believe’ if God has personally revealed Himself to you. That’s so unfair to us hell-bound atheists.

America isn’t getting worse. America isn’t getting better. America is getting better and worse and better and worse. We’re not going to live long enough to make that national after-party where we enjoy white wine and veggie trays in celebration of American Dream Achieved.

The lady who hovers forever in the pasta aisle. Right in front of my rigatoni.

Anyone who uses the verb ‘unpack.’ Unless they’re actually referring to luggage. When I was a kid we had ‘explain’. And we liked it.

Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump gives me indigestion. Vladimir Putin gives me nightmares. I would bet green money the man sleeps in a coffin.

The upstairs neighbors who toke on their balcony. Do they offer me a puff? No, they do not.

Cheesy 3rd-tier shows on Netflix, like ‘Longmire’ and ‘Lucifer’. Why do they irritate me? Because I watch them, okay?

People who think ‘Black Lives Matter’ is unfair. For cryin’ out loud.

Whoever wrote ‘The President is Missing.’ In other words, Bill Clinton and James Patterson. One novel, two authors, and yet…the novelist is missing.

WordPress. For inserting bowel-cleaning ads in the middle of my blog posts as the price for hosting my free entry-level account. (I don’t see a cent of the ad revenue, by the way.) What a clever up-sell strategy: nauseate my readers. Both of them.

« Be Best ». It just grates on my ears. Would it really have hurt anything to stick an article or a pronoun between ‘be’ and ‘best’? (And what the hell does it really mean, anyway?) Maybe it’s just me. Is it wrong to demand correct?

The mini video clips that have replaced simple photos on the front page of the electronic version of the New York Times. How can I read the headlines when the port of Beirut is getting blown up every 4.5 seconds?

(Today’s post is written by our friend, the retired State Department officer George Kopf.)

It is very difficult to consider, much less manage, a perilous future. We’ve all seen public service announcements on television featuring lung cancer victims who continue to smoke.  Denial is an overwhelming human behavior, a kind of species addiction.  I’ve been reading William Manchester’s “Alone,” the second volume of his biography of Winston Churchill.  Today it is hard to grasp that between 1930 and late 1938 Churchill was one of the most despised public figures in Britain, someone who was considered a crank and a fanatic who was banned from the airwaves and columns of major newspapers.  Churchill’s sin was to have published his belief that Hitler was for real, that is, someone more threatening than a run-of-the-mill nationalist politician, but a genuine predator who posed an existential threat to the U.K., Europe, and Jews everywhere.  For many complex reasons, this was a message no one wanted to hear in the U.K. in 1932. Churchill was eight years ahead of popular opinion, and suffered for it.  He lost public office, income, policy influence, access to information, and friendships.  At one point late in the decade when he rose to speak in Parliament, he was so effectively shouted down by a unanimous chorus of MPs, led by members of his own party, that he had to leave the building, and rarely returned to Parliament before being called back at the end of the decade.

Churchill could have been wrong; history proved him right, and he got there first. By monitoring German investment in armaments, he was able to visualize a catastrophe a decade hence.  Today I suspect most of us would be grateful if we could similarly visualize three, six or twelve months into the future.  Distracted by the covid pandemic and political uncertainty, we are all on edge.  The urge to get away, to deny, grows stronger just as our predicament deepens. Nostalgia beckons.  People want to return to the past, to work, to get their kids back into school, to pick up the threads of their lives.  Public leadership has been hopelessly muddled on this issue, but most (sane) individuals at some level understand that picking up where we left off last February would only be admissible if two conditions pertained: 1) that it were feasible, practical and possible in the first place. 2) that it were desirable.  In other words, normal employees won’t return to life threatening workplaces and normal parents won’t send their kids into the arms of infection.  Moreover,  some people may apply the lessons of the pandemic to reconsider who they were last February and decide not to party as if it were 2019.  Months away from normal activity may have the effect of the proverbial sea voyage.  Prompted by economic necessity or more personal reasons, some people may reconsider their lives and their vocations.  They will become different, and collectively so will our society. 

Reconsidering ourselves in the coming dispensation is the subject of two short pieces of literature which appear below for your enjoyment. I urge you to have a brief look.  In times of crises, political leaders, like Churchill, may get there first.  Other times it’s the artists.  These two easy pieces may initially appear gloomy, but they are balanced by optimistic visions of our ability to know ourselves, assess ourselves, and move on.  Interestingly, both take place in what is now Israel and the West Bank. T.S. Eliot’s “The Return of the Magi” was published in 1927.  “Outside” by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret appeared on July 12, 2020 in the New York Times Magazine.

–George Kopf