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Soaked in Blood and Cotton: Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners”
“It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.” -Luke 15:32 Zombies have had a good run as cultural metaphors, from George Romero’s 1978 zombie flick, Dawn of the Dead, which is set in a shopping mall, Continue reading
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“Bloodshed, Bedlam and Squalor and Worse”: Washington, D.C. in the Words of Donald Trump
I one asked a historian friend what he thought the “Again” referred to in “MAGA.” He replied, “It means they want to be children again, opening up presents in the living room.” Good point. I want that, too. But I also know that it was not perfect—that there was addiction, that we wanted money, that Continue reading
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Was the Civil War “For” What It Was “About”? Part Two.
What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,What mighty contests rise from trivial things. –Alexander Pope A few years ago, I was waiting to go into the prison with a group of other volunteers, and overheard some men from a local Bible study group discussing the idea of reparations for slavery. They seemed to think the Continue reading
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Was the Civil War “For” What It Was “About”? Part One.
What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,What mighty contests rise from trivial things. –Alexander Pope One of my colleagues currently has a student who claimed in class that the Civil War “was not about slavery.” That’s a popular argument with Lost Causers. But is it true? It seems like a good time to revisit the Continue reading
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“The Infinitely Divided Star-Dust,” Part Three: Preposition Trouble!
Part of the fun (?) of reading legal rhetoric is the endless parsing of language, what Mark Twain called the “infinitely divided star-dust.” The first post in this series looked at the Trump DOJ’s pettifogging over “facilitate.” The second looked at “invasion,” and whether or not the DOJ can unilaterally (re)define what a word means Continue reading
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“The Infinitely Divided Star-Dust,” Part Two: “Invasion”
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Humpty Dumpty “Accepted canons help construe statutes.” —U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr. Part of the fun (?) of reading court rulings is their close analysis of language, what Mark Twain called the “infinitely divided star-dust.” Part One Continue reading
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“The Infinitely Divided Star-Dust,” Part One: Pettifogging
“Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s words, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways—and if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, HOW did he get it, and WHERE and WHEN?” -Mark Twain, Continue reading
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Turning Around
“This love of his is not somethinghe can do if you aren’t there…Go back, you whisper,but he wants to be fed againby you. O handful of gauze, littlebandage, handful of coldair, it is not through himyou will get your freedom.”-Margaret Atwood, Eurydice “Let me tell you a story. This happened last summer, during one of Continue reading
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El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
On December 9, Fox News‘ Jesse Watters opined, during a segment on Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, Now, apart from the fact that Watters is openly calling for murder, this scenario is absurd. First of all, it’s based on an internal contradiction: that everyone in prison is at once animalistic and rational, Continue reading
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Cancel Fezziwig: “A Christmas Carol” Reconsidered
The Japanese expression “seisatu yodatu” is made up of four separate kanji: 生 (sei) meaning “life”; 殺“ (satu) meaning “to end life,” i.e., to kill; 与 (yo) meaning “to give”; and 奪” (datu) meaning “to take.” Historically, it was used for those who held absolute power over their servants, and it embodies the terrible contradiction Continue reading
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