Culture wars

Should we be concerned with the corporate marketing effect on the remaining tried-and-true depositories of culture, among which we can include NPR. Pace John Charles, "Prairie Home Companion" is entertaining and a nice slice-of-life take on Midwestern small-town culture. However, it is far from classical. At what point do survey polls become a threat to culture instead of an indicator?

A quote from C.S. Lewis

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satisfied; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for the do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Good reading for the post-election, Iraq-bombing blues


I say blues because war is generally not a wonderful time, but there are certainly those who disagree with me. Perhaps they would do better sticking to sunny work like the cookbooks of Julia Fairchild. For the rest, I recommend Johnny Shines. Or maybe jazz a la Charles Mingus strikes a more appropriate chord, given its highly technical flirtation with the blues.A Love Supreme uncovers what went into the making of John Coltrane's famous album. The short story, "Rock Spring", by Richard Ford provides a subtle take on the male-female doubletake ratio, or that point at which nodding trumps head-turning and the therapist's couch provides a better means to understanding the actions of others than it does to the understanding of one's own. Giacondo Belli's The Country Under My Skin: A Memory of Love and War steers close to the Latin American tradition of love stories during war (best exemplified by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love In the Time Of Cholera) and raises the flag of individual triumph during that quintessential and classic collective action problem dubbed "military conflict".

A short excerpt from a poem by Father Daniel Berrigan

Our trouble

the trouble with our state

with our state of soul

our state of seige

was

Civil

obedience