Posts

What the Death of Honor Looks Like: Part 1

 What do a 20th century Yale historian, a 2000’s Josh Whedon whirlpool of sex and violence, “the father of history,” and the book of Judges have in common? Two things: 1) They are all favorites of mine in one category or another, and 2) They all work in tandem to teach a fundamental lesson about honor, a lesson that America would do well to remember today. I’m going to take ridiculous length to articulate that lesson through these four different lenses, in what I have come to realize will have to be several separate posts for the length I plan on indulging myself at. At the end, though, I hope I will have at least given you pause for thought on how the decline of honor in the American soul is poisoning this republic. A good starting point for that, I think is to review Whedon’s excellent TV portrayal of what a similar decline meant for the original Republic—the Roman Republic Exhibit A: The Moral Decline of Rome— Spartacus I am referring, of course, to the absolute masterpiece that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The True Tragedy of Oedipus

This short story is my first ever attempt at literature of any kind (minus some middle school assignments I'd rather pretend I never inflicted on the world). Hopefully its moral is more apparent than felt, but I suspect far too many of us can empathize with some part of it.  
Post a Comment
Read more

My Gripe With Jackson

…Though probably not the Jackson you were thinking of. I have a gripe about how the constitutional structure of foreign policy power is talked about, but for someone not quite up to speed on this stuff it’ll probably feel confusing, so let me start at the beginning—then I’ll get to complaining. Democratic government, by design, constantly clashes with itself as the tides of popular opinion flow into and out of its various branches. In the realm of domestic policy this works by design to yield popular sovereignty as the law. In foreign policy however, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed at the start of the American republic, it can yield inferior policy relative to aristocracies’ due to its tendency to eliminate consistency, commitment, and long-term strategy from a nation’s external affairs. The Constitution partially addresses Tocqueville’s concern by insulating the process of American foreign policy from the worst consequences of democracy, but, nonetheless, leaves it open to many of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Putnam's Real Revalation

  THE PROBLEM:              Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting a young United States in the early 19 th century, observed that one of America’s greatest strengths lay in its people’s habits of voluntary association, which allowed their democracy to function a successful degree that Europe had never been able to achieve. Writing a couple hundred years later, Robert Putnam wrote of a   historic decline in civic engagement over the latter half of the 20 th century, a phenomenon that he labeled Bowling Alone and lamented, as Tocqueville would have concurred, as unquestionably bad for America; he sought to show the fact of the decline, its causes, and propose solutions. Fixating on the problem of civic disengagement as today's great American civic disaster and pointing to Putnam as the main expose on the crisis is not a new revelation. However, I have found myself wondering how much of Putnam's analysis really fits ...
Post a Comment
Read more