Sunday Night Journal
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Sunday Night Journal — July 4, 2004 John Cage’s famous “composition” 4′ 33″ consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. I’m told that he resented the people (of whom I am one) who assumed he intended it as a joke, and that he had in mind a perfectly serious exercise in listening. His…
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Marriage Fever It is very convenient to find that someone else has said, and said better, what one has been thinking of saying, thus saving one a certain amount of trouble. Ever since I posted these comments on the homosexual marriage debate, I’ve been mulling over further remarks. One thing that has particularly struck me…
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Another Root Canal, Please, Doctor When Ronald Reagan died a couple of weeks ago many of his prominent political opponents made an impressive effort to speak well of him. As one who disliked Bill Clinton as much as some disliked Reagan, I wondered how I would do in the event of Clinton’s death—could I speak…
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*-wingers I started noticing a few years ago that liberals and other opponents of conservatism seemed not to be using the word “conservative” as their preferred epithet for the enemy in the way they once had done. Instead, they seemed to be using the term “right-wing.” The most famous use of the term was Hillary…
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Ronald Reagan and D-Day To judge by most of the news reports I’ve seen over the past couple of days, one would think that Ronald Reagan had been a far more universally admired president than he was. But while he was president anyone who was at all left of center politically and culturally viewed him…
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Memorial Day: The Soldier’s Trade Many years ago I read the following passage from John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and it permanently affected my view of the military vocation. Ruskin is considering “the general lowness of estimate in which the profession of commerce is held, as compared with that of arms”—that is to say, why…
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The Progressive Steamroller Once the bandwagon for homosexual marriage got rolling at a really good clip, it occurred to me that if it became thoroughly established the result would be bad for heterosexual women. Why? (A): most women want to marry and have children, while most men are at least hesitant about, and at worst…
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Writing Division Into Law It appears that tomorrow will see the beginning of legally recognized “marriage” between persons of the same sex. If this arrangement is given the force of law throughout the country, it may very well be seen by history as the point where the deep and bitter division in American society which…
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A Nightmare In the beginning of the dream it was as if I was watching a movie. It seemed to be a crime drama sort of thing, taking place in a run-down littered urban neighborhood. Colors had the washed-out look that you see in a lot of films from the ‘70s. A big car of…
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Sunday Night Journal — May 2, 2004 I had planned to write about the lack of leisure in modern life this week, but I didn’t have time. A nice line, and one which occurred to me on Saturday morning as a way of making short work of this week’s journal, but things rarely happen as…
Light On Dark Water 