In the 1952 American presidential election, Republican Dwight Eisenhower ran against Democrat Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower was a five-star general in the army and Stevenson was the governor of Illinois. I’m so old I was in grade school back then and my teacher Miss Kelly, who was big for Stevenson—as I think about it, this may […]
On August 10th, 2018, Richard Russell, 29-years-old and married, a baggage handler at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who had no training as a pilot, and who as far as anyone knows had never flown a plane before, took an empty 75-seater twin-turboprop Bombardier Q400 plane and flew it for about an hour over Puget Sound, executing […]
Back in 2008, I wrote an essay/review—I called it a review at the time, but it was as much an essay as a review—of the book Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy by Michael S. Sherry (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). The book was informative and personally helpful. It got […]
The only real tragedy in life is being used by personally minded men for purposes you recognize to be base. All civilization is founded on [man’s] cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. Men will never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose—fighting for an […]
There are lessons to be learned from the game of baseball. A big one is around race. In this area, baseball operates on the principles of equal opportunity and merit. Everybody, no matter their race, gets an equal chance to play, let’s say, shortstop for the Yankees, and the person who can play shortstop the […]
