John Brown's Notes and Essays

For the previous entry to this blog [11/30],  see ; scroll down for 12/17 Due to a number of factors, your scribbler has been unable during the past several weeks to keep up his blog on his minor, personal efforts to pick up (and dispose of, in public waste receptacles) plastic water bottles (PWBs) and other trash, ranging from left-over plastic gloves to used prophylactics, in his Cleveland Park neighborhood in the NW Quadrant of Washington, DC: Today, your blogger, in better shape, " Afoot and light-hearted ," returned to his near-daily account of his neighborhood PWBs/other trash excursion, which covers the following area of Cleveland Park: --Tilden Street, at its intersections with Connecticut Avenue and Spring of Freedom Road; --Spring of Freedom Road with its intersection at Rock Creek Park;  --Porter Street at its intersection with Connecticut Avenue; --Connecticut Avenue at its intersection with the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) ...

image from The Politics of Exhaustion: Voters pick whichever candidate exhausts them less. By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist, The New York Times , Dec. 12, 2019 [Excerpt; see also, among several entries on this blog re Brooks's infatuation with the meaningless word " people " (with apologies to " We, the people "]: Haunted by economic insecurity, they will tolerate any sin in their leader — racism, anti-Semitism, dishonesty — so long as that person is willing to fight and be on their side. They both support massive, unrealistic policy proposals, because they reject the idea that politics is simply the muddled way we settle differences with people we disagree with. These two power blocs are driving the debate and setting the agenda. But there’s another group of people , who have become the most interesting part of the electorate, both here and in Britain. It’s the exhausted 75 percent, people who are defined not by any common ideology but by an af...

By Fareed Zakaria   Columnist The Washington Post , November 28, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. EST President Trump, with first lady Melania Trump looking on, pardons Butter the turkey in the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s a secular celebration of America, and as an immigrant, I feel I have much to be grateful for. I am an optimist who tends to see the story of this country as one of addressing its shortcomings and making progress. Lately, it has been tough to maintain that sunny outlook. America’s greatest assets — its constitutional republic and its democratic character — seem to be in danger of breakdown.  Listen to the language of the president. “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage,”  he thundered at a June rally  to kick off his reelection campaign. “They want to destroy you, and they want to destroy our country...

The U.S. has an unmatched capacity for absorbing newcomers. Yet historian David M. Kennedy worries that the country no longer agrees on a shared identity or purpose. By Jason Willick, The Wall Street Journal , Nov. 27, 2019 ILLUSTRATION:  KEN FALLIN Stanford, Calif. As the Seventh U.S. Army prepared to seize Axis-held Sicily in July 1943, Gen. George S. Patton sent the troops a message. “When we land,” Patton said, “we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy.” Patton is famous for his martial exhortations, but Stanford historian David M. Kennedy paraphrases his Sicily address to highlight what it said about immigration. “Many of you have in your veins German and Italian blood, Patton said, “but remember that these ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty,” whereas the Germans and Italians targeted in the Allied assault chose to remain “as slave...

Elizabeth Bruenig, The New York Review of Books , November 21, 2019 Virgin Whore by Emma Maggie Solberg Cornell University Press, 275 pp., $39.95 The Magdalene in the Reformation by Margaret Arnold Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 300 pp., $29.95 National Gallery, London Robert Campin:  The Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen , circa 1440 In January the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, suffered a minor scandal concerning the virtue of the Mother of God. It came to light that an English professor had taught Emmanuel Carrère’s 2014 book  The Kingdom— a self-consciously provocative work about the author’s struggle with his Catholic faith and the unlikely survival of the early Church—to a group of five upperclassmen as part of an elective course in the spring of 2018.  The Kingdom  is something of an odd elegy to faith by an agnostic who finally couldn’t believe, and thus Carrère takes aim at the religion’s more incredible dogmas; t...