“The difference between genius and stupidity,” says an African proverb, “is that genius has limits.”

I’m a country boy with limited imagination, so I thought the 1975 pictures of Vietnamese on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon fighting over seats on the last helicopters out, clinging to the skids while being kicked, was an all-time low point for my country’s reputation in the world. Those people clinging to the skids until kicked off were Vietnamese who threw in with us and — with good reason — -feared victor’s justice.

Donald John Trump found a lower place to take us when he removed U.S. protection for the Syrian Kurds after they did the bloody…

Yesterday, I entered hospice.

There, I got it through my fingers and to the screen, and I know that this time I will finish and post it on Medium. I started three times yesterday and this morning.

One turned into a rant about the twenty year war and how it looks like we got nothing from it and we are leaving Afghanistan worse off. Excepting the crooks. When you move money in cash and in amounts that require pallets and a forklift, there is bound to be some shrinkage.

One came out with a discourse on neos: neocons, neoliberals, and Neo from The Matrix.

…

Wherein I attempt to argue that three current events in particular are better understood if you understand the relevant history.

Is it sexist to address the incoming class as “freshmen?” The manifest clumsiness of “freshperson” might dispose of the question if you gave no thought to the term “co-ed,” which made sense only because higher education was thought to be a male pursuit.

Sit right over there, little lady. Just keep quiet and don’t touch anything. The guy next to you is training to fly the plane and your IQ has gotten you into a target-rich environment for husband-hunting. You will get what you want and so will the guys.

I retired as Associate Professor Emeritus from Indiana University, the…

Not everybody has signed on to the jihad against opioid drugs. There are dissenters, and I am one, although I’m absolutely on board with making those who lie about opioids pay for the resulting harm.

We among the lucky — or unlucky — few who are allowed to contemplate the end of our lives spend a great deal of that limited time contemplating the beginning, remembering with varying degrees of accuracy, telling stories.

How do I know that? How can I speak for anybody but myself?

That’s a fair objection. In the last couple of years, I’ve sat through nursing home hospice with two elderly relatives as cancer took them away slowly and, forty years or so ago, with two of my generation in home hospice. Likewise, cancer.

That makes a sample of five, me…

It was December 18, 1865, when the 13th Amendment — which banned most slavery in all of the nation became part of the U.S. Constitution.

Lincoln, the film, was realistic enough to show that a lot of what was done to get it passed was not pretty. Ratification was even worse. The ratification of the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment (promising equal protection of the law), and the 15th Amendment (guaranteeing the right to vote) or legislation of equal import was made to be a condition of readmission to the Union.

This demand was extra-constitutional and, from the time Chief Justice Marshall arrogated the power to strike down acts of Congress in Marbury v. Madison, extra-constitutional had been synonymous in the minds of many people…

President Biden’s Memorial Day speech was a full-throated defense of democracy. Was it merely a string of safe applause lines? Didn’t the voters just reject the cheap patriotism of bone spurs on one side and an American flag lapel pin on the other?

I rise to dissent from the view that the battle’s over. If our current situation is victory for democracy, I should hope to never taste defeat.

Poor old Karl Marx. His name got attached to so much nonsense. Yet, he is one of those rare thinkers who left his mark on so many disciplines that it’s hard to earn an advanced degree even now without encountering his work — though seldom in the original because his writing was a hard slog. Marx left tracks in political science, economics, sociology, philosophy, literature and most other arts.

He died a stateless person…

Today marks a century from a wrong that some of us would like to excavate from the memory hole, but the R word often impedes even a frank discussion.

A discussion about whether there was law in Oklahoma after it ceased being Indian Territory in 1907?

Considering the facts on the ground, it might be fruitful to examine whether the white supremacists in our times running with the Adolf Hitler fan club is coincidence or just because the neo-Nazis agree on white supremacy but nothing more?

What will the discussion cost us in reputation? Will it cost us money? What could we tell the kiddies after all these years of lying silence?

R word? Racism?

Even scarier. Reparations.

A hundred years makes a lot of distance but I grew…

I am about to spew forth a river of loosely-connected thoughts that have little to do with current events or each other.

I have decided that if I’m not going to make money with my writing, I am at least going to enjoy it. Godwin’s law, for those who need a refresher, instructs us as follows:

As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.

Mike Godwin, the law maker, has been forced by current events to recognize the size of Hitler’s fan club and to admit that when people do harm and cite Hitler as the reason, it might be a good idea to call them out in the terms they have…