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THE DEFLOWERING OF GEORGE W. BUSH
If you were looking by some chance for a laudatory piece about George W. Bush, you will have to read Bill Safire or George Will or some other right wing writer or perhaps the Wall Street Journal editorial page. My reading on Bush after following his career since he became the Governor of Texas is…
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AMAZING GRACE
As I sit down to dictate these lines, it is a cold morning in January. With a prayerful thought, January will soon be over. This essay will not be a religious one. Worse than that, it will combine the third rail of all essays in that it will comment upon politics and religion. The title…
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“OLD AGE IS A DISEASE”
-FRAU DOKTOR HERTA KNOPFMACHER FISCHER I know a man who speaks lovingly, respectfully, and admiringly about his own mother-in-law. Can you imagine that? His mother-in-law furnished the title for this essay. This woman was born in 1878 in the Sudetenland. There is considerable mystery about whether in 1878 the Sudetenland belonged to the German…
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A REPRISE ON DIGNITY AND TEARS
Those of us who write essays recognize that when an essay demands to be written, it will be done. You may remember a recent essay called, “A Matter of Dignity.” In that essay, it recounted the story about how Matthew Pepe, my old friend who installs driveways and sidewalks, saw the problem of my taking…
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A MATTER OF DIGNITY
Those of us who have lost our sight frequently wrestle with the thought of our potential uselessness. It has always been so. In the Irish folksong, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” an Irish soldier who served with the British Army returns from a battle in Ceylon minus two limbs. The song’s lyrics say, “You haven’t…
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A COLLOQUY WITH TOM FRIEDMAN
Under ordinary circumstances, your old essayist attempts to keep his correspondence separate from the essays that are produced here. In this case, however, Tom Friedman, the New York Times star op-ed writer wrote a piece that should not be condensed or treated in the Reader’s Digest fashion. Friedman’s piece was so wrong and so provocative,…
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THE PES-TI-MIST
It is a matter of great regret that none of you knew George Knickerbocker, my pre-World War II St. Louis colleague at AT&T. George insisted in pronouncing every letter of every word in spoken English. For example, miscellaneous on George’s tongue came out as MIS-KEL-AN-EOUS. Old George did not stop there at all. As in…
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A BATTING PRACTICE SLUGGER
As most of you know, this old essayist and former solder has long believed that George Bush is a vile creature who is attempting to finish what Nixon started, which is to turn the United States into a Fascist theocracy. The litany goes on. A war brought on by Bush’s lying. The squandering of our…
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IS CAMILLA PG? | Meditations – Chapter Seven, Verses 1-17
For the better part of 35 years, Prince Charley of England had played games with Camilla, an upper class English woman who bears a remarkable resemblance to his mother. Charley and Camilla were married to other people for many of those years, so it is fair to assume that Princess Diana and Mr. Parker Bowles…
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WAY TO GO ALBERTO | Meditations – Chapter Six; Verses 1 to 17
When Bill Clinton was the United States president, a suit was filed against the producers of American tobacco products. It was alleged that nicotine is addictive and leads to emphysema and lung cancer among other disabilities. That much is a given. When Bush took the presidency courtesy of Scalia and the Supreme Court, his Attorney…