-
“First they came for…”
Martin Niemöller, the German theologian and Lutheran pastor, is a complicated figure. You may not know his name, but you are, no doubt, familiar with his famous quote which begins “First they came for…”. The quote is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a poem. And through the years, it has been adapted and modified to…
-
It just sounded better
On October 26, 1945, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9646, redesigning the presidential seal. Among other changes, he proposed that the eagle should face away from the arrows, signifying armed conflict, in its left talon, to demonstrate a desire to avoid war. The first President to have a seal was Woodrow Wilson. Prior to…
-
Ice Ice Baby
Any cold war spy novel or movie worth your time will eventually mention East Germany’s secret police known as the Stasi, officially called the “Ministry for State Security” (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit in German), which operated from 1950 to 1990 and was among the most hated and feared institutions of any of the cold war communist…
-
It’s déjà vu, all over again
This is a sobering moment. And where you come down on what happened yesterday, and over the last week in Iran, depends on how willing you are to suspend your disbelief and accept the narrative fed to you by the administration in Washington DC. One only has to look to recent history. A regime in…
-
Mexico
Oh, MexicoIt sounds so sweet with the sun sinking lowThe moon’s so bright like to light up the nightMake everything all right James Taylor, “Mexico,” 1975, from the album Gorilla Watching the coverage of the protests in Los Angeles, one thing stands out. It is Mexico’s green, white, and red flag that has become a…
-
So much for progress
For most of my life, at least since I developed a mind of my own and thought about such things, I had two unshakeable beliefs. One was that everything will be okay. And I believed that because of the second one – that things are getting better. Progress may not be dramatic or even perceivable,…
-
Oh. My. God.
I had a post all written and ready to go for today. I was just polishing it and fact checking a few assertions I had made. It was a fun one for my “curiosity” category about etiquette and how the concept of what is appropriate or proper has changed over time. For example, you’re on…
-
We are all sons of Verdugo!
We call her the Jewel City of the Verdugos. Because of geography and terrain, we can see the skyline of downtown LA just over the hills of Elysian Park where Dodger stadium sits. We are the backdoor to LA’s “urban wilderness” – Griffith Park. We bridge the southland’s two great valleys, the San Gabriel and…
-
Conspiracy Theories
President Donald Trump has promoted one of the most outlandish and unhinged conspiracy theories I have ever heard to his 10 million followers on Truth Social: former president Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by robotic clones. Stop and think about that for a moment. Just that. Forget everything else you know about…
-
The Warrior Ethos?
I… um… the… it’s… but… there are no words. I’ll try though. I thought it was hilarious – ignorant, stupid, childish, petty, but hilarious – last March when Newsweek reported that pictures of “Enola Gay,” the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan during WWII, were flagged for removal from the…
Your mileage may vary.