December 2014

Partying with Shakespeare

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00December 17th, 2014|Life|

Wayne Bailey passed away December 17, 2014.

“I have borne a charm’d life with you,” the Bard said. “Your counsel hath guided my every footstep; driven me to dare and gamble and seize the day; taught me temperance and delivered me wisdom where too often I had none. But why not tarry longer? Why go thither; why go now?“

The pair stood in the grand old Globe, the ground about the stage still littered after a particularly raucous show of “Much Adoe.” One man, the Bard, furrowed his brow in worry. The other, the traveler Wayne (once a barrister by trade, but always a teacher at heart) smiled serenely, one hand resting on the device that would whisk him away to parts unknown.

Over the years, Wayne had skipped in and out of the Bard’s life often, a friend and mentor who always seemed to emerge at the right place and time. It was Wayne who had first suggested, with a twinkle in his eye, that the Bard try his hand at plays. It was Wayne who had laid the Globe’s cornerstone into place. It was even Wayne who had stayed up long nights with the Bard, splitting tankards and rewriting and reciting the sonnets of Othello and Puck and Macbeth until they sang. And now he was leaving.

(more…)

> Read More
 0

October 2012

McGovern

2016-12-28T21:37:57+00:00October 21st, 2012|Politics|

Originally published October 21, 2012

I was sad when I saw that George McGovern had entered hospice last week, and I was sad to hear that he passed earlier today. We’re losing an important generation of American statesmen; McGovern ranked high on that list.

My dad gave me a McGovern pin when I was little and speaks fondly of his time volunteering for the ’72 McGovern campaign. For a lot of young people who had embraced 60s counterculture, McGovern pushed them to finally participate in the system they’d spent the last decade fighting against. His subsequent (crushing) defeat turned many of them away from politics forever.

Read a McGovern obituary and you’ll see that it was his principles and ideas, not his accomplishments, that earned him a place in American history. He was a champion of lost causes. He had supporters, but never enough. He was lauded and respected by both sides, but seldom listened to. I suspect that often, when McGovern would take the stage, more than a few in the (polite) audience were thinking, “There he goes again…”

(more…)

> Read More
 0

March 2011

Remembering the Great War

2016-12-28T21:37:57+00:00March 24th, 2011|Defense|

Originally published March 24, 2011

Last month, 110-year-old Frank Buckles — our final surviving veteran of World War I — died peacefully in his sleep. His passing marks the end of an era and the fading of a conflict that is increasingly footnoted and ignored in American studies of history.

In some ways, this diminishment is inevitable. WWI began the better part of a century ago. Its causes are diverse and complicated. It offers no cosmic battle between the evils of fascism and the good of democracy, and it has no happy ending. Literature regrets it, video games ignore it and Tom Hanks hasn’t even done a miniseries about it.

Yet four million Americans fought in it, joining a staggering total of 65 million combatants who took up arms between 1914 and 1918. The extent of their sacrifice was unprecedented. And the significance of their struggle — one which profoundly changed both east and west — haunts us to this day.

(more…)

> Read More
 0
Go to Top