January 16, 2019
When the Pardon Furthers the Conspiracy: Limits to the Pardon Power
That Look When You Know How To Cause Trouble
I like to blog about the dark side of history and our penchant for violence in defense of our freedom – blood watering the tree of liberty and all that. See, my series on ancient history (before Magna Carta, the first document to guarantee the right to jury trial) when all disputes were resolved on a battlefield […]
A Companion To Carl Sandburg’s ‘I Am The People, The Mob’
The Porteous Riot: Scotland, 1736: a smuggler’s mob “…we should pass over all biographies of ‘the good and the great,’ while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows.” ~Edgar Allan Poe For the Carl Sandburg weekly blog, click here.
I Am The People, The Mob (Carl Sandburg)
I am the people – the mob – the crowd – the mass Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and […]
Traveler’s Trough
A man’s power to connect his thought to its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. Ralph Waldo Emerson The whole thing had been a mistake from the beginning. It was if the Old […]
The Pigeon
1623, Leyden Jesse deForest, remembered as Jesse the Walloon, was a dyer permitted by law to use color, a high honor at the time. Jesse’s dream was to establish a Walloon colony in the New World free of persecution. Turned down by the American Virginia Colony in 1622 for an expedition of six hundred followers, […]
The Lost Badge Of Innocence
My family’s Appalachian experience is a composite of Catholic and Protestant steel foundry workers, circuit riders, train flagmen, coal miners and barons, lawyers, teachers, car salesmen, card sharks, and housewives. We are descendants of early American settlers, farmers, merchants, Revolutionary and Civil and Spanish-American War soldiers. We brokered steel, commanded Navy vessels, prosecuted rural crime, […]
Where Are You From?
I can give you that historical bird’s eye view. But I cannot readily explain the mystery of Leonard Side’s inheritance. Most of us know the parents and grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain […]
9/11
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world The heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings But the heart has it’s seasons, its evenings and songs of its own Grateful Dead, Eyes Of The […]
Integrity
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. Samuel Johnson The President’s lawyer says that “Truth isn’t truth” and any effort to question his client under oath is a “perjury trap”: the inevitable result of flouting all recognized rules in a scorched-earth, “win at any cost”, “art of […]