Life is interconnected, making sorrow and absurdity cousins. Sometimes that interconnection invites laughter.  The reaction might seem perverse but it can also be enlightened. In times of great adversity, if we look, we might see clowns cavorting in the margins of the shadows. The an

If the coronavirus is a hoax, as some preachers claim, I must admire the people who engineered it.  Over 30,000 casualties in this country, not to mention the 160,000 deaths worldwide. To accomplish this task takes more staging than one of Andrew Webber’s musicals.  So far, no one

As April 23 is William Shakespeare’s birth and death date, being alert to language adaptations inspired by the coronavirus seems appropriate. One group of new words pertain to how the illness has changed our daily lives. A second are words the President has ascribed with new meaning

During this pandemic, I keep reflecting on the opening lines of Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times and the worst of times.  The words suggest that fate has a fickle side.  For example, thieves might be happy that wearing a mask in public is acceptable.

Twice each day while I was quarantined because a neighbor was awaiting coronavirus test results, a nurse came to my apartment to take my temperature. One morning, I forgot to put in my hearing aids, so I didn’t respond to her knock until she pounded on the door like a lumberjack. Wh

THE WRATH OF GAYA While the number of coronavirus victims rises in the United States, it’s difficult to see a man like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the scientist who led us through the AID’s epidemic, take his marching orders from President Donald Trump, a bungling, babbling buffoon whose a

Having lived through the Asian flu epidemic in the late 1950s, I’m pretty sure the coronavirus will eventually wend its way out of our system. For one thing, science knows a good deal more about how to mount a viral defense than in those earlier days. A vaccine may arrive sooner rat

Rudyard Kipling’s poem IF  is a tribute to Leander Starr Jameson, a Victorian war hero who led the failed Jameson Raid against the Transvaal Republic.  I know this history because in the 1960s I taught at Jameson High School in Zimbabwe. The school was named in the man’s honor

Here’s another patriarchal hangover that is affecting the 2020 election. According to several studies, likeability is optional to voters if the candidate is male, but is a requirement for a female. Also true is that people view forceful women as lecturing but give a thumbs up to a m

  Indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon are locked in a battle with the government to preserve their lands and way of life. So far, they have shunned all offers of money.  The rest of human civilization could learn from their values. After all, where do you buy drinking wate