Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, people are struggling to come up with ways to prevent future tragedies involving mass murders by gun-toting crazies. Some are calling for renewing the ban on military-type assault weapons and high capacity ammo magazines of the type used to gun down the victims at Sandy Hook elementary school. The previous ban was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and expired in 2004. Previous efforts to renew the ban have never gotten out of committee. Others have suggested that instead of banning weapons, a hefty tax be placed on certain types of ammunition. After all, without bullets, a gun is about as useful as a length of pipe in a fight. Back in 1994, Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced a bill to impose a 10,000% tax on hollow point ammo, saying, " Guns don't kill people, bullets do. " Earlier in the year, Chicago discussed imposing a 5 cent per bullet "violence tax," which ended up going nowhere. Still others hav...

Now that the initial wave of shock and horror over the shootings at Sandy Hook has worn off, the national debate has again started about gun control, and to a less degree, mental health issues. Discussions about both are long overdue. After every recent shooting, the first reaction of the gun-lovers is...to buy more guns, because they fear "the government" is going to make it impossible to get guns. Am I the only one who sees this as closely related to the behavior pattern of people who are hoarders ? I'm tired of hearing some say that this happened because of some amorphous  "Evil" in the world that humankind is powerless to overcome. If there's Evil afoot, it's what Hannah Arendt, writing about the Nazis, call the banality of evil :  "normalizing the unthinkable." Such as accepting the idea that the man or woman on the street needs to own military-style semi-automatic assault weapons with huge magazines of ammo. There have been quite ...

The other day I awoke to the news that pianist Dave Brubeck had passed away at age 91, one day short of his birthday, December 6. To say he was a jazz giant is only to illustrate the weakness of the written word, compared to his chosen language, music. I first got turned onto him as a twenty-something who had grown bored with his dorm roon collection of rock and roll. KERA (local public radio station) at the time played classical during the day, and jazz at night. My first purchase was a double LP called The Dave Brubeck Quartet at Carnegie Hall . To say it knocked my socks off is to further illustrate the weakness of the written word. He was born in the San Francisco Bay area. After graduating from the College of the Pacific (where his inability to read music created a bit of a scandal), he was drafted and served in George Patton's Third Army. While in the army he formed one of the army's first multi-racial bands. It was then that he first met his long-time collaborato...