Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I just looked and it's been almost a year since I've posted anything to this blog. I can't remember when I last posted as Dr Ralph on Facebook (and in my other guise I mostly share pictures of recent paintings from Instagram). Twitter? Bah. Most social media has become anti-social and I'm sick of it. Even for stuff that normally I would have some natural affinity for. It's tiresome and I'm tired. I no longer feel up to joining the army of angry voices out there, even though I find myself alternately pissed off and horrified. My most optimistic opinion about current events is that we, as Americans, have been stricken with a bout of temporary insanity, although truth be told, I don't think that insanity is ours alone. I don't think trying to shout louder than the folks I disagree with is going to make the situation any better. So I've decided to shut the fuck up. Mostly, anyway. I've got several friends and more than a few relatives t...

Years later I worked with a guy who was a couple of years older than me who said he never dated anyone who couldn't tell him where they were when Kennedy was assassinated - they were, he opined, either too young or too out of it. As for me, my family had moved from Fort Worth to the Chicago suburbs the summer I turned nine. The elementary school I attended in Park Forest was close enough that I used to walk home for lunch. That Friday 50 years ago, my brother and I had come home as usual and were watching Bozo's Circus on WGN when the station broke away for news flashes that President Kennedy had been shot. I wasn't sure what to think other than it seemed shocking - impossible to believe. But I'd seen it on television. My class had introduced to the idea of  "current events" that year. We were supposed to tell something we'd heard or read about in the news. This seemed like the ultimate current event. I headed back to my classroom (I have no recoll...

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 ...