Steven Parmenius

Why do Evangelical Christians (even in Canada) love Donald Trump? The client/patron model explains this too and I finally have an answer to a question my sister once posed as to why one should take a Roman history class. Evangelical Christians are paranoid but being paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you. What this well worn phrase indicates is that one may have a justified sense of exclusion or persection but apply it to all the wrong objects and magnify it out of all proportion. Evangelicals think that they, the Christians, are subjects of a global wave of perscution that the 'left' does not care about or perhaps even secretly endorses. There is some merit to this a complaint: the 'left' does not in fact care about 'religious persecution' of Christians in places like Egypt or Pakistan. Of course this fact gets spun in terms of an apocalyptic conflict between the children of God and Satan and if you point out, say, that, that religious confl

This is a frequent complaint I hear among those who are not professors or journalists or doctors or other members of the clever classes. I think I have figured out one thing that is behind it and it is in fact pretty simple and logical. There is no doubt in my mind at all that workers would greatly benefit from a renewal of social democracy but workers and peasants operate under the principle that hanging onto what you have, no matter how little, is more important than grasping for more. This bird in the hand principle, as old as Aesop's fables at least but surely older, explains the powerful grip that corporations have on the working class and why, though they despise the politicians that SERVE corporations, they actually do trust in corporations to work for their interests. Let me explain it this way: the relationship of worker to corporation is the relationship of client to patron and as long as this relationship exists it will be next to impossible to move the working class vot

"Look into your heart and write" said Sir Phillip Sidney in his famous sonnet. Of course, he was toying with us as poets so often do. His plea to abandon literary convention for the authenticity of the heart is itself a literary trope and one the heart rightly scorns. The heart does not quite reveal itself in this easy way at least for most of us. If it does, once in a while, you should count your lucky stars but you will not make a poetic career out of Sidney's advice and I doubt he intended that you should. Still, we all, as Sidney did centuries ago, face the terror of the blank page. I myself, for over a decade, did not write a single line of verse out a simple inability to start even one line. By this I mean the first line of course. If you want to write you need a trick for getting the first line for after that the other lines come as naturally as the orderly flow of conversation (in my experience) so it is a question of breaking the ice. My trick is just this. The h