Steven Parmenius

I have noticed that J.K Rowling and the Trans community are not very a happy with each other. I am not a stakeholder in their dispute as I do not use the washrooms in question but not being a stakeholder allows me to something that is glaringly obvious and, as far as I can tell, invisible to the participants: J.K Rowling and her critics are stuck in a feedback loop. Every act of calling out J.K. Rowling and her fans elicits a new act of insensitivity and defiance. This evokes yet more calling out which is, predictably, met by yet more defiance. Liberal, progressive and conservative Americans are stuck in the same loop. Even some liberals have figured out that the aim of the Trump voter is to goad you into calling him stupid which is the point at which he wins the argument. Of course knowing this does not solve the problem for a feedback loop, once it is constituted, is virtually unbreakable. This is unfortunate because a feedback loop, once it starts, will end ultimately in physical co

  I have lived in the United States and met many fine people there. I think bourbon and southern barbeque are marvels. Things like the blues and jazz loom large in my imagination and what would I be without Melville or Whitman or Hart Crane’s The Bridge ? I could go on and on about the America of my mind but now I have to deal with a new, though not quite unexpected fact. The America of my mind will soon be only in my mind for the real one has a decade left at best if it is lucky. I mean this as literally as possible: perhaps a bit later but perhaps shockingly soon there will be three countries. One will be on the East coast and the other will be on the West. In the middle will be a ‘rump’ America. These three states will have to work out all kinds of issues in a climate of profound hostility and suspicion like how to divvy up America’s vast military establishment. This will be the true start of the ‘new century’ exactly as the breakup of the Soviet Union was the true end of the last.

       “This kind of spiritual terrorism is showing up on a national scale and, as in my own faith journey, only reason can get us out.” So says an author in the Huffington Post ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/evangelical-christians-covid-19-Pandemic ). This author is a disappointed Pentecostal and calls herself a ‘skeptic’ though I can hardly imagine a statement less in the spirit of the skeptical schools of antiquity or the early modern period than the one cited above. I am not here to belabor a naïve author, however, I ALWAYS cringe when disaffected fundamentalists talk about ‘reason’. This because they have swapped one talisman for another: they speak of reason exactly as they once spoke of Jesus. After all, what are we referring to when we say that ‘reason’ will get us ‘out’ of something? What reason? Deductive reason? Inductive reason? Dialectical reason? Practical reason? Hermeneutic reason? Further, why reason and not also intuition, imagination or compassion? What about art

  This is a Sanskrit word that means, among other things, ‘yes’. ‘Yes’ is a word worth thinking about as, I suppose, is its counterpart and opposite ‘no’. There are consequences to uttering either. Eastern thinkers might say karmic consequences but as a westerner I won’t go that far. I will simply say that no has its dangers exactly as yes does even though the  Gospels  tell us to confine our discourse to either. The dangers of yes are simple enough: we might say yes too quickly. We may take the pie out of the oven before it is fully baked. The problem with no is more subtle: no develops into a nasty, self-thwarting habit. Yeats prayed for his daughter to think opinions are accursed. This is futile advice, of course, for opinion making, opinion exchanging and opinion contesting are part of the sad necessary, business of life. Opinions may not be accursed but they are, perhaps, part of the curse which Christians call the fall. Opinions are acts, utterances, of determinate exclusion. An

  From time to time I pick up the KJV Bible I stole from a hotel room and read a section or two. The other night I read the books of Ezra and Nehemiah which concern the reconstruction of the temple and the Jewish community in the reign of King Cyrus that followed the exile in Babylon. I must say that, where a certain sort of Christianity is concerned, it is not encouraging. Ordinary Jewish people were having trouble making ends meet and were particularly burdened by taxes demanded by the Persian Empire. The ‘nobles’ and ‘leaders of the people’ took full advantage, of course, by making a series of predatory ‘sub-prime’ loans. To borrow money ordinary Jews put up their farms and vineyards for collateral. When they inevitably defaulted the ‘nobles’ scooped up their land which, one has little doubt, was their intention all along. The inevitable result of this, of course, was a concentration of land among a few ruling nobles and penury for the rest including people so desperate they sold t