David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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May 26, 2018
3 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, May 26, 2018

I happened on a nice article about my old friend Connie Venuso that appeared in The Atlanta-Journal Constitution on January 25, 2018. Connie and I worked together at Tall Tales Book Shop in Atlanta back in the late 1980s. At the time she was a nurse and single mother with a son beginning college at the University of Georgia and a daughter in high school. That must not have kept her busy enough, so she took on the part-time job at the bookstore, much to the good fortune of the

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Resist Trump Tuesday

May 23, 2018
2 min

Resist Trump Tuesday

I checked out the Resist Trump Tuesday action this morning after spotting a listing for it on an events calendar somewhere or other. Resist Trump Tuesday is a weekly event organized by Indivisible Oregon that meets 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at the offices of Oregon's senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden. Today's gathering was in the courtyard at the World Trade Center Portland, 121 SW Salmon Street, where Senator Merkley's office is located. Next week they will be at Senator Wyd

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May 6, 2018
5 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, May 5, 2018

Yesterday afternoon I finally made it to a Reed College Friday @ 4 recital. The Friday @ 4 series came to my attention about six weeks ago. The recitals are open to the public and free. It would be foolish not to check them out, but as often happens it took a while to get around to it. You know how I am. The chapel on the third floor of Elliot Hall made for a comfortably intimate setting. The architecture of building and chapel are suitably academic in a wonderfully old-fashi

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Apr 30, 2018
2 min

WHCD: Yet Another Dismal Moment of the Trump Era That Did No One Credit

Sometimes you just want to wish a pox on all their houses. I shed no tears for Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Reports about Michelle Wolf's performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner gave the impression that SHS was the focus of the comedian's venom. This morning I sat through a youtube video of the whole thing. SHS was subjected to abuse for only a small portion of a twenty-minute set that seemed longer. Wolf was harsh, crude, and foul but not unfair to the press secretar

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Apr 28, 2018
4 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, April 28, 2018

I enjoyed watching Kareem Abdul-Jabbar play basketball, first in college at UCLA as Lew Alcindor, then in the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers. He played the game with exceptional skill and conducted himself with uncommon grace. These days those qualities are on display in his commentary as a regular contributing columnist for The Guardian and in articles for other publications. Earlier this week he offered a thoughtful, and some think contrarian, take on c

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Apr 19, 2018
11 min

Tom Nichols and the death of expertise; or, experts and the rest of us (Part 2 of 2)

Part 1 of this two-part essay and review of The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols was published on April 17, 2018. Tom Nichols tells us in the introductory chapter that his book "is about the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, can do about it" (p. 6). His treatment of the first two elements is coherent and well-documented, his points on the whole well-taken. On the third, ho

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Apr 17, 2018
18 min

Tom Nichols and the death of expertise; or, experts and the rest of us (Part 1 of 2)

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols Oxford University Press [2017], 252 pp. I got a little carried away on this one. I hope readers who plow through it find something of interest and merit. Thanks for bearing with me. Our collective inability or unwillingness to distinguish reputable authorities and reliable sources of news and information from knaves, charlatans, and Orwellian propagandists is notorious and b

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Apr 14, 2018
5 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, April 14, 2018

A draft for this post composed yesterday prior to 6 pm PDT opened with an expression of fear that the president will bumble and bluster his way into war with Russia. The text of the draft has been superseded by events. The fear remains. I am reluctant to criticize the strike against Syria's chemical weapons facilities, presuming always that there is, as is claimed, conclusive evidence that the Syrian government is responsible for the chemical weapons attack earlier this week.

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Apr 7, 2018
6 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, April 7, 2018

That migrant caravan has the president in such a tizzy he's calling in the military or the National Guard or something to deal with this existential threat to the nation's security. Never mind that the military is less than enthusiastic about the proposed deployment and has its hands full elsewhere, or that the proposal is completely open-ended until Congress deals with the problem, which no doubt includes building a wall. Got to have that wall. I suppose this will all be pai

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Mar 31, 2018
6 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, March 31, 2017

This week's film recommendations Faces Places (Visages Villages) is a collaboration between 88-year-old French New Wave director Agnès Varda and 33-year-old visual artist JR. Varda and JR travel around France taking photographs of ordinary people they meet and pasting them on the sides of houses, buildings, shipping containers, train cars. It's a delight. A Fantastic Woman won this year's Oscar for best foreign film. A trans waitress faces hostility and hatred while dealing w

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March for Our Lives in Portland: Notes & Impressions

Mar 25, 2018
4 min

March for Our Lives in Portland: Notes & Impressions

The morning was rough, raw, overcast and cold, temperature in the forties when I arrived downtown at 9:10 and strolled from the bus stop at SW 5th and Washington to Powell's City of Books where I would pass some time browsing and avail myself of the facilities before joining the demonstration slated to commence in the North Park Blocks at 10. I was not alone in setting out early. Several passengers on the bus I boarded at 8:55 gave off a je ne sais quoi aura of protester that

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Mar 18, 2018
6 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, March 17, 2018

In an uncharacteristic display of good sense I decided to baby the recalcitrant right knee by skipping the Saturday run. My first thought had been to cut back on mileage, set out to go three or four miles instead of seven, nine, or ten, with a commitment to break off the run at first sign of discomfort. That might have done no harm, but in the end I opted for the more cautious course. The running had been going well, routinely notching twenty-five to thirty miles a week. At t

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Mar 11, 2018
1 min

Florida Opens a Door

An old Atlanta pal, call him M, came out in support of Florida gun legislation that opens the door to arming teachers. While M is a teacher himself and of the opinion that armed teachers are more likely to shoot themselves in the foot than to take out an individual bent on wreaking mayhem with an assault-style weapon, he accepts opening that door because the legislation also has provisions the NRA hates. I take his point but with reservations. I think opening that door to arm

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Mar 4, 2018
2 min

How does he do it?

Yes, 'tis the president I have in mind. This week the honorable occupant of the Oval Office advanced a proposal for dealing with gun violence of such dubious constitutionality that even a staunch advocate of gun control such as I must take exception, and his ongoing treatment of Jeff Sessions is so abominable that I am compelled to speak up for the attorney general, a man for whom my regard is not of the highest order. The president advocated that we take guns first and go th

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Feb 28, 2018
8 min

Guns and the Great Culture Divide

Most men, and above all intellectuals, believe what they want to believe, once and for all, I perhaps included, and in the last analysis they make statements of faith which are totally immune to argument. — Raymond Aron The president is all over the map on gun issues, rattling off proposals bullet-point style like an ADHD kid who neglected to take his meds. His grab-bag couples reasonable, modest policies with demagoguery and nuttiness. Improving the existing background-check

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Jan 31, 2018
3 min

The state of...things...

Yesterday evening I poured a Deschutes Brewery Obsidian Stout into a glass and settled in for Donald J. Trump's first State of the Union address. I did not relish the prospect. There was temptation to skip the telecast and read—well, skim—the transcript later before going on to accounts and analysis. The responsibility to see for myself won out. The speech went much as anticipated. I give Trump a pass on the questionable assertion that the state of our union is strong. A pres

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Jan 21, 2018
4 min

Uneasy About Shutting It Down

I don't have a good feeling about the shutdown. Each side expresses confidence the other will take the hit. Democrats point to public support for taking care of Dreamers and to the 2013 shutdown that did not cost Republicans in subsequent elections. Republicans think they have a winning hand when they paint the Democratic position as support for illegal immigration at the expense of the troops. Trump sees this as red meat for his slavering base. The country is not well served

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Jan 14, 2018
3 min

Another Travesty of Justice; or, yes, the Bundys Again

I held off for a few days to give myself time to take a breath and cool down before taking up Monday's mistrial ruling in the trial of Cliven Bundy and sons Ammon and Ryan on conspiracy, weapons, and other charges related to a 2014 armed standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada. The mistrial was declared because the prosecution and government purposely withheld key evidence from the defense. The feds claimed that fears of violence against witnesses was "part of their decision-making i

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Jan 8, 2018
9 min

On Writing about Trump and the Regime

A short while back I gave way to an impulse that may not have been my best when I went off on a rant about the tyrant Trump and his running-dog lackeys. I had second thoughts even as I wrote because I am wary of opening up a debate about whether or not there are grounds for saying Trump is a tyrant or is unhinged or should be impeached. This ends up being a distraction from substantive issues. Besides, if I am going to toss around epithets like "tyrant," "running dog," and "l

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Dec 17, 2017
3 min

Good grief, what a week

I have tried, truly I have, to rant with discretion, to resist the urge to sarcasm, invective, cheap shots, and general snarkiness, and to aim for an elevated level of discourse, maybe even gravitas, with the blog. Yes, I have on occasion dubbed individuals blockheads, an insult of which Samuel Johnson was fond, and otherwise laid abuse on powerful creatures of the public sphere. I hope that has not become a distinguishing feature of this space. The times make it a challenge.

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