The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.
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Some years ago, five or six years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I was asked to participate in a conference at Boston University’s marvelously named Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
The details of the conference are swaddled in the mists of times gone by, but I do remember that part of my talk was devoted to some thoughts about our tendency to deploy language to emasculate surprise. In particular, I dilated on the curious phrase “the foreseeable future.” With what cheery abandon we employ it! Yet what a nugget of unfounded optimism those three words embrace!
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Eighty years ago on June 6, 1944 the United States joined with Great Britain, the free French forces, and Canada to mount a bold invasion of the beachhead in Normandy, France as a last-ditch effort to gain a foothold in Europe against the conquering forces of Hitler’s Germany.
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Monday, a week ago, Holocaust Day was marked by solemn remembrances in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world. It was marked in the U.S., as has been customary, by a presidential address, where Biden said nothing that would garner more than perfunctory notice.
Turns out that that was by design. For Biden had already approved a decision that gives cheer to the shade of Hitler and all his modern wanna-be-s — embargoing any arms to Israel that would allow them to keep Hamas from surviving intact and reasserting its plan for death to Israel.
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