The Unclad Soul

“Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.”   ―   John Lennon

Joe DiMaggio “DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.”  ~ From historian David Halberstam’s book, Summer of '49

The world is broken. Split down the middle of its whole structure of existence. Civilization wobbles on cracked limbs leaving it basically immobile and infirm. The Ebola virus threatens West Africa and potentially all of us. The mulish ignorance and superstition, the wretched poverty and corruption of human life there invites indifference to all the simple protections against deadly diseases. The virus there spreads and kills because of human neglect, illiteracy, and obstinate religious cultism and bizarre myths. It destroys life because of the political indifference of the countries themselves and of the rest of the world toward them. Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan all remain locked in some horrendous blood bath that leaves the rest of us weary with it all. The politics and religious fanaticism involved in that mess of cultures is beyond any rational unraveling. The political corruption, the insane inhuman greed fed by these wars, the waste of life, theirs and of our soldiers, ...