The Unclad Soul

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said in one of his Fireside Chats, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” President John Kennedy said, “For only the President represents the national interest. Upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country and all nations of the world.” President Lyndon Johnson once referred to the White House as “that house of decisions.” Moral leadership. The interest of the nation and the world. Critical decision making. Those are some of the most important responsibilities of the president of the United States. The presidency is not about brand; it’s not about endless rallies of off the cuff speeches filled with jokes and taunts. It was never intended to be a place of chaos, disorganized strategies, or useless press conferences where a spokesperson and not the preside...

Stephen Paddock, the mass murderer in Las Vegas, continues to puzzle law enforcement and investigators. He will most likely never be understood. As I mentioned in my last essay and blog post, I think we have to seriously rethink our humanity, and consider how vulnerable we all are both personally and as a society, to the deadly effects of mental illness. This is not something new, and it is not something that will go away. I have no confidence in our political system to do anything useful regarding gun legislation. Congress will talk about it, offer their empty prayers to victims, and say perhaps the gun issue needs to be looked at. But the NRA has a death grip on Congress and state legislators across the nation. The NRA controls gun manufacturing, gun sales, and the gun lobby. Nothing will change there. Money, and lots of it, fuels our political system. Not the safety of the nation. Not the value of our children. Not the security of special events outdoors or indoors. The...

I am a liberal in politics and religion. All of my friends know this. I am a seeker. They know this, too. I have never been comfortable with easy answers, with the accepted truth of the majority, with well-meaning but trite words of comfort. I want to find some deeper meaning to it all. I want to know there is a meaning. Beyond the shallowness of our current day there has to be more. More than the acrimony and alienation between so many of us. More than the shameless meanness of our leaders. More than the materialistic gluttony, the voracious urge for empty consumption of so many of us. We’re all appetite and no provision. Something has turned us sour, spoiled our sense of humanity, and left us rotting inside our vacant rituals. The election of a president in this country is now a tawdry spectacle of infantile behavior. The candidates preen and harangue and offer us not examples of capable leadership or even decent human conduct. Instead, they divide us with caus...

"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on election day.  By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting.  In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard's vote." ~ David Foster Wallace, Novelist