When I visit places, it never occurs to me to take photos of them. I also know that if I take a photo, I will never look at it again. As a traveler, a place has meaning while I am there at the moment, however slight that meaning may be. It is the experience of the moment that matters, not a memory of it, which is what a photograph is.
In the way that burlesque, roller derbies, and tattooing and other body modifications were reclaimed in the postmodern age (though not without detractors), sideshows and freak shows have tried to become something different than their earlier iterations. Many say they intend to be inspirational, empowering, and to realign conceptions about difference.
WashU students scrubbed off the racist symbols as fast as they could, but the damage would cost $10,000 to repair. Meanwhile, the video Patriot Front made of the sabotage would be seen, liked, and shared by thousands. The destroyed mural is titled “The Story That Never Ends.”
In elementary school, as a fund-raiser, we kids were sent out to sell 16-ounce boxes of Bachman pretzels for twenty-five cents each. It was easy to sell lots of boxes because everyone loved them. My mother had to stop me from eating whole boxes at a sitting.
Make no mistake. Our Team is a wonderful book in this sense. It is easy to read. It tells an interesting story built on thorough research in newspapers and secondary sources, skillful organization, pleasant writing, and narrative drive. Epplin gives each of his four main characters equal attention in an account carefully woven out of the cloth of several seasons. For the baseball fan, either serious or casual, even if one’s favorite team is not the Indians, this book can provide several hours of pleasure.
Much of The Lincoln Brigade involves actual warfare, action scenes that have little to do with the heroism of Boy Commandos but a lot to do with the grimness of EC war comics. Blood flows. Victories are followed by defeats, and by the end of the comic, we approach the present with old men’s memories.
The words we speak influence how we see the world both figuratively and literally, psycholinguists tell us. Certain words even trigger involuntary eye movements.
The endtimes is just one more stage in deep time.The phrase is all over the place these days, and it is well chosen. Deep time is mysterious; it implies the sort of reflection one does in a hammock on a lazy Sunday.
Wolf hunters rationalize the bloodlust as pragmatic, saying they are protecting their livestock or avenging their slaughter. The facts seldom bear this out. Instead, the electric thrill of the hunt comes from the archetype of the wolf as sworn enemy, sinister and sometimes supernatural.
You cannot use biased humans to design a bias-free system. You cannot feed vast databases filled with biased or distorted information into a computer program and expect a clean and pure result. And you cannot hand off the responsibility of judging human nature to a nonhuman entity. Why do we keep trying?