Even for someone who has not carefully followed Bernie’s tenure in office, now going on ten years in the senate preceded by sixteen years in the house, it’s not hard to figure out what his political passions are: abortion, health care, LGBT rights, minimum wage, racism, and so on.
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A little scrutiny of the senator’s record might reveal a tendency—just to take some current examples—to champion big expenditures for military bases in his home state even as he pleads helplessness in challenging government funding of Planned Parenthood or enforcing the laws on illegal immigration. All in all, it’s a pattern that’s too familiar.
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Cost identifies the major phases of corruption: the national banks, the rise of political parties and bosses, Gilded Age capitalist cronyism, and Progressive bureaucratic sprawl.
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It all comes down to arrogance. Trump is just too much like Malvolio: competent at a limited number of things—managing a household staff, for example. But Malvolio supposes that his limited gifts equip him for loftier, grander things.
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That said, the general idea of the “audacity of hope” was that in an age —pre-2008, you understand — of desperate cynicism, we needed a gargantuan dose of optimism, even chutzpah, to find the silver lining around the darkest of modern clouds, chiefly those hovering above the United States. The only man with the requisite skills for the task was Mr. Audacity-of-Hope-and-Change himself.
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It was a symbol of local pride, and like all things regional and local, it fell under the inflexible scrutiny of progressive aparatchiks and was found wanting as racist, nativist and, of course, political.
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Yet I hear often enough of students at state universities who attend class in their pajamas; and I once heard the story of a young woman who was stopped by the highway patrol for driving naked. Why? She said it was “hot.” It doubtless was, but her inability to distinguish between dressing appropriately for the season and dressing not at all might stand as a symbol of the times.
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With homosexual marriage given Justice Kennedy’s benediction as an inherent right, is it too far-fetched to envision courts granting homosexual litigants custody of children from the heterosexual marriages being dissolved?
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Shakespeare, more or less shorthand for the entire Western tradition, and perhaps its greatest literary manifestation, contains in abundance the most sublime meditations on nature and, outside of Scripture, the deepest insights into the soul of man quite likely ever written: high ambition, hilarious folly, bestial desire and the most refined love.
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But what of a modern-day Rip Van Winkle? First of all, the modern Rip would not need to snooze for twenty years; a mere eight or fewer might suffice for him to find changes unimaginable before his nap.
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