Did Thoreau Drink Martinis?

What one gathers from reading Jerry Brown's review of William Perry's new book, "My Journey to the Nuclear Brink" (Stanford Security Studies, 2016) published in the New York Review of Books, July 14, as "A Stark Nuclear Warning," is that there are no heroes anymore, though it's about time for one or two, and that a heroine is just as good and far more likely to emerge from the rubble of current leadership.

Even more dire, or at least curious: all the liberals one knows now were yesterday's conservatives, while the conservatives of today don't make any sense, or at least as little sense as Dadaists, whose whole project was, in large part, to mock socio-political sensibilities by inverting their meanings to the degree that they would mean their opposites.

In our tidy planetary sphere, yet another political season is upon us. Unthinkable though it might be, we seem to have backed ourselves into the same existential corner we have been backing ourselves into since the revolution, or at least the civil war. We're so accustomed to being in crises that it's comfortable. Now the odds are stacked so that it's possible, to paraphrase another poet, we'll never change our lives or find our real voices, though a real voice may be what we've been hearing all the time.