Hold Your Nose, But Vote

The centuries old educational model--the university as final intellectual destination--as rearranged by the pandemic: those interested in the humanities conclude that the only righteous way of educating oneself is via the autodidatic method in which one is free to explore the differences of the meaning of the words 'theology' and 'religion', and explore the nuanced divide between the concept of 'reciprocity' and 'quid pro quo'.

Those interested in the sciences will proceed with their usual rigor in classrooms and labs designed for the intense scrutiny of the observerable physical world, with the pre-pandemic educational model intact.

That the country should be run by people who write Letters to the Editor to The New York Times becomes manifestly obvious, as the eloquence and common sense of the People, as expressed daily in the Opinion section of that newspaper, would seem to be far superior to the eloquence and common sense expressed by the officials elected to represent those People who write Letters to the Editor, though what these People have written are not letters at all, but emails.

Notable too that The Times is now placing stories that once would have made Front Page--a US President pressuring a foreign official to move a golf tournament to a property the President owns in that foreign officials' country, the US Senate rejecting a ban on the transfer of military grade weaponry to police departments in the USA, the continued loosening of EPA guidelines on emissions--to pages 10, 16, and 20. The news is now parceled out in small bundles of information beginning with things that happened yesterday, things that shouldn't have happened, and things that will happen tomorrow and the day after that, in a correspondingly synchronous declension.

In a democracy all roads lead to Letters to the Editor. And history is for the living, that is history's most curious quality--that it piles up higher and higher in the present.