Midlife Meditation

Just over half the Republican Presidential candidates. In the end, will there be anyone left to vote for whomever survives the GOP presidential nomination race? Donald Trump set the tone for the campaign with his vicious, unapologetic assault on immigrants. He started by slandering Mexican immigrants, and under criticism, doubled down to propose eliminating birthright citizenship, the crown jewel of post-Civil War Constitutional reforms. Following Mitt Romney's embarrassing defeat in 2012, the Republican Party did some deep navel-gazing. One of its conclusions was that the party had to start appealing to immigrants if it was to have any chance of ever winning the White House again. Trump's two-month tirade against immigrants is a brutish repudiation of that conclusion, and the speed with which so many of his opponents for the nomination jumped on the Constitution-scrapping bandwagon demonstrates the shallowness of the introspection. Ted Cruz has downplayed the immigra...

6-25-14 I can do without a lot. No private room? Share a bed with a stranger? Same food for every lunch, every dinner, for two weeks? No TV except the World Cup? No good beer? Nothing but instant coffee? I’m good. In fact, I’m great. I can handle being without all sorts of creature comforts, and often choose vacations that take me away from all these things. But take away the internet, and oh boy, am I going to get cranky. It’s amazing how dependent I’ve become on this invention which didn’t even exist for me before 1995, and which I didn’t begin using in earnest until 2003. So that’s really just over a decade of living on the web. But live on it I do. Except in Ghana. My first night, at the Hotel Obama, I had a good strong connection, and was able to Skype with Amy. I expected the same for our week in Dzodze, at the White Dove Hotel—and I was mistaken. There was nothing, no way of connecting at all. Even mobile roaming was dicey. I did manage some time at an i...