Upcoming Events:
Wednesday, 8 July, noon - Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Mount Horeb Rotary Club, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin
Monday, 13 July, 11:15 am - Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Verona Community Center, 108 Paoli Street, Verona, Wisconsin
Tuesday, 14 July, 7 pm - A Dialog on Writing with Dave Wood, Whitehall Public Library, 18560 Scranton Street, Whitehall, Wisconsin.
The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin “All parental rights are reserved to the parent of a minor child in this state without obstruction or interference from the state, any of its political subdivisions, any other governmental entity, or any other institution …” —Section 3, Parents Bill of Rights, Parental Rights Foundation MAYBERRY—Andy Taylor, Chairman of the School Board,…
by David Benjamin “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” — Kristi Noem MADISON, Wis.—Okay, so you’re watching a re-run of the peerless Jerry Orbach in “Law and Order,” or soaking up Mark Harmon’s neo-Joe Friday shtick in “NCIS.” The trusty good…
by David Benjamin “You can either be Southern or you can be smart and successful.” — Landon Bryant MADISON, Wis.—Perhaps incongruously, as I navigate the waves of eulogies to the wondrous Dolly Parton, I think of the film, A Time to Kill. In the climactic scene, in the trial of a black man who shot…
by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis.—John Milton loved the Devil. In literary history, Milton was the most pious and passionate of Christian poets, a devout believer and a pillar of the Church. But he was simultaneously a complicated intellectual with boundless curiosity and a devotion to artistic rigor. For Milton, it would have been illegitimate to…
by David Benjamin “A penny saved is still just a fucking penny.” —Dan Lok MADISON, Wis.—One of the drawbacks of vegetating in front of the TV after a hard day at the keyboard is the intrusion—and merciless repetition—of ads that seem conceived to rankle my nerves and make me talk back to the screen. For…
by David Benjamin “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” — Frederick Douglass MADISON, Wis.—To fill my class schedule in my last college semester, I signed up, reluctantly, for a course entitled “Leadership Lore.” My professor, whose specialty was classics, steered his students toward ancient conquerors like Cyrus the…
by David Benjamin “Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of the hit-and-run.” — Branch Rickey MADISON, Wis.—The saturation coverage of the recent World Cup featured fans from all over the…
by David Benjamin “MEPHISTO: Hence sin and havoc and ruin—all you call evil, in sum—for me’s the element in which I swim.” — Goethe, Faust MADISON, Wis.—The sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham this month set off a cliché storm in the punditocracy, with numerous references to Graham’s “Faustian bargain” for the royal favor of…
by David Benjamin “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.” — Donald Trump The presidential helicopter rests in the village common, one of its wheels in a sandbox from which several terrified children had…
by David Benjamin “Overturn this!” — The Belgian soccer team MADISON, Wis.—The rumor isn’t true that Gianni Infantino has sent the World Cup trophy back to the shop to super-glue a gold bas-relief of Donald Trump’s scowl over the part of the globe where the Pacific Ocean used to be. Right now, this re-design is…