In honor of the United States Congress, I’d like to present Bertolt Brecht’s acerbic little song with the grand title of “The Song about the Insufficiency of Human Striving.”
The video is followed by the German text, with my own loose translation after each stanza.1
Das Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Strebens Continue reading “A song of insufficiency”
I’ve read more than one news item describing how drivers sometimes place too much faith in their GPS navigation devices. Guided by the disembodied voice coming from the dashboard, some have doggedly followed dirt roads to nowhere, faced oncoming one-way traffic, or narrowly avoided driving over cliffs. The authority of the voice-in-a-box overrules common sense […]
So today the real Americans turned out en masse to protest “socialism,” government spending, middle-class tax cuts, taxes (period), and the election of a Kenyan Muslim as president of the United States. Not that we’re racist or anything. Just patriotic. You can tell by our “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and our use of Boston […]
I just want to record an insight on politics from a discussion with our favorite American in Italy. (Call him Giacomo.) It is this: Americans, taken by and large, are compassionate as long as they don’t have to talk or think about “compassion.” “Compassion” is fuzzy-headed, ineffectual, improvident, and invites all kinds of trouble. It […]
à la Rob 