Reviews and Reflections on Life In America
By Wayne Allensworth I was strolling around the campus of a major state university not so many years ago. Along the way, I committed what has become a cardinal sin in our brave new globalized world—I noticed something that stood out like a man in a three-piece suit in a 21st century supermarket. What I noticed was that the student body didn’t look very American. I saw lots of representatives of...
By Wayne Allensworth In Act 3, Scene 2 of King Henry IV, part II, Shakespeare’s grand comic knave, Falstaff, reminisces about old times with his friend Justice Shallow, particularly a memorable night more than 50 years in the past. They recall a woman, Jane Nightwork, who, like Falstaff and Shallow, has fallen victim to advancing age, as time flows on, and the chimes will eventually toll for the...
By Wayne Allensworth This is the second of my articles on Iain McGilchrist and his hemispheric theory of human cognition, which posits two apparently opposing, actually complementary, modes of being and perception as expressed in the Right and Left brain hemispheres (RH and LH hereafter). In the first article, I raised the issue of relationships and how our personality—and our world—come into...
By Tom Piatak August 15 is the Feast of the Assumption of Blessed Mother, a day that always makes me particularly glad to be Catholic. In Cleveland, the principal celebration held outside of a church building is undoubtedly the one sponsored by Holy Rosary parish in Little Italy, my parish for some 20 years. I made the long trek to Little Italy for years, because the music was excellent. But I...
By Wayne Allensworth I can’t remember exactly when AIDS became a big media scare back in the 1980’s, but as noted earlier, 24/7 cable news needed material to crank up what became a constant festival of horrors. CNN had to have something to talk about, and the emerging globalist managerial elite needed crises to justify the extension of its power over us. Anthony Fauci was auditioning for his...
By Wayne Allensworth In his magisterial books The Master and His Emissary and the two volume The Matter with Things, the brilliant polymath Iain McGilchrist argues for a world that comes into being via an interactive process between embodied consciousness and the Other—what’s out there, or, as the case may be, others, other people. He believes that relationships precede the relata. I’ll be...
By Wayne Allensworth Over the Rainbow…Everybody remembers Judy Garland singing that lovely song in The Wizard of Oz. The song was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg specifically for Judy to sing in the movie. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. After Toto snaps at Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), Judy as Dorothy wonders if there is any place where there is no trouble. There must...
By Wayne Allensworth Some thoughts prompted by viewing the movie The Sound of Freedom… Observing post-American life is something like watching a train wreck. Some of you may remember those disaster movies of the 1970s — Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and on and on. Disaster movies and horror films. There was the giant-critters-will-eat-you genre — think Jaws — and...
By Wayne Allensworth Gretchen Peters is another fine musician you may not have heard of. Born in New York City in 1957, Gretchen Peters found her way to Nashville in 1988 after living in Boulder Colorado in the 1970s, where she had played in local clubs. She has written songs that became hits for country stars such as Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, and George Strait, as...
By Wayne Allensworth It’s easy to push the proverbial “panic button” these days. Just turn on your TV, scan the “news” on the Internet, or watch any popular movie released in recent years, or decades for that matter. Take TV, for example, beginning with something as seemingly innocuous as The Weather Channel. From what I can gather from a quick web search, The Weather Channel was launched in 1982...
Recent Comments