Thank you for the comments you all posted and the many emails on this essay.  I am reposting this as an anthology: broken up in four unique pieces. “Pro-life.” I hold A. S. Neill, who coined those words in 1960, a genius copy-writer. For their powerful simplicity and amazing symbolic value. The value of those words, I opine, lays even more in that the antonym is absolutely unacceptable for all who are not institutionalized or indefinitely...

Thank you for the comments you all posted and the many emails on this essay.  I am reposting this as an anthology: broken up in four unique pieces. Clichés ... Clichés are cliché because they are soooo ... damned cliché! "The pen is mightier than the sword". There is an absolute truth, first written by novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. Fantastic wisdom. And, now, shockingly, reduced to an ordinary cliché. Every writer,...

Clichés ... Clichés are cliché because they are soooo ... damned cliché! "The pen is mightier than the sword". There is an absolute truth, first written by novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. Fantastic wisdom. And, now, shockingly, reduced to an ordinary cliché. Every writer, actually everybody, must understand the power of words. The power of words is astoundingly far beyond that ubiquitous cliché. So much good, and even more...

With due humility, I know more about the most enduring social pathology in history, antisemitism, and about the Holocaust than most. Not as much as some. And, incomparably uninformed compared to some legitimate scholars who have invested significant shares of their intellectual beings studying both. I read some of them. Marvel at the dedication they had – and some continue to have - to dwell into those subjects to the depth and breadth they...

I faced this keyboard - still dark coast to coast - with some concern. Just some because of admitted arrogance as a writer of often provocative stuff. Would I be able to relate coherently what was buzzing about in my mind. Not-torturously. Rather, fun and informative. And worthwhile your time. Here goes a yeoman’s try at all that. My eyes popped wide open at 2:17 AM. Inexplicably, one hour and one minute ahead of my normal-body-clock-alarm. For...

Early January, 2020, I got a Happy New Year email from an acquaintance in Milano. He, a well-known orthopedic surgeon and university professor. “Happy New Year, Stefano, and to your family. Have you heard, are you hearing about our new Chinese virus, exploding in Codogno? A COVID virus? Makes me wish I was a virologist, not a cutter.” Even just two months later, as the world would become intimately acquainted with the scourge of COVID 19, I...

Some experts and talking heads of all kinds, write, talk about, lecture, teach, wax philosophical, sell millions of CDs, about success. They urge everybody who listen, watch and read them, that would be many millions of people, to spend their money and follow their advice. And engage in every kind of behavior imaginable therefrom, thus, achieve the success they covet. Everything, starting with imagery to success, entirely war-like. If you...

The enormity of the holocaust, the most grotesque exhibit of perversity of mankind the boundless inhumanity of people. Fascism and ultimately Hitler, rose from the ashes of Germany’s total devastation and even more importantly humiliation after World War I. The victorious countries, including the United States, France and England, stripped Germany of its status in the world. And, again, more importantly the inbred pride and fierce nationalism...

The Holocaust has been on my mind, well, it is often. With Ukraine having been set ablaze by Putin—a legitimate 20th and 21st centuries competitor to Stalin, Mao and Hitler—my mind has been preoccupied a lot with it, perhaps accounting for some loss of sleep and occasional headaches therefrom. It is intellectually disingenuous to address the Holocaust, without addressing the Ukrainian Holocaust. The murder of one and a half million Jews, a...

From: The Big Man In The Khaki Shirt And Riding Boots With His Arm Up A Cow’s “Thing”       Then he started sweating and swearing. The man could keep a fierce string of swear words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs going for an hour. And he could do that in at least five languages. And he did that at a deafening level. Uncontested. Who dared stop The Big Man In The Starched-As-Plaster Khaki Shirt And Riding Boots when he got started? He started...