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It Is 2034, and Trump is Still President!

“And was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark Satanic Mills,” queried poet William Blake in dismay at the destruction that industrialization was wreaking on England’s “Green and Pleasant Land.”

 Jonathan Greenberg’s America 2034: Utopia Rising, where the long-time President now calls himself Donald Jesus Trump, depicts the triumph of mercenary cruelty over human comfort.  Like most dystopias, his book is dark and full of gloom; fortunately, he devotes equal time to what a better world would be like.

Here is the Book Review and Author Interview I wrote for Impakter, a European online magazine full of interesting articles. 

Socrates and Me

When I was getting ready for college, I expected that everyone would be sitting around under the trees discussing Plato. I could hardly wait; but when I got there, everyone was sitting around under the trees discussing “boys.”

When, after long years of graduate school, I finally landed a job as an Assistant Professor at a big university, I expected intellectual conversations among my peers.  Although I facilitated  philosophical discussion among my students, as the years went by my fellow faculty developed lockstep loyalty to a theory called deconstruction and were impatient when I refused to adopt it. If I asked a question like “What do you think is the meaning of life,” they  answered that all meanings are “socially constructed” and reprimanded me that,  if I thought otherwise, I was being deplorably “essentialist.”

When I  quit all that to become a full time writer, I  discovered, from a book by Christopher Phillips, that I might find stimulating intellectual conversation if I started a Socrates Cafe like his.  He also developed Democracy Cafes and Constitution Cafes,  conducting them not only on campuses but in elementary schools, prisons, and public squares.





That was in in 2007, and it wasn’t long before I enjoyed probing, explorative discussions on every topic we could imagine.  Where in universities (and especially, in law schools) “Socratic Dialogue” involves such intense argumentation that it easily slides into attack mode,  in Phillips’ style of discussion we avoid  challenging, interrupting, or rebutting each other.  As a teacher, I insisted that my students avoid that kind of viscerally verbal competition because  it stirs up such strong fright and flight emotions that their brains are flooded and they can’t  think at all.  Phillips also finds that respectful discussion and active listening,  rather than scheming your rebuttal in your head, opens rather than closes the mind.

The resulting atmosphere of open-mindedness, where opinion gives way to thought and one question leads to another,  makes every participant a true intellectual.  Anyone who wants to submits a question anonymously; then we vote for which one we will pursue that day. We don’t expect to find a final answer to our questions,  just leave with a lot of new ones.

Here’s a random pick –

Where is your center?  What is the center?     What determines belonging?     Define  normal?     Which truth is “truth”?    What is Common Sense?     What did Jean Paul Sartre mean by being “condemned to be free?”    What is a fact?     What is a good death and do we have a right to one?    Why are we here?  What is integrity?     If we each have “our own worlds” how do we manage to get along?     What is character? Can it be taught?  What is “doing the right thing” and what is that all about?  What is time!

And what do you think?

And the Ring of Power Passes….

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s wonderful series, The Lord of the Rings, a little hobbit named Frodo carries the ring of power through all of the perils of the world in order to destroy it, while enemies try to enhance their own agendas by threatening him at every turn.

That’s where we will be tomorrow.

We can take heart at the good wizard Galdalf’s reply  when Frodo wishes his fate were otherwise:

img_1169    And so it is with us whatever tomorrow’s outcome – Blessed Be