I am writing this on the fiftieth anniversary of a significant cultural event. Fifty years ago today, a white cartoonist responded to a request from a white woman who was concerned about the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., by a white man. Like Jane Elliot, another white woman, Harriet Glickman used her response to…
Author: Clio
North American Traveler
My father liked to travel. When I was a child, it was his goal to take his family to every state in the nation, and as many Canadian provinces as possible. Some of these states, we lingered in. I had grandparents in Virginia and Florida. My father had been born and raised in Utah; my…
Waters, Washington, and Civility
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has been called “uncivil,” and there’s at least one call for her censure. More on that later. First, I want to tell you a story. ◊♦◊ The year was 1776. The month was December. The winter in Virginia was unusually cold, and the Continental Army was struggling. Soldiers lacked food, shelter,…
White Man Waking
I’m a white man. I have about the whitest pedigree around: The twelfth descendant of Miles Standish and John Alden, with a family tree to prove it. I have plantation owners in my background. Just about any sentence that begins “White people in this country …” applies to something my ancestors did. I spent most…
A Special Kind of Courage
My nine-year-old son did something really brave today. We were at a tourist attraction, and there was a rope climbing course. For $11, anyone over the height of 48 inches would be strapped into a full harness system, and then they be allowed to wander a four-story-tall gridwork of steel supports and rope bridges. Neither…
My Father’s Games
I remember the first time my father showed me GAMES Magazine. I must have been around ten years old, because it was shortly after the magazine premiered in 1977. We’d seen puzzle magazines before, but this was a new kind of thing: It had a slim section of traditional puzzle magazine-type puzzles surrounded by news…
How To Be An Ally: Don’t Be An ‘Ally’
This is a story about allies. Once upon a time, there were two men. Bartholomew and Winston worked at the same office, in different departments. Every day for months, when Winston passed in the hallway, Bartholomew held his hand out. Some days, Winston would sneer. Others, he’d just ignore it. Once in a while, when…
A Mathematician’s Sonnet
So algebra is not aligned to taste: A bunch of letters dancing without need. You find the dancers nothing but a waste? My friend, some words on this you ought to heed: We start with adding, just as shepherds did To count their flocks when sent to fields by day. Subtraction’s just some adding being…
villanelles
A student spoke of writing a sonnet, and I mentioned that I’d written some once, once upon a time. She sounded like she didn’t believe me, like this wasn’t something that she’d expect a math teacher to do. I said I’d written some villanelles, once, too. But I couldn’t tell her if I still had…
White Dusk
fate’s fickle finger is cold gray steel filled with hot white pus angry and impotent: it is its impotence that makes it angry makes it flash across the sky makes it rain down blood like hot lava in the fading day this is the sunset tonight, the white man in the moon will gaze down…