W.D. Ehrhart

Phillis Wheatley: “the Surprising African Poetess” *

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by W.D. Ehrhart In 1990, I spent a semester as the Visiting Professor of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. My office was in a building named for Phillis Wheatley. I’d never heard of her, but discovered that she was an African-born slave whose Boston owners had brought her up as a “house servant” and allowed her to learn to read and write. She had even published a book of her poems. I tracked down some of her work, but didn’t find it very interesting. Like so much of the poetry written in English in the later 18th century on …

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Happy Birthday, Henry the K

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by W.D. Ehrhart Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, recently celebrated his 100th birthday.  Marking the occasion, all sorts of public figures have been praising his long lifetime of accomplishments and contributions to our nation. CNN’s David Andelman noted enthusiastically that Kissinger is “still teaching us the value of ‘Weltanschaung.’” Roughly translated, it means “how the world works,” also known as “realpolitik,” or “if you’ve got the power to do what you like, screw morality or justice or right and wrong; just freakin’ do it” (my translation). International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach called Kissinger “a great statesman” and …

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History Repeats Itself

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But sooth is seyd, go sithen many yeres, That “feeld hath eyen and the wode hath eres.” – Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale” The old saying goes that fields have eyes and forests ears; no secrets could be kept for long in olden times: not murders, robberies, infidelities, what have you. All came to light eventually, justice finally for the guilty, balance restored. Would that it were so in Chaucer’s day or in our own. Where should I begin? Injustice is a fact of life. Ask George Floyd, Emmett Till, Joe Hill, Little Turtle, or Rebecca Nurse. The list is endless, and keeps growing. What …

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Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

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By W.D. Ehrhart So now we find out that Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow paid the private school tuition of a boy Clarence Thomas and his wife were raising “as a son.” We can add this to Thomas selling his mother’s home to Crow, who promptly sank thousands of dollars into the house to refurbish it, and then let Thomas’s mother live there rent-free. Oh, and there are the decades of luxury vacations, luxury cruises, and luxury private jet travel, courtesy of Harlan Crow. None of this was, as required by law, reported by Thomas. And then there’s his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a stridently vocal …

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Mission: Impossible

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by W.D. Ehrhart What follows is a list of mass shootings with firearms in the United States of America since the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado on April 20th, 1999 that resulted in 13 dead and 24 wounded.  Each one of these killings has resulted in at least three dead.  Most have involved many more dead, along with many others wounded.  The worst incident resulted in 58 dead and 546 wounded. Littleton, Colo., April 20, 1999 Atlanta, Ga., July 29, 1999 Fort Worth, Texas, September 15, 1999 Honolulu, Hawaii, November 2, 1999 Tampa, Fla., December 30, 1999 Wakefield, Mass., December 26, 2000 Melrose …

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The Myth of the Spat-Upon Veteran

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have been speaking about the American War in Vietnam in high school and college classrooms ever since the spring of 1973. Over the course of half a century, I have probably spoken in 250 to 300 classrooms. Maybe more. In all those years and all those visits, I have never had a single person make the kind of fuss that a student made a few years ago in response to remarks I had made refuting the mythology of the spat-upon Vietnam War veteran. This young woman, a high school senior honors student, lodged a major complaint with the upper school head …

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