W.D. Ehrhart

by W. D. Ehrhart In a withering, indeed breathtaking, succession of recent decisions rendered by a U.S. Supreme Court now dominated by justices vetted by the Federalist Society and nominated by presidents who did not win the popular national vote, most of the past 120 years of legal progress and precedent have been obliterated. The rationale for this assault on common sense and common decency is a doctrine called “Original Intent,” which states that only those guarantees intended by the framers of the Constitution in 1787 and set forth in the document ratified two years later are valid. This is also sometimes defined as “strict …

Read moreLet’s Talk About Original Intent

by W.D. Ehrhart Back in the May 20th issue of the Gazette, readers may remember an essay of mine called “Woe Is Me!” I began by cataloguing a litany of disasters and lunacies that leave me feeling hopeless about the future of this country and the planet. But then I spent a wonderful day with some friends of mine reminding me that there are indeed still many good things in this world, and lots to be grateful for. Which is certainly true. The world is full of sad stories, but none of them are mine. And for some people, life is better now than it …

Read moreThe Way Things Are

by W.D. Ehrhart Back in 1990, at the first Conference of U.S. & Vietnamese Veteran-Writers in Hanoi, Le Minh Khue, a novelist who had been a teenager with a young volunteers team assigned to the military engineering command, told me that she had gone off to the war with several books in her knapsack: translations of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London. “I learned a love of life from Jack London, as well as the courage to transcend death, to keep up hope against any odds,” she said.  “I cherished the anguish of Hemingway, whose wonderful short stories deal with loneliness, death, and love of life, …

Read moreA Farewell to Arms?

by W.D. Ehrhart Lately I have been struggling to find something worth writing about. What is the point? Nothing changes. I’ve written multiple essays about the madness of our uniquely U.S. gun culture; but Americans keep dying at the wrong end of firearms in record numbers, and in most states it’s easier to acquire and carry a firearm than it was ten years ago. I’ve written multiple essays about the need for the Democratic Party to get its collective head out of its ass and start functioning effectively to counter the insidious and pervasive evil that has become the Retrumplican Party, yet the Democrats keep …

Read moreWoe Is Me!

by W.D. Ehrhart I’ve just purchased a piece of the state of New Jersey. Really. It’s ten feet by ten feet and located in a lovely pine forest. Sooner or later—I’m 73 now, so I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for “later”—it will become my final resting place when I shuffle off this mortal coil and join the Choir Invisible. My wife will eventually be there with me, too, though she’s younger than me and thus has a better shot at “later.” But why South Jersey? I’ve never lived there and have no family connection to the area. All my life, I’ve been completely …

Read moreGoing Green, or: Poetic Justice