the witch hunt

@realDonaldTrump

“…..the call with the Ukrainian President was a totally appropriate one. As he said, โ€œNo Pressure.โ€ This Impeachment nonsense is just a continuation of the Witch Hunt Hoax, which has been going on since before I even got elected. Rupublicans, go with Substance and close it out!” [spelling all his my friends]

Did he cry Witch Hunt? Again? A term he has tweeted close to 300 times like rapid fire at all of us? Of course he did, because if there is one thing this president knows about lies, is the power of repeating them. “Calling himself the victim of a witch hunt allows Trump to label charges against him as not just inaccurate but fundamentally impossible. Witch hunts, by definition, are illegitimate, their victims innocent, their judgments always wrong” (Markham- Cantor). Is there anyone who believes he is innocent? Not even Trump claims that verdict. He boasts his lies like a prankster proclaims laughs.

Having just finished Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with my Advanced Placement English Literature students, who, due to the large number of theater kiddos in the room, read with passion and gusto, it was as if John Proctor and Abigail Williams and the rest of those iconic characters peopled my class. When Abigail, in all her initial seductive coyness said, “A wild thing may say wild things” they predicted that Proctor’s sin of adultery would unravel around him, and that she had indeed “an endless capacity for dissembling”. In Act Three John lets loose his shame, “I have know her, sir. I have known her.” “You–you are a lecher?” The crux of the Salem Witch trials fought over land tracks and false blame and stifling fear all come to a “pointy reckoning” when the innocent hanged “high over the town.” My students were hooked on every word like greedy fair-goers, ready to watch as lies replaced fact and insanity trumped reason.

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shadow season

Halloween starts the dark months in the northern hemisphere, when clocks race toward night while we still yearn for day, trees that just last week were ablaze are now bare, the mosaic of the forest floor morphs into a brown sepia tone, and the monochromatic blue-grey skyline fades quickly to black. Where can we look to find a spark? How can we edge up a smile that lasts past the early dusk? What lurks just ahead that can transform our outlook? Well, I have three suggestions.

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Witching Time

Every year as Halloween approaches, our maples drop their leaves, the marigolds turn to seed, and the landscape changes from brilliance to black and white. Like clockwork a northern wind races across our bare fields and one can hear it howling through the cracks. While observing all this external starkness we move indoors and begin to question our mortality.

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