About me: I’m 58 years old, happily married since the early 1970s to the same woman, and the father of one child, a 26-year-old son. I teach History and English at a community college in central Connecticut, but I spent most of my professional life working as a journalist in Connecticut and (briefly) Virginia.
My politics are pretty consistently to the left of center, but there are two exceptions: Unlike most of my left-leaning friends, I’m rather dogmatic in my support to the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms and I believe that society has an ethical obligation to establish the death penalty as the punishment of last recourse. In both cases, too, there are limits to my conviction. I don’t believe, for instance, that individuals need to own bazookas, rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, or automatic weapons. And, while I believe we MUST have a death penalty, I’m not too sure about applying it in any specific case. I’m also bothered greatly that the people on death row are far more likely to be from minority groups than from the white majority.
I like to keep people off-balance by arguing against the accepted wisdom. I believe, for instance, that Stephen King is a great writer possessed of a literary flair and imagination that make him the Charles Dickens of our times. I think that we should teach the novels of John Grisham in college-level courses. To paraphrase and expand the argument that Crash Davis made in Bull Durham (one of my favorite movies), I believe that the works of Susan Sontag are mostly self-indulgent crap and that the same is true of what has passed for literary criticism over the past two decades.
I’m also acutely aware that I could be wrong about just about everything that I’ve written here, except for the stuff in first paragraph.
That’s me, or at least a part of me. I hope you enjoy my blog.
