So far, 2026 brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s legendary sigh, “What fresh hell is this?” It’s said to have been uttered when her doorbell rang, but it has other uses. Applied to our current year it makes Parker seem a prophet (though her politics and choices of friends tended to be terrible).
The political forces tell us we must choose. Either the “ICEstapo” executed a heroic nurse this weekend as a precursor of the new holocaust or ICE is the most elite law enforcement agency ever assembled and anyone who dies had it coming. Mercifully, more of us are refusing these absurdities, but there aren’t yet enough of us.
Alas, it has begun anew. It will get worse and there’s reason to believe that this time it will be more irritating than ever before.
Are you happy with 2026, now that the first month is almost half over? Me neither.
The last week has been like one of those bizarre times in which you notice that nothing makes any sense, so you must be having a dream. With that realization, you awaken.
I’ll get right to the point: Charlie Kirk was not a white supremacist. I will leave you to believe that he deserves to be called a colorful name for a donkey. I leave you free to believe he was a good man, who ultimately died for his Christian faith.
The NFL’s decision to make a “gender non-conforming” star who doesn’t sing in English the halftime performer is not important to world events. But it is a symptom of a big problem in how we deal with our big problems.
This might explain it. Donald Trump had a dream in which he was told that reality is an illusion, that it’s all in his head, that all that exists is what he imagines. The notion would not be original to him. Nothing is, except his regard for himself.
Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about it all. Pluralism as an absolute is relativism; a relative pluralism honors the individual search for truth.
The events of the last week have captured the news media, the commentariat, and the online amateur philosopher sites — TwitteX and suchlike. Though they are connected, I think therein lie two separate compelling stories. Here, I hope to tell both of them, separately.