Our musical selection this week is a song from the 1980s, the lyrics of which are strikingly relevant today: Kris Kristofferson’s “The Eagle and the Bear.” For the better part of a decade (maybe longer), it was the song with which he opened each show.
Notes and Sources
Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. In subsequent text, I update the spellings.
Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen and his staff are keeping track. https://cohen.house.gov/TrumpAdminTracker. The Center for European Reform provides a view from abroad: https://www.cer.eu/insights/donald-trumps-return-office-ten-consequences
If you clicked on the USAID link in the paragraph above, the agency is effectively gone, and if you click on this link (https://oig.usaid.gov/) at the bottom of the page, you will find virtually no information about the agency’s work since 1961.
Jenny Dorsey provides a great overview in two minutes and thirteen seconds. Caveat, which she shares as well, it is just an overview.
Kegan’s work is one of the models on which this shorthand is based.
It’s essential here to remember Merton’s warning that we need to make sure it is we who are choosing and that it’s not “the anonymous authority of the collectivity” choosing through us. Perhaps the best place to explore freedom to (positive freedom) and freedom from (negative freedom) is Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom, (Crown, 2024). He speaks for 5 minutes on this difference here; for about 47 minutes here; and for much longer in a variety of other talks you are free to (see what I did there?) on your own.
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