A WEEKLY DISCUSSION SERIES

MEMBER MONDAY

THE ARCHIVE NARRATIVE:

Member Monday grew out of Highland's book club which began in May 2006 and ran sporadically through 2013. We certainly had some fine evening discussions though it became clear participants were drawn more to the respective topics than they necessarily were to the underlying books. Some were put off by the time commitment these books demanded, especially in the earlier days, when we ran one session per month.

A new format was thus instituted in mid-2016, stepping up the frequency to change it from the previous monthly evening session format into a weekly lunch discussion and to replace a full book as the discussion catalyst into a more approachable article (or two) with an introduction to help set the stage.

Member Monday held its first session on Monday July 5, 2016. The topic for that inaugural session was, in fact, a spillover from the very last session of the previous book club, centered around A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. Instead of an article, though, a more extensive introduction was prepared to capture the essence of Zinn's book and to frame the discussion. There had been some thought given to breaking down his lengthy work into bite-size chapters as the basis for a series of future Member Monday discussions but, in the end, we decided to stick with the original plan and serve up a new topic each week…continue reading…

Mourning In America

A therapist looks at America through the collective lens of all those fifty-minute intimate (monetized) psychodramas and issues his pronouncement about the country: It's unhappy. Profoundly unhappy. He theorizes why we're all so sad.

America and Its Discontents | Gary Greenberg - The Baffler

We're sad because we're grieving over something. But that's not the real issue. The problem is we don't actually know the something we're grieving over. Were there a recognized grief object -- say the loss of a loved one -- the standard talk-therapy might be of help. The grief becomes pathological when it goes so far that its object can no longer be identified. Honest therapists, he maintains, realize that they are not only incapable of doing much about the suffering they are witnessing but that they are actually part of the problem.

Steve SmithSeptember 24, 2018Comment

Artificial Intelligence / Tyranny of the Drones

Those of a certain age will undoubtedly recall a particular Super Bowl commercial of January 24, 1984. This iconic ad introduced the Macintosh computer by way of an Orwellian scene showing a giant screen depicting Big Brother addressing a mass of seated dead-eye grey proletariat drones in the flat, ominous tones of we-shall-prevail propaganda-talk when in bursts a vision of youth and color, the very embodiment of beautiful feminine energy itself, to execute the perfect hammer-throw that literally shatters the old guard. The tagline: And you shall see why 1984 won't be like "1984". (link: Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer ...).The Proles were set free.

Steve SmithSeptember 17, 2018Comment

What Is It Like To Be Human? Don't Ask . . .

What does it mean to be human? That sounds narcissistic. Perhaps the "Get Over Thyself" dictum (MM, 8/27/18) should apply, not just to the individual, but to an entire species. How about what does it mean to be a dolphin? What does it mean to be any animal, for that matter? Is the difference simply one of consciousness? Recent auto-television research techniques have established that self-awareness perception in dolphins begins around the age of one and a half years, just like in humans…

Steve SmithSeptember 10, 2018Comment

Get Over Thyself

A sign over the doorway to the club library entrance features the well-known Socratic dictum: "Know Thyself." Our next Member Monday (8/27) session is dedicated to the proposition: "Get Over Thyself." Maybe a corresponding sign to that effect will someday be posted over the library exit…

Steve SmithAugust 27, 2018Comment

Religion as Philosophy

Talk about your high stakes. In the back corner of the club's music room, propped up by the lamp, is The Divine Comedy, by Dante. Open it to the "Gates of Hell" (p.5, line 4 - "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here" ) and then to ix-x for an index to the Circles of Hell from The Inferno. In order: Unbaptized; Carnal Sinners; Gluttonous; Misers and Prodigals; Wrathful and Sullen. Cross now the River of Styx and you will land in the Sixth Circle, dedicated to The Heretics. This is where you -- you non-believers -- will be sent. Believe it…

Steve SmithAugust 20, 2018Comment

Applied Philosophy

You may never have heard of the philosopher Diogenes Laertius. Some of the heavies e.g. Hegel and Nietzsche dismissed this third century wanna-be as a lightweight (or worse) when it came to philosophical reasoning. Yet by some quirk of fate, his "Lives of Eminent Philosophers," newly translated from the original Greek (see Lovers Of Wisdom), serves as the remaining link to a great portion of Greek and Hellenic philosophy now that much of the primary source material has been lost to antiquity…

Steve SmithAugust 13, 2018Comment

Have We Forgotten How To Die?

Garrett Matthias had it all figured out. The five-year-old boy from Iowa co-authored his own obituary just before he died of a rare cancer a few weeks ago. He wanted "to be burned and made into a tree so I can live in it when I'm a gorilla." Lest you think he was some soft sentimentalist, the piece ended with his own brand of existentialist machismo, "See ya later, suckas!" You go, Garrett. You were dealt a bad hand but you checked out on your own terms.

Steve SmithAugust 6, 2018Comment

The Rise and Fall of Empires

Invest even a modest amount of time and effort in this remarkable twenty-four page essay (Click here to read “The Fate of Empires and the Search For Survival,” by Sir John Glubb) and you will be rewarded with a renewed appreciation of history, presented not as discrete and disconnected segments but as the sweeping, interconnected story of the dynamics powering the rise and fall of empires over the last four thousand years. This wide-angle lens captures ten such representative empires -- Assyria, Persia, Greece, Roman (pre- and post-Augustus), Arab, Mameluke (Egypt, Syria), Ottoman, Spain, Romanov Russia, Britain -- each served up not so much for individual analysis but as exemplars of the organic flow characterizing human development.

Steve SmithJuly 30, 2018Comment

Could It Happen Here? Pt. 2

Our Member Monday (7/16) topic is a look at probably the most dramatic transformation of the twentieth century from the perspective of the people who experienced it. Our focus article (It Can Happen Here) is a tight synopsis of three highly credible works that depict Germany's rise into an authoritarian state through the lens of its citizens. A follow-on Member Monday (7/23) session will apply the lessons learned from that earlier era to pose the question: Could it happen here? The spirit of that question is that its very asking might help us to maintain our own guard.

Steve SmithJuly 23, 2018Comment

Could It Happen Here? Pt. 1

Our Member Monday (7/16) topic is a look at probably the most dramatic transformation of the twentieth century from the perspective of the people who experienced it. Our focus article (It Can Happen Here) is a tight synopsis of three highly credible works that depict Germany's rise into an authoritarian state through the lens of its citizens…

Steve SmithJuly 16, 2018Comment

Finding Killers From the Couch

Eight years ago I received a phone call from my son saying two detectives were at his fraternity house seeking a cheek swab. As neither of us had any idea what this could have been about I suggested he politely decline the opportunity and maybe we'd look forward if necessary to a follow-on chat with the authorities about the meaning of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. Well, that was that, until we discovered a number of my son's kindergarten classmates similarly had been approached even after all those ensuing years. Another classmate happened to have been JonBenet Ramsey…

Steve SmithJuly 9, 2018Comment

The Making Of a Congressman III

Joining us again for this third and last installment of "the making of a Congressman" series is Mark Williams, one of two lead candidates on the literal eve of the Democratic Party primary for the (Boulder) Second Congressional District. The other lead candidate, Joe Neguse, who participated as Charlotte Sorenson's guest in this past Member Monday session on education, was invited to join us for this next one as well but declined due to another commitment…

Sina SimantobJune 25, 2018Comment

Don't Need No Education

The broadside indictment by Bryan Caplan in his recent book "The Case Against Education" is the equivalent of an academic calling in an air strike on his own position. Yet it's the response to his work that will frame our discussion. Rather than dismissing Caplan's thesis as challenging his own profession, the reviewer, a fellow academic, largely endorses it as based upon a) common sense and b) the data. And, one might add, personal experience. The Case Against Education…

Dustin SimantobJune 18, 2018Comment

Tragedy Of the Commons

The dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons is so straightforward as to be almost self-evident i.e. the exploitation of any limited resource by individual parties in furtherance of maximizing their own self-interest which collectively serves to deplete or even exhaust said resource to the ultimate detriment of all. What is the tragedy of the commons? - Nicholas Amendolare - YouTube. That resource could be anything that represents a finite limit, from fish in a pond (the simple YouTube example), agricultural land, building acreage, neighborhood park, access to education, roads/parking, or even pollution/climate warming at the global (yet still finite) level…

Dustin SimantobJune 11, 2018Comment

Masks

Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime, danced a revealing truth in his parable of the man and his mask. A little man playfully tries on a series of masks. After cavorting about exhilarated by his disguises, he grows tired of the novelty and tries to remove the mask. Horrified, he discovers that he cannot. The mask is fixed to his face. A terrible struggle follows; his body writhes in agony while his face remains frozen in a grin. At last the false face is wrenched off, but the real face behind it is now simply a blank Marcel Marceau - The Mask Maker (1959)…

Dustin SimantobJune 4, 2018Comment

New Era Colorado

New Era Colorado has figured it out: the immense potential political power represented by the youth contingent. Perhaps, though, the youth contingent first needs to be awakened Young people say they plan on voting in November ... - Washington Post . Or, in this post-mortem on the “tired radicals” of the First World War era, Walter Weyl wrote, “Adolescence is the true day of revolt, the day when obscure forces, as mysterious as growth, push us trembling out of our narrow lives into the wide throbbing life beyond self.”…

Dustin SimantobMay 21, 2018Comment

Reimagining America

As our nation threatens to pinwheel into identity politics — too much Pluribus and not enough Unum — perhaps it’s a good time to take stock of the unifying myths that have defined America in the first place…

Dustin SimantobMay 14, 2018Comment

Land Of The Lawless

Who knew?: Title 40 of the U.S. Code makes it a federal offense to take your bicycle into the National Institute of Health building, not because any legislative body ever deliberated on that subject but because it's one of the wholesale regulations (this one by the DHS) automatically incorporated into that criminal statute…

Dustin SimantobMay 7, 2018Comment

"Illegal" Immigrants

Perhaps a big story, such as this one about “illegal” immigrants, is best told as the mosaic of little stories like the one we discussed years ago as portrayed in the novel Tortilla Curtain: Mexican illegal Candido Rincon is left as so much road kill after having been accidentally struck by Delaney Mossbacher's SUV on a southern California highway. Candido…

Dustin SimantobApril 30, 2018Comment

Connection: Anybody Out There?

Step one is the acknowledgment of its pervasiveness. It’s the call of the all-night FM disc jockey taking requests all the while beseeching, “Is there anybody out there, anybody at all?”..

Dustin SimantobApril 23, 2018Comment