Wednesday's Trailheads

The Politics of Pathology by Theodore Dalrymple "There was recently an article in the British Medical Journal about the ethics of diagnosing President Trump’s psychological or medical condition by doctors who had never examined him. It was generally a very fair article by authors who almost certainly detested him. But while they acknowledged that his psychological or medical condition was a matter of importance, they urged caution (not quite the same as absolute prohibition) against diagnosis at a distance. " "And with good reason. Inadvertently, they demonstrated how difficult it is in this field to separate technical judgment from moral judgment. They wrote:" " In 2017, a group of mental health clinicians … accused Donald Trump, President of the United States, of being “paranoid and delusional” and having “malignant narcissism.”" "The giveaway word is “accused”: a word that one does not usually employ in making a diagnosis. It implies fault or blame, a moral failing rather than a merely physiological deficit. " "As Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions." Remembering the Spirit of 1976 by David Skinner "The sophisticates were wrong. The radicals, too, were wrong. The bicentennial celebrations of 1976 defied expectations. The bicentennial could no more be stolen than the Grinch could steal Christmas." "Working as a cultural bureaucrat under the two administrations before this one, I remember attending meetings for the coming semiquincentennial with a lot of staff who didn’t want to talk about celebrating. To do so would be to betray all the people our country had disappointed at one time or another. I found this surprising and wrong. For on birthdays, we celebrate that we are here, not that we are perfect but that we are alive. Pride should be a part of it, yes, but you can be proud of the imperfect." "Anyway, it isn’t up to committees in Washington to determine the parameters of the semiquincentennial. It’s up to Americans. And with, I expect, bottle rockets and history books, with flags and facepaint, with overlong documentaries and even thoughtful conversation (to say nothing of UFC fights), we can take note and admit in our many ways the gratitude we feel to be a part of the greatest nation on earth. If they could do it in 1976, we can do it this year." This Week in American History: Virginia Leads the Way, All the Way by Jonathan Horn "There is a story that Lee stormed off from Philadelphia because Congress denied him a spot alongside Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Adams later claimed that it was fellow Virginians who conspired to give the fifth spot to the then much less well-known Jefferson. In truth, Lee already had his trip to Virginia planned, and neither he nor almost anyone else could have anticipated that Jefferson’s words would one day secure the man from Monticello fame far beyond Lee’s." "Though we’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about the fate of the motion for independence, suffice it to say here that Congress passed it on July 2, which Adams believed future Americans would celebrate as their independence day. Though Lee didn’t make it back in time to Philadelphia to be part of the final debate, the motion to declare the colonies free and independent states will forever bear his name. Call it the Lee Resolution."