Ken's Blog

I spent much of the day today at a wedding. It was deeply moving and delightful.

And I realized two things. One was that the worst thing about weddings are the speeches.

The other thing? That the best thing about weddings are the speeches.

There seems to be some controversy about this weekend’s “No Kings” march. But why would it be controversial that U.S. citizens don’t want anybody to act like a king?

You would think that this would be one principle that every American could agree upon. Our Founding Fathers repudiated the very principle of royalty. Rather, they asserted, power should ultimately rest with the citizenry itself.

That is why the purpose of government, according to our U.S. Constitution, is to serve the will of the citizenry. And yet, in recent months, U.S. citizens are being violently attacked and detained simply for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

I am starting to think that our government has lost sight of what this nation is all about.

I watched the NYC mayoral debate this evening. In assessing the three candidates, I keep going back to a bar analogy. One of the candidates is like that cool smart friend you like to meet at the bar, just to hang out and discuss ways to make the world better.

The second is like that old guy from the neighborhood who tells stories about what the city was like back in the day. The third is like that older guy down the bar who is acting friendly, but is really just trying to hit on your hot young girlfriend.

I won’t tell you which is which. That would be partisan.

Today I read two startling news items. In one piece of news, the United States is considering revamping its refugee program.

Rather than serving the world’s most vulnerable people, under the proposed guidelines, preference would be given mostly to white people. Specifically mentioned as potential beneficiaries are members of the far-right German political party that actively promotes Holocaust denial.

That would be a clear act of antisemitism on the part of the U.S. federal government. Which possibly means, according to our own government’s policies, that we should stop pay Federal taxes until our government stops promoting antisemitism.

In the other piece of news, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering gutting the Voting Rights Act. I wonder how long it will be before they bring back “separate but equal”.

Will trains need to have separate cars again to avoid racial mixing? Given where this government is heading, I am sad to say that I wouldn’t be too surprised.

The U.S. Senate has declared this day of the year, October 14, to be a national day of remembrance for Charlie Kirk. As much as I disagreed with nearly everything Kirk said, I can see a kind of logic in this.

Having Kirk stand as a symbol of the right to free speech is appropriate precisely because so many of his stated views were so horrifying: Black pilots being incompetent by definition, all black women being stupid, all Muslims being the enemy, Jews engineering a vast conspiracy to replace white people with “lesser” races, to name just a few of his opinions.

These were ugly and openly racist views by any definition, but that only serves to highlight the higher principle: It’s easy to defend free speech by kind and caring people. The real test comes when people express views that we find horrifying.

One of the best characteristics of the United States is its focus on everyone’s right to free speech, enshrined in our First Amendment. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall memorably put it, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The fact that I find Kirk’s views to be so reprehensible makes it even more important to acknowledge that the proper response to speech is never violence, but rather other speech. The disturbed mind of young Tyler Robinson apparently couldn’t grasp this important principle, but we must.

That said, I suspect that the weird MAGA response of blaming liberals for his death is a defensive reaction. Kirk certainly had the right to believe that an “open carry” policy is worth the risk, but it is also true that this particular MAGA policy directly contributed to his death.

In an open carry state, a “good guy with a gun” — like many in that crowd in Utah that day — cannot do anything to stop a determined and disturbed killer like Tyler Robinson. Had Charlie Kirk been giving the same speech in the State of New York, which does not allow open carry, he would be alive today.

I suspect that much of the misplaced MAGA anger toward liberals in the wake of this tragedy comes largely from a defensive need to deny that obvious truth.

Columbus Day is a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, it was established mainly as a way to help fight racial prejudice against Italian Americans, back when “being white” in this country was defined more narrowly.

On the other hand, if you’re Indigenous, celebrating Christopher Columbus is problematic. To fully embrace that particular history would be a bit like a Korean celebrating the Japanese occupation.

Maybe we can all simply agree on what we all have in common. Each of us is but a temporary traveler on this planet. In the short time that we are here, we should try to help each other on their journey.

The Third Reich Chancellery responded to the awarding of the 1944 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Committee of the Red Cross by saying the prize committee was playing politics by not giving it to Chancellor Adolph Hitler.

“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” Reich Communications Director Joseph Goebbels wrote in The People’s Observer.

Hitler has publicly stated at least a half-dozen times that he deserves to win the prize. He and his allies have cited various peace efforts, including the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact in 1934, the Haavara Agreement in 1933, the Munich Agreement in 1938, and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939.

“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Hitler had previously said during a meeting with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”

Hitler’s fellow countrymen Gustav Stresemann, Ludwig Quidde and Carl von Ossietzky have previously won the award.

In New York City it can take a while to get to your flight by public transportation. In addition to the travel time itself, there is all the waiting around — first for the subway, then for the shuttle bus, then, after all that, even for the elevator at the airport.

Today I was on that elevator with another guy who was on his way to a flight, and he looked very grumpy. He turned to me and said “I can’t believe this takes so long.”

“Yes,” I said “that’s true.”

“But then,” I added, “the plane goes very fast.”

I think I managed to lift his mood.

The 2009 sci-fi action flick Surrogates posited a world where people send idealized physically fit robotic versions of themselves out into the world. Meanwhile, the actual people puppeteer their surrogates from the safety of their homes, while growing fat and lazy.

As I have been reading more and more research papers that have obviously been “cleaned up” by ChatGPT or one of its cousins, I am reminded of this film (based, by the way, on an excellent comic book series). Now in 2025, the thing that is being idealized is not one’s physical appearance, but how one expresses oneself.

We are entering an age when the words people use in public discourse are not their own. Rather the words you see them use are a kind of amalgam of all the words that have ever been used by everybody else, courtesy of Large Language Models.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of digital make-up. Except it is worse, because now it is not merely our physical form that is being painted over, but our very thoughts and ideas.

Will we eventually arrive at a reality in which verbal expression itself is systematically cleaned up and homogenized? Will every human utterance we hear eventually become a kind of intellectual autotune?

I worry that in this brave new world the unique poet’s voice will disappear, replaced by homogeneous A.I. slop. This would be tragic, because society needs that idiosyncratic spark of the individual human mind to keep it awake and healthy.

As Bob Dylan once said: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

On this day of the year, in 1446, the Hongul alphabet was published. That alphabet, commissioned by King Sejong the Great of Korea, was arguably the single most influential act by a government to level the playing field for its nation.

The consequences were rapid, far reaching and quite permanent. The Hongul alphabet led quickly to near universal literacy and more.

Korea had been a highly stratified society, with the aristocracy and priesthood on the top and everyone else — the peasants — far below. But once everyone could read and write, a thriving middle class quickly formed.

Ordinary people could now form their own businesses, buy and sell property, participate in education and government, even sue their aristocratic countrymen in court. It was perhaps the most successful act of universal enfranchisement in history.

During our own sad time, when the executive branch of the U.S. is trying its darnedest to disenfranchise its citizenry — and terrorize us all in the process — it is good to remember a moment in history when a government actually did something good for ordinary people.