“Death comes for us all… And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh. It is the law of nature, and the will of God.” ― Robert Bolt, “A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts” The Big Picture –…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – ARGO, Ala. – You want to know a secret? Sure you do. Everybody wants to know a secret. Knock, knock Who’s there? Santa Clause and me Who’s me? Jesus No room at the Inn A color line even then How lives intertwine. So Santa, I have a…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – In a retrograde world where finding crumbs to eat might be enough to make the peons and peasants kiss up to the new king/dictator and the pope like they did in Shakespeare’s time, when monarchs ruled the world. But how in this world has it come to…
Game of Riddles No. 9 This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down. The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – In chapter five of J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit, and in the first of the…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – If we had only known that ignorance really was bliss, that human stupidity was the ultimate goal in life, that to be “woke” was not just a bad thing but the worst thing a person could strive to be, we could have saved ourselves…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Resistance may be futile. Unless you live in California. Apparently, the phrase “resistance is futile” appeared the first time on TV in a 1967 “Doctor Who” episode called “Tomb of the Cybermen.” In Star Trek’s “First Contact,” the voice of the Borg, spoken by…
Live with that if you can – “In absolute government, the King is law.” – Thomas Paine The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The news business is dead. Just ask The Washington Post: The latest news? Not right now, thanks. Long live the news writers who braved to tell it…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – It makes me a little sad that I could not be there at Gettysburg this year for the 161st anniversary of a legendary two minute speech that hinted at the end of fighting during the Civil War and began to move the United States…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – It should come as no surprise that the news of Donald Trump’s election again was greeted with glee in Moscow. Russian dictator president Vladimir Putin sent his congratulations to Trump after the news was announced, but not for the reasons you may imagine. According to Russian journalist…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – When the present goes wrong, hope for the future – or retreat into the past. Mark Twain didn’t say that. I just did. More on that in a minute. But on October 2, 1876, a speech of Twain’s was covered by The New York…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – JONESBORO, Ark. – Covering politics for the past 44 years, for the past decade mostly in Washington, D.C., I’ve seen some crazy, outrageous things in my time. But Republican Congressman Rick Crawford’s federal lawsuit for a pay raise and back pay may just take the cake. After…
Tales From the MoJo Road – By Glynn Wilson – Election Night 2024 is two days away and even 966 miles west of Washington, D.C. the tension in the air is so heavy it makes me seriously regret giving up my predilection for Xanax 20 years ago, about the time Hunter S. Thompson killed himself…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – UNDISCLOSED LOCATION – “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Tom Paine once wrote in a famous essay drumming up support for the American Revolution. The American Crisis: By Thomas Paine – 1776 Now a woman writer named Margaret Sullivan, formerly the media columnist for The…
By Glynn Wilson – No matter how this election turns out, my retirement from political news and journalism is imminent. Social media has made news, journalism and facts irrelevant, even as Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are making the first big social media program Facebook irrelevant, by ignoring and downplaying news and politics. No matter that…
Will people finally wake up when they finally feel the hurt? – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – They say life is a journey, and you never know where you might end up. For many people, life seems more like a slog, from one hard day of work for a bad boss and…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – HARDY, Ark. – It takes time to get oriented in a new place as a writer, especially after experiencing nearly catastrophic trauma on the road. But less than two weeks after leaving Maryland and passing through Virginia, West Virginia, a sliver of Missouri and crossing the Mississippi…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – JONESBORO, Ark. – The rain and wind from Hurricane Helene is lashing out even here in the Delta on Friday night, and that’s an actual fact. There are no two partisan sides to report in this story. This storm was huge, covering most of the Gulf of…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – TRUMANN, Ark. – When the Mississippi River bridge came into view with cotton fields as far as the eye could see, and then the Welcome to Missouri sign came into view, I began to relax a little after a trying ordeal that already had me thinking about…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – The last thing I would ever want to do is compare myself to a Biblical character like Job. Job was a rich man in his time, if he really existed, which is a scholarly dispute to this day among Christians, Jews, Mormons and even within Islam, since…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Rarely in American political history has a moment been as charged with salience and import as the so-called “debate” that is to take place in Philadelphia Tuesday night on ABC between Democrat Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. On the face of it, Harris should have the clear…
