Happy 4th of July. There is a non-zero possibility that we may all be doomed.

But when you really think about it, is that so different from every other day, except that on this day I get to wear red, white, and blue, and probably eat a cheeseburger later.

So, all things considered, a pretty good day. Now this is a a politics podcast never has been never will be this is not a

podcast where I tell you what you should believe politically or I tell you what I

believe politically I think the Western canon is for everybody and I know

that I have listeners from a variety of political perspectives. If you want to know what I think on

politics, who I'm voting for, all that stuff, you can find it very easily online.

There's plenty of places for me to talk with you about that for you to read what I write on Twitter or various websites and blogs and magazines.

You can find that stuff out there.

That's not what this show is about

because there's enough political chatter

going on in our lives.

We all, I think, are hypersaturated with various people's opinions, including

our own, about politics. So I'm not here to tell you that the Western canon absolutely

dictates that you must vote for this or that person because Dostoyevsky would want you to be a Republican or

Thomas Aquinas would want you to be a Democrat or whatever else. I'm definitely not trying to do that and I don't think that's the best use of our time because as I say these

treasures of the literary canon of the artistic canon of the philosophical canon. They're not just there for a

particular political elite. They do contain political ideas and we all have to

wrestle and grapple with them, but they're bigger.

The tradition is bigger than any one particular ideology, no matter how good that ideology is,

no matter how much you believe in that ideology, the world is always larger than your

philosophical system and that's why it always pays to wrestle with the world as seen through

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