A Blog on McConnell Center Life

FOR YOUR BOOKSHELF | Ron Chernow's Washington:  A Life (New York:   Penguin Books, 2010) “If he does that, he will be the Greatest Man in the World”     Those were the words of an astonished King George III, when he heard that General George Washington was returning his military commission to the Confederation Congress following the American victory in the Revolutionary War.   The British monarch was not alone in viewing with awe Washington’s decision to surrender power and return home to his farm at Mount Vernon. The Virginian was widely looked upon as an eighteenth-century Cincinnatus.   As one would expect of Ron Chernow, his treatment of this pivotal episode in Washington: A Life is sure-handed, reflecting his consummate skill as a biographer.   Chernow is best known for his work about Alexander Hamilton that spawned the famed Lin-Manual Miranda musical.   Written six years afterward, Chernow’s book on the Fi...

By Garrett Kasey On Monday, November 11, I turned twenty-two years old. The week before, I had made plans to workout, have a nice dinner, and spend time relaxing to celebrate, but none of those things ended up happening. My birthday began with an early morning spent working on economics homework and a business communications assignment. After attending my classes, I spent the rest of my day in meetings trying to forget the fact that I was spending the majority of my birthday away from friends, family, and enjoyable tasks. Finally, around 9 PM, I was able to return to my apartment and get ready to go to bed in preparation for my 8 AM class the following morning. As I walked into my room, I noticed a nice bottle of bourbon and a birthday wish from one of my roommates. While I had spent my day pouting about everything my birthday was not, I had a great friend who was thinking about one of the ways he could make my birthday better. Needless to say, this gift brought up my spi...

By Eric Bush Last week, bureaucrats in New Jersey handed Uber a $650 million fine, insisting that Uber drivers should be considered employees, not independent contractors. This is just the latest attempt to regulate away opportunities for hard-working Americans looking to get ahead.  Democrats – ranging from Andy Beshear to Kamala Harris – have repeatably insinuated that people who drive for Uber, whether it be to take their kids on vacation or pay a few bills, are actually victims . God forbid someone might voluntarily provide a useful service while enjoying the fruits of their labor! Ironically, Harris’s now defunct campaign racked up more than $14,000 in Uber expenses – hope she tipped! This war on the freelancing is a favorite tactic of the left. Well-meaning democrats insist Uber drivers be considered regular employees instead of contractors, which would require Uber to provide drivers sick leave and health care benefits, not to mention pay a slew of ...

By Evan Clark Having read the short story “The Egg” by Andy Weir and most of the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, I have noticed intriguing parallels and differences between their portrayals of the concepts of the individual versus the collective. My fellow seniors in the McConnell Scholars Program and I have been reading the Zamyatin’s dystopian novel throughout this semester. While the novel’s immensely unreliable narrator, D-503, begins to question the worldview propagated by the theoretically all-powerful One State, he nevertheless writes propaganda for the One State throughout much of the book, at one point describing the individual as insignificant compared to the collective. This perspective of the One State reveals the assumption that there is a dichotomy between the individual and the whole, and that the collective must triumph over the allegedly puny and expendable individual. On page 102 of We , D-503 writes, “On one side is the ‘I,’ on the other is the ‘We,’ the One State...

By Celia Cusick  Growing up, I was raised and encouraged to be independent. My headstrongness was a force to reckoned with from an early age. At 2, I decided and proclaimed “I do it myself” regarding dressing myself, which as my mom fondly recounts, led to a couple of mismatched ensembles. We all still laugh at that one. I was lucky enough to have parents that nurtured and encouraged this kind of independence because it taught me some invaluable lessons. It instilled within me grit and strength which are two lessons I am so thankful for having learned.  Recently, I have had the conversation with my mom about why she felt like this was so important for me to learn from a young age. She responded, “I felt like you needed to be stronger because life is harder on girls. I wanted you to be prepared.” At first, I felt a sort of irritation about how unfair it is and seemed-- a sort of righteous anger not at my mom, but at the world. How unfair it is that I had to wor...

By Jared Thomas I have never been at goodbyes, so I don’t intend to start saying them here. That comes next semester, so everyone continues to insist to me. The end, they say, is closing in. The barbarians are at the gate and they’re carrying pounds and pounds of LSAT prep books instead of clubs. They’re demanding sky-high application fees instead of gold, frankincense, and mer. They’re wreaking havoc on my shaky mental health, instead of my pristine city streets. The end truly is nigh and, for the first time in my life, it feels like it. This is new for me, in a whole host of complicated and a wider collection of painful ways. The fact of the matter is, to me, the end of my high school career was more like ‘Empire Strikes Back’ than ‘Return of the Jedi’ but this….This is ‘Rise of Skywalker’ and the end credits are in real danger of rolling before I’ve had a chance to wrap everything up in a way that’s going to keep the fans happy. A long time ago, in a galaxy far,...

Donald Stoker's Why America Loses War: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present  (Cambridge University Press, 2019) The United States has been at war since 2001 in various parts of the globe.  We have an entire generation of officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted military members who have known only war.   In addition, the majority of our law makers and now three presidents have also never served in a time of peace.   Given that we have been fighting the same conflict for over 18 years, one is correct to ask the question, do American’s know how to win a war? In his book, “Why America Loses Wars,” Dr. Donald Stoker, a former professor of Strategy and Policy for the U.S. Naval War College’s Monterey Program, answers that question.   Stoker argues that Americans don’t know how to win.   Further–not only do they not know how to win, they don’t understand what war is all about.   Certainly these sen...