Running Iron Report

If you feel like your values and your very nature are under assault — they are. Two things happened on the same day last week that provide ample evidence that values and life‐ways we cleave to here at Running Iron Report are under concerted and deliberate attack. The American Psychological Association has released new guidelines for psychological practice with men and … Read More

If the now ubiquitous American Freak Out is evidence of anything, perhaps it is a symptom of our lives on the new frontier.  Maybe it’s happening because we are culturally marooned, neither here nor there just yet, but rather groaning through the death agonies of the old myths that once sustained us, while fighting savagely over the invention and control of the new myths we will eventually live by.

… Read More

For me, the rifle is sacred. Some of you will readily accept that statement; maybe it’s sacred for you, too. Some may think that “sacred” is pushing things too far. Some of you will recoil (sorry) in disgust. We all have our sacred objects, whether we pin that loaded term on them or not. Really, they are not sacred in … Read More

Over the years I have paid particular attention to my family history.  Not because my family is in any way unique from anyone else’s, only that from a very young age I have been imbued with an abiding appreciation for the experiences of my ancestors.  I’ve wanted to know them, or at least about them, and so maybe learn something about myself as I’ve traveled through this life.  And it is the Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri branches of my family — Norwegians, Germans, and Dutch — who all wound up farther west at one point or another, that I have learned the most about

… Read More

I’ve spent most all my days trying to touch the past. It’s a compulsion, a hunger for a connection. I have been accused by some folk who lack understanding of “living in the past,” but that misses the mark by a country mile. It’s never been about that at all — it’s always about making the past present. When that connection … Read More

This year has been a particularly good one for those of us who are interested in old Rome, as new discoveries of letters, and even boxing gloves, at Hadrian’s Wall – a strange wall, indeed, for a host of reasons – and in fresh diggings at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Oplontis, all destroyed by Vesuvius back in ’79 – have given us valuable new information about Roman life, culture, and reach, and indeed have overturned some apple carts.

… Read More

What can be scarier and stronger than the feeling of impending death? — Larisa Reisner, Trotsky (2017) * I hung around St. Petersburg When I saw it was time for a change Killed the Tsar and his ministers Anastasia screamed in vain… Pleased to meet you Hope you guess my name But what’s puzzling you Is the nature of my … Read More

There are people among us who think they have all the answers.  They don’t.  Blowhards and know‐it‐alls, particularly those of the political stripe, are really just people overcome by fright who have morphed into frenzied tent‐revivalists, and who would love to baptize you in the church of their own nightmares.

… Read More

This week, I had the pleasure of writing a story about a good deed. The construction manager of a major project here in Sisters, Oregon, rescued a family that had run off the road in the Cascades and ended up in their wrecked truck, upside down in the North Santiam River. You can read the full story here. The key … Read More

It’s the same old story Tell me where will it end I got the same old blues, same old blues again — J.J. Cale * I’m gonna lay down these Doomsayer Blues. The fourth National Climate Assessment under the U.S. Global Change Research program was released on the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend — the traditional burial ground for stories that … Read More