The governance, or lack thereof, of the great republic.
I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us. (Tim O’Brien) On Veteran’s Day, we are told only to honor those who have served this …
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. (Elie Wiesel) I’m not especially familiar with the work of Scott Kurtz. Cursory investigation reveals that his webcomic, PvP, is quite successful, though, which may explain why …
If you credit the arguments of those on the comfortable center of the divide between rich and poor, we are currently locked in a life-or-death struggle between radical Republicans and a thin blue line of heroic Democrats who alone champion the liberal values of civilization against the rapacious hordes of …
The bosses of our mass media — press, radio, film and television — have their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster. (Ernst Fischer) Just a quick one tonight, inspired by Sony Pictures’ firing of Dan Harmon. …
The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this …
A slave, Marcus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not; he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless …
What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all, in the material sense, and we know it. But we …
When I was young, like many idealists, I still believed that America was exceptional. I still believe that this country is an exceptional one; there is still no nation that so fiercely enshrines the rights of man in its very foundational document and so vociferously defends them as part of its …
So, I’m not black. I’m able to say that I’m not white, either — ironically, through the very mechanism of white privilege. If you’re white and you choose to reject whiteness, you are able to do so only because you’re white. People of color can never deny their color; they …
That one finds, in the infant days of the 21st century — indeed, if certain overzealous interpreters of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar are to be credited, the very end of human civilization! — a widespread resistance to well-established facts about human behavior continues to surprise. The world probably isn’t …
Considering the prominence we give it in our society, Americans seem to have a lot of trouble talking about money. All sorts of odd communicational shorthand has arisen around the rather simple concept of money, to the degree that we have found ourselves voluntarily handicapped when discussing the very thing …
The state of the nation as Baby 2012 makes its squalling entrance is extremely hard to gauge. The answer to the question of where we are politically, as is often the case, depends entirely on where you are standing, and what sort of filter you are looking through at the …
George Orwell was right about a great number of things, and he was right about them in an extremely eloquent and insightful way. Never was he righter, and never more insightful, than in Chapter III of Down and Out in Paris and London, where he describes the stroke of bad …
It is in Ezekiel, near the beginning of God’s crazy-old-man period, when he admits that he deliberately gave his followers stupid ideas and made them follow intentionally bogus rules just to make them miserable and remind them who was really in charge. For all their talk of abortion, homosexuality, and …
As the Occupy Wall Street movement drags on, and law enforcement agencies make the foolish but predictable decision to respond to its persistence with violence, a fundamental contradiction begins to make itself known in our political lives. It has always been a basic assumption of even the most partisan political …
