When Life Starts to Improve
Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…
Category: Power and Ideology
Ed Snowden, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald
Check out Matt Taibbi’s article today, The Washington Post Dabbles in Orwell: In scrubbed piece about Edward Snowden, the Bezos Post offers a preview of how history will be re-written. Here’s the penultimate paragraph: “That…
Problematizing My Faves: Matt Taibbi on Howard Zinn
The worst thing is to claim to be objective. Of course, you can’t be. Historians should say what their values are, what they care about, what their background is, and let you know what is…
Birds of a Feather
From Matt Taibbi’s article today at Substack–Which brings us back to Cheney. All those things Trump is rumored to be, Dick Cheney actually is. That’s why it’s so significant that he appeared on the floor…
Dear Daisy Zamora
(After Reading Riverbed of Memory) I admit itI am filled with guiltWe didn’t do enough back in the 80sWhen the Reaganites were determinedTo crush the RevolutionTrue, you might say, the Sandinistas were far from perfectBut…
Beyond This Week’s News
My friend Andrew Wimmer shared the following provocative view from economist Michael Hudson… The current Democratic impasse shows that no progress can be made without changing the institutional structure of American politics. It seems that…
The Plan
My friend Andrew Wimmer’s comment on the above: Of course they have. It was never “on the table.” It’s not a shame, it’s the plan.
Why Did All Those People Die?
W. D. Ehrhart, The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature, and American Life [2002] This is a collection of the Vietnam veteran and poet’s prose pieces up till 9.11. Some are quite short…
A Letter from 2005
April 6, 2005 Dear Andrew, I recently finished a small book by Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and it made me think of many conversations we’ve had over the past couple of years. So…
An Honest Man: Smedley Butler
Marine General Smedley Butler, in a 1933 speech: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in…