There and Then, Here and Now
A lady: Yes, that’s just like what goes on nowadays, and it’s because anyone that is struggling for the liberation of the oppressed, he himself is a Christ, and then here’s a Herod, and what…
Category: Dissidents
Cultivating Attention and Animating Conscience: Reading Thoreau in Desperate Times
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I…
Perennially Good Advice
“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above…
To Serve Suffering Humanity
Shekhar Ganguly, A Satyagrahi, a Revolutionary, a Communist People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1995 I recently read Arundhati Roy’s moving essay, “Walking with the Comrades,” detailing her solidarity with the indigenous Maoists of India back…
Reading Václav Havel I Think of Gideon Levy
Glucksman says the role of the intellectual is to warn, to predict horrors, to be a Cassandra who tell us what is going on outside the walls of the city. I share this notion….I too…
The Goal Is Justice, the Method Is Transparency
For those who would like to know a little more about the issues surrounding Julian Assange and Wikileaks, please take two minutes to read and ponder the following passages from Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler’s…
For So They Treated the Prophets…
Here’s Noam Chomsky–True prophets like Amos — “dissident intellectuals,” in modern terminology — offered both elevated moral lessons, which the people in power weren’t fond of, and geopolitical analyses that usually turned out to be…
Share the Wealth with Andrew Wimmer and Mark Chmiel: Making Use of Wikileaks
According to Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, “[Wikileaks] functions almost like a group of historians of the present. Its institutional mission is to reveal the secret activities of political leaders and, in the process, show the public…
This Weekend in Saint Louis: Colin McLaughlin’s “Jailbird”!
My friend Colin wrote the play! Spread the word. The Missouri History Museum and Bread and Roses Missouri presents the premiere of Jailbird, a new play. In 1920, Eugene Victor Debs ran a campaign for…
What a Joy to Run the World!
When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the United States, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality, and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they…