Books

Blog

24 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

That’s an odd, uncomfortable title for any writing of mine. I thought I thought vengeance a waste of energy. Then a recent barrage of news stories set me off. Nothing unique about any of them, given the pattern we’re used to under patriarchy. But the barrage, across a range of contexts, kept drumming the same insult home. There’s Trump's boy, Brett Kavanaugh, confirmed to the Supreme Court for life by the narrowest of margins, after having been credibly, publicly, convincingly accused of sexual assault, and responding with an indignant tantrum before the Senate committee. Now the story breaks that additional credible witnesses contacted the FBI to testify in agreement with Dr. Blasey Ford, the survivor of his assault—but the FBI refused even to interview them. Did the FBI, pressured by the White House and GOP-dominated Senate, just cave in? Was the FBI worn out by right-wing accusations against its own...

16 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Back from hiatus! I confess that over the summer, I considered making this blog a Trump-free zone, since we're all so fatigued by hearing him, about him, about his policies and their disastrous effects. But that would be neither responsible nor possible, unless we were proverbial ostriches.

01 Jul

Posted at 00:00h in Temp, Uncategorized
This has been a painful time, while the old hegemonies have been massing together to try and suffocate what is inevitably coming to birth in our Republic, in the world. Yet the flip side has been that we’re living through a golden age of journalism. When the Executive branch of government was kidnapped, when the Judicial is endangered by being packed, and when half the Legislative seems silenced, we are still here, in fact still advancing, only because of investigative reporting by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and others.

24 Jun

Posted at 06:00h in Temp, Uncategorized

“I’m sick and tired of bein’ sick and tired!” That’s what Fannie Lou Hamer, the magnificent Civil Rights leader and head of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats said, and I thought I understood what she meant back in the 1960s. But now I understand it in my bones. You determine to manufacture affirmation. It’s a deliberate decision. You seek affirmation as if it were a place, and so it is. It’s the place where Yes We Can comes from. Anger can get you there–and women especially have a hard time with anger. But we’re learning to walk that path. Religion gets some people there. Love get some people there. There are many roads. It’s the mysterious place of reserve from which we draw resilience, imagination, even humor. Endurance--and pride in endurance. Art flourishes there. Like jazz and lullabies. Signals flash there, like songs, puzzles, quilts with codes that map directions...

17 Jun

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

I became so incandescent yet inarticulate with rage on hearing Trump say flat-out, whether from arrogance or ignorance or both, that of course he would accept foreign interference in U.S. elections if that would permit him to retain power, that rather than stammer any comment in tongue-tied fury I thought it preferable to rely on my betters. Here are two startlingly applicable examples of my betters holding forth with their highly relevant views. The first is George Washington. The Framers were particularly and justifiably worried about foreign intervention into the fledgling nation, so that was not only the subject of the now-famous-because-so-violated-by-Trump Emoluments Clause in the Constitution but it also took up a substantial proportion of Washington’s great Farewell Address. Here is a small excerpt: As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, . . . attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do...

03 Jun

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Some readers write me that they find these blogposts helpful on the sanity front, but that they’re still exhausted, weary of fighting, and fearful about escalating struggles during next year’s elections. Oh, how I understand.

27 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Upside down, backwards, sideways. No wonder we feel dizzy and nauseated much of the time. Legislators discuss ”consensual rape,” presidential spokespeople insist there are ”alternate facts,” and lies become beyond brazen since there are written, photographic, video, audible, publicly witnessed records and testimonies exposing the lies. Crowd size, for example. What was said in an un-doctored videotaped interview or speech. What crime was boldly committed and baldly denied. When enough of these accumulate—and they come in an avalanche daily—they leave tiny pits, then dents, in a citizen's self confidence about recognizing reality, until the blizzard of pebbles becomes a pelting of stones and finally a hillside of boulders roaring down to bury the self, the truth, the real. This happens through language and action both, via short-term tactics and long-term strategies. It’s so blatant it bewilders the rational mind. It’s so continual it exhausts attempts to select one discrete example and...

20 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Right to the point. Alabama has fired the first nuclear weapon in the out-and-out war over women’s right to bodily integrity. Georgia and Missouri are close behind. These three, and the other states trying to enact so called “heart-beat laws” about women’s right to terminate unwanted pregnancies, have made increasing forays and assaults for a long time now.

13 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” You might recognize that line, from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, as famous, but its meaning has been roundly debated. Some scholars insist that the speaker, a ne’er-do-well character aptly named Dick the Butcher, is serious because he detests lawyers, since they are virtuous defenders of justice. Other scholars insist just as loudly that because the scene is one of Shakespeare's comic-relief guttersnipe-street-people scenes, the remark is spat out as a laugh line aimed at corrupt lawyers and their high fees. Me, I think Will was, as usual, slaying two meanings with a single line. That would work today, too. On the one hand, more than 700 and still counting former Federal prosecutors have signed an open letter stating that had the acts committed by Donald J. Trump as outlined in the Mueller Report been committed by any other American citizen, that...