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22 Feb

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

The FBI has finally proclaimed white supremacist groups as our greatest domestic security threat, and the Department of Homeland Security has followed suit. They haven't got around to adding "male supremacy" yet--after all, this part took them more than 30 years. I write "more than 30 years" because 1989 was when I published the first and, regrettably, to date the only feminist analysis of terrorism, and one of the infinitesimally few analyses by women at all. This was a boys' game with the solutions brought to you by the same folks who brought you the problem. I'm glad that I wrote The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism when I did, because if I hadn't I would have to do so again right now. Besides, I've updated it three times since then: as it went into paperback, then in 2001 after the Twin Towers fell, and again when it became...

08 Feb

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
The greatest deliberative body in the world. That's how the United States Senate has been described, a group portrait that's an exercise in aspirational hyperbole, to my mind.

25 Jan

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
All this is going to take us some time. You don't adjust out of Stockholm syndrome into something approaching hope, much less normalcy, with a snap of your fingers. You suffer leftover debilitating addictions.

18 Jan

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

On December 30, 2020, Lois Diane Sasson succumbed to COVID-19. She was a survivor of multiple cancers, Lyme’s disease, and various respiratory illnesses–and she was not young. She was also highly intelligent, witty, an impassioned feminist, an artist, and my friend of 46 years. We were friends as young women, as maturing and then middle-aged women, as old women. Conversations about periods, lovers, and politics gradually got replaced by conversations about aches and pains, doctors, and politics. Yet we retained the elastic, enduring innocence of our youngest friendship, the way women's friendships oddly can--as "girlfriends." She was my proverbial sister, perhaps the last of the truly great dames. It is inconceivable that Lois actually could die. She was just too much alive, texting to the very last "Can't talk, can laugh," because the oxygen mask muzzled her speech. “At least I'm stoned," she texted, high on morphine. When she...

14 Dec

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Let's face it, my friends, 2020 has been one hell of a hard year. Can you believe that the Trump impeachment hearings, complete with his dutiful senatorial acquittal, took place only last February? It seems eons ago. Of course, the pandemic loomed over all of 2020 and still does. Reuters reports that one person in the United States now dies every minute from COVID-19; as of last Wednesday, the national death toll surpassed 150,000—the highest in the world, thanks to Trump's sadism and ineptitude. Furthermore, that number is expected to increase over the holidays. No other country in the world has anything close to numbers.

09 Nov

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

How tempting it is to leap ahead to the end—or simply to post a downcast photo of he-who-shall-not-be-named with the all-in-caps words: YOU'RE FIRED! How tempting to shout KAMALA DEVI HARRIS from the rooftop. But it's revealing to remember the process. This was the process. It’s Wednesday, the fourth, at dawn. I’ll be writing this in real time, in stages, adding on news breaks as they come—at least up to the moment when I must file this. I have no idea how long this will take. Weeks? A month? Agony. This is not what any of us were expecting. What we have got to keep in mind: 1) We told everyone to please be patient ; we cautioned everyone that this could take days or much more. We should listen to our own advice. 2) The razor edge margin of the vote in some places—say, Georgia—demonstrates the fortitude of those voters who stood for...