Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (more…)

With Hillary Clinton having recently made like a schoolyard bully, maybe this isn’t the right moment to bring up the issue of misogyny. Or maybe it is.

Anybody who thinks this is a dead-letter issue should take a look at those e-mailed erectile dysfunction advertisements bubbling up from the cesspools of humanity. Their revolting language is full of references to the male member as a weapon. They talk of overpowering, exploding and nailing women. They assure men “their” women will be delighted by this weaponization of sexuality. (more…)

Hickory dickory dock, Pillory Clinton is determined to turn back the clock, now borrowing $6.4 from herself in her Energizer Bunny effort to convince us we’re not ready to elect an African-American. That’s her message. She can disguise it with talk about Barack Obama’s inexperience and empty eloquence, but the message is we’re not ready to put racism behind us.

This quintessential power elitist and Washington insider will seemingly pillory the Illinois senator for anything she thinks will stick, including his so-called elitism, which is a scintilla of her own. In the name of giving us a real choice, she has buried the real issues under a heap of non-issues, such as her guileful gas tax holiday and the Jeremiah Wright flapdoodle. In the guise of being ready on Day One to take over she has demonstrated not only a startling hubris and pettiness but Washington dirt-mongering as usual. (more…)

What happens to e-mail happens to us. We delete each other. We
bounce, trash, junk and leave each other unread or misfiled. It’s not surprising. Human minds created the computer and the Internet, so of course they would go on doing what they had always done, but with more dispatch.

We can train an e-mail program to identify junk mail, but if we want to express our particular displeasure we bounce e-mail. This is much the same way we filter people. There are certain “kinds” of people we category (more…)

In an article entitled The Modernists of Al Andalus (May issue of
Istanbul Literary Review) I suggest that modernist English language poetry owes a significant debt to the medieval Arab and Jewish poets of Al Andalus, Arab Spain.—DM

Acting in its usual role as the national mind the press has decided that the rising fuel price is bad news, end of story. But it may be just the beginning of a much more important story.

Since the end of World War II we have built a society predicated on cheap gasoline. The suburbs sprawled inexorably into the countryside. Highways sliced and diced communities and farmland. Immense malls rose in remote spots, sucking the blood out of established commercial centers. Schools were consolidated into education factories, giving rise to huge bus fleets and loss of community control. A long-distance tourist industry developed. Small farms fell to developers and agribusiness combines. Agribusiness depends on huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, and on diesel-guzzling farm equipment and long-haul trucks to take farm products to market. (more…)

Of all the trumped-up issues that beset this presidential campaign elitism is the most slippery. Putting aside suspicion that it may disguise racism when it comes to Barack Obama, the word smells as a pejorative because its users are elitists.

Does it make sense for the quintessential power elitist Hillary Clinton to get away with painting a Chicago community activist as an elitist? No, but the press has swallowed the ploy. (more…)

It’s often said our government is a cosmology of checks and balances, and lately it’s often said the Bush Administration has labored mightily to subvert it in favor of executive authority. In nature, too, there seem to be checks and balances that humanity labors mightily to subvert.

I have been wondering lately whether advertising has played the role of the Bush Administration in subverting culture in favor of appearance over content. It seems clear to me that a precariously broad segment of the electorate favors appearance over discourse and slogan over an intricate interplay of facts and ideas. (more…)

The only thing keeping us from becoming a federal police state is our
nostalgia for the ideals of our founders and the need to pretend that
we’re still living up to them.

Perhaps I’ve figured out why we clumsily call it a health care system. It’s because it exists to take care of the health care industry. Otherwise we might more felicitously call it patient care. The way it is now, the patient is so named for patience while being screwed. (more…)

Once you’ve been nuts in New York City you wouldn’t want to do it anywhere else. I know this because I occasionally write and edit in Manhattan’s streets and attract no more attention than the millions of look-at-me’s who gab on their hands-free cell phones. I could be having phone sex or translating Proust, it wouldn’t make any difference to anybody. (more…)