Barack Obama hasn’t been telling us, as his predecessor did once too often, that he’s just giving our generals in the field what they tell him they need. But that’s the way it’s turning out anyway, and it raises a fundamental question about who our society belongs to. If it belongs to the people, they [...]
Read More...The health care debate might as well be conducted on the moon for all the reality it has failed to embrace. On the one hand the Obama Administration has disastrously failed to explain its ideas. On the other hand, the insurance industry has mounted a massive disinformation campaign while assuring the White House it supports [...]
Read More...Reasons to Hate the Sky, Stuart Bartow, WordTech Editions, 2008, 69pp. The reason vampires are always in vogue is because we encounter them. All of us have left the company of certain people feeling we have just donated a bit too much blood in an uncertain cause. And we have all entertained that sense of [...]
Read More...“There are religious doubts over the abilities of women when it comes to management,” says Iranian lawmaker Mohammed Taghi Rahbar. Iran hasn’t had female government ministers since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Now there’s progress for you. And how much better are we? Does anyone think all that half-wit antagonism for Nancy Pelosi on the Internet [...]
Read More...The best thing I can do for the health care debate is to take care not to heap more on the pile of know-nothingness abuilding every day. But it does occur to me that the debate—because it addresses death and taxes—has revved up a national neurosis that now obscures everything else, putting us exactly where [...]
Read More...Listening last night to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer “interview” Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister on his decision to let the dying Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi go home to Libya, I thought I had tuned in to closed circuit TV at True Blood’s vampire hotel. One would have thought Blitzer was channeling a Hollywood version [...]
Read More...Every once in a while the downright absurdity of life enchants me. It was 105 degrees outside. I was slogging around in my own perspiration and standing in the gift shop of The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan trying to admire an array of wall clocks when I glanced at my wristwatch to see [...]
Read More...(Note: This one of an occasional series of musings about poets whose work prompts me to think I might have something enlightening to say. They by no means represent all the poets I encounter and admire. And this is why I wince at such Facebook-type questions as, Who is your favorite author? What kind of [...]
Read More...Okay, so many Americans don’t want to pay for their neighbor’s health care, maybe not for grandma’s either. I get that. They don’t want the government interfering with their Medicare, and don’t try to tell them Medicare is a government program. And they don’t want the government standing in the way of their insurance company [...]
Read More...Bipolar America manufactures polarities better than it makes anything else, including sense. Polarities and contradictions: hawk, dove, global cop, nativist. Convention posits these polarities in red states and blue states. But I’d like to suggest an alternative, more surreal geography, for we are surely the quintessentially surreal country. I think we Americans live either in [...]
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