Keeping your spirits up these days may mean turning your television off. The alternative is to be water-boarded by dire warnings about disease and the consequences of taking drugs to combat them, deficits, failing banks, Wall Street casino, and every other manner of disquieting infotainment. The alternative is, in fact, to be entertained to death. [...]
Read More...One of the things I learned about bullies in boarding school is that you have to throw the table over and spill the game on the floor to deal with them, because the system, the game, is loaded in favor of giving bullies cover. Not surprisingly, it strikes me in my old age as odd [...]
Read More...I’m not sure even Jon Stewart can shame the politicians into talking straight, so ingrained is their hypocrisy and cowardice. Take the tax issue. Republicans and conservative Democrats have made a career of associating taxation with devil worship. But across the land when push comes to shove at the local and state level they refuse [...]
Read More...Conventional wisdom holds that commercially viable fiction must give us a villain, or two or three. The problem of evil must be confronted. And this is a problem for me as a fiction writer because I am much more interested in the nuances of decency. I believe evil must be confronted boldly and quickly, but [...]
Read More...There is obviously big money in scaring us to death. Between the pharmaceutical ads and the so-called news it’s a tribute to the American people that our suicide rate hasn’t skyrocketed. We should by now be thoroughly obsessed with getting sick and getting poorer. Getting lied to doesn’t help either, but that’s really our own [...]
Read More...If you watch too much television you start dreaming about the scorned ex-lover of a victim’s fiancé and soon realize your life needs a continuity editor. Not that it matters because your advertising support is weak and your Nielsens are in the toilet. There’s no chemistry between you and the beautiful people whose misfortune is [...]
Read 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 [...]
Read 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 [...]
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