Someone recently emailed us twenty-two images of old military posters, the kind so familiar to what has been called the greatest generation. I enjoyed scanning through them, remembering some of them from my childhood and not suspecting they would be hitched to an anonymous hate wagon at the end. Here is what I found at [...]
Read More...President Barack Obama has relieved Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal for the right reasons. But he continues to make the wrong decision about staying in Afghanistan. The issue was never about the general’s insubordination. That’s a no-brainer. He is insubordinate. An ordinary soldier who said the things he said would be court-martialed, and our Army is [...]
Read More...The Lucky Ones, a 2008 film about three Iraq War veterans who return to an America that doesn’t seem to have room for them, raises some of the questions societies almost never raise when they send their children to war. A middle-aged sergeant played by Tim Robbins returns to a wife who has outgrown him [...]
Read More...Made in the USA—remember that reassuring label? It’s as dead as the Edsel, and yet there is an eerie silence across the land, from Washington to Anchorage, about how Americans are going to prosper without a manufacturing sector. Even Taiwan seeks cheaper labor in China. The quest for cheap labor is the Black Death of [...]
Read More...Theater is like conspiracy theory; it rearranges the furniture in your head and before you know it your script might as well be gospel. I think that’s what happened in Nazi Germany. We’ll see one of these days if it’s what happened with Washington’s 9/11 scenario. Theater is heady stuff. Since 9/11 we have been [...]
Read More...The Baltimore poet Gregg Mosson has written a thematic collection of poems, Questions of Fire (Plain View Press, 86pp) that gives voice to the psychic devastation of war on the home front. His poems show how war pervades our lives in ways we hardly suspect until the artists among us take notice. I have reviewed [...]
Read More...Contrived breathlessness being the defining characteristic of television and radio journalism, how is it that the breathtaking premise of The International, starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, is anathema to the 24-hour blatherers? My guess is that if war is about money, specifically debt, the media avoid the idea because the media are about money, [...]
Read More...Never thought I’d be glad to see a cordless shaver or kitchen knife commercial on television, but lately the advertising that keeps programs on the air is so fetid and dishonest that plain old-fashioned product hucksters are as welcome as robins. There’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling us the sky will crumble and fall [...]
Read More...In an admirable model of breakthrough journalism CNN today recasts the West’s conflict with militant Islam in a way that challenges our assumptions and points to a new dispensation. Nic Robertson and Paul Cruickshank report that out of a notorious Libyan prison a new jihadist code has emerged that renounces Al Qaeda’s tactics, reinstating Islam’s [...]
Read More...We are a society whose major industries are war and turning people into debtors. Were these circumstances forced on us by others? If not, what does this say about us? It’s not a rhetorical question. I don’t know the answer. But it occurs to me that a debtor nation that finds itself almost continuously at [...]
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