( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court […]
Public Libraries under MAGA Threat: Banning what Matters
( Tomdisptach.com) – When my mother died in 2000, I inherited all her books. Sadly, after several moves and downsizings over the decades, her collection had shrunk. Still, it remains considerable and impressive in its own way. Her legacy to me included some special volumes like a first edition of Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles […]
Nowhere to Run – The world’s Refugees say, ‘Gimme Shelter’
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Think of Donald Trump as, in his own fashion, a creature of climate change. After all, in 2015, he descended that escalator into the election race denouncing immigrants at the southern border (those “Mexican rapists”) and calling for a “big, fat, beautiful wall” to be built along those very lands. As […]
Is it Time (Once Again) for Nonviolent Rebellion? On Ending Dreams of Revenge in Israel, Palestine, and Elsewhere
( Tomdispatch.com) – When I was in my early twenties, I seriously considered murdering someone. He had given my best friend genital herpes, which many health practitioners then believed was the agent responsible for causing cervical cancer in women. (It wasn’t.) Back in the 1970s, though, I believed that, by infecting my friend, he might […]
Republican Contradictions: Are they Fascists or Nihilists — or Both?
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum. Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more […]
Getting old in America is another Lonely Game of Haves and Have-Nots; It doesn’t have to be this Way
(Tomdispatch.com ) – For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a […]
Kissinger at 100: Did Realism really require War Crimes?
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Henry Alfred Kissinger turned 100 on May 27th of this year. Once a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, for many decades an adviser to presidents, and an avatar of American realpolitik, he’s managed to reach the century mark while still evidently retaining all his marbles. That those marbles remain hard and […]
The Ugly Side of American Exceptionalism: Refusing to Play by the Rules
( Tomdispatch.com ) – In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and […]
Yes, We have home-grown Fascists: And Now They’re beginning to say the quiet Part Out Loud
( Tomdispatch.com ) – One day when I was about six, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw […]
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