“No matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.” (Lily Tomlin) I have a friend who talks about “the default world.” He means the one in which we adjust to absurdity, tolerating behavior that we ought to rebuke, simply because in that diminished reality it has become normalized. In the default world, U.S. elections …
Years ago, at a time when I felt trapped by circumstance, when the way forward was anything but clear, a wise friend asked me this: How seriously can you take yourself? What would it look like to take yourself one hundred percent seriously? There’s a sort of superstition that if something comes up three times …
This year marks the 50th anniverary of The Port Huron Statement, a democratic manifesto drafted largely by Tom Hayden and modified and adopted by Students for a Democratic Society, a leading activist organization of that period. For many people like myself who came up in the sixties, it was an important articulation of political values. …
Have you got it yet? The Surreal Season Headache-and-a-Half? I start to feel my SSHH! when the presidential election campaigns ramps up during the summer before the election, and the pounding doesn’t usually stop till November at the earliest. It’s an overdose of surrealism, plain and simple: while this over-the-top waste of time and money …
I’ve written often about my conviction that getting big money out of politics is the necessary precursor to anything like a meaningful democracy in the United States. Most recently, it was in “The Impasse”: I continue to believe that purging the electoral system of private money is the key to everything. If big business and …
If the question had been put outright, my friend and I agreed, a supermajority would have voted on our side: Do you want to live in a nation where a few ultra-rich individuals own as much as everyone else put together, have carte blanche to use their wealth to shape public policy, yet feel completely …
What principle do you hold dearest? What sense of American identity matters most to you? If I put a question— say, What do you stand for?—what answer resounds with total conviction? My friend and I were at lunch, discussing our usual topic: The Impasse, aka the gulf between what we know of Americans’ capacity for …
We need a new rallying cry. Van Jones has an idea that’s not quite cooked, but suggestive. On Saturday, someone who heard Jones address a Scott Walker recall rally in Wisconsin tweeted this quote from Jones’ remarks: “Don’t adapt to absurdity.” He was making the point that over time, even what seems preposterous becomes normalized. …
The rambling life ain’t restful, to paraphrase Satchel Paige. The last five weeks have been almost nonstop work for me, including nearly 10,000 miles of air travel. I always think that 30,000 feet above the planet will be a great place for introspection, but instead, I shift in my seat, get work done, eavesdrop on …
In ancient Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was a kind of maze built at Knossos by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete. It was designed to hold the Minotaur, a mythical creature that was half-man and half-bull. Unlike an ordinary maze, a labyrinth is easy to get into; but once you attain the center, it is …