Political speech is so close to religious discourse. Listening to John Kerry and his friends and family last night was a little like praying: my mind skates over the parts I find disturbing (as during prayers beseeching God to smite our enemies), and lingers, swelling with desire, during the parts that lift my heart. Then …
Yesterday’s paper quoted Condoleeza Rice as saying “No one is thinking of postponing the elections.” A Justice Department spokesperson went so far as to deny they’d ever had a conversation with the Homeland Security folks on this question. I’d say the trial balloon described in my blog of 14 July crashed like a lead weight. …
Yesterday a friend sent me a message headed “The pending 2004 Coup d’Etat.” You may understand that when I started to read, I felt skeptical. It was a letter from a Unitarian minister in Atlanta, claiming that the Bush administration’s Homeland Security department is pursuing legislation that would allow it to postpone national elections in …
It’s hilarious the way \Fahrenheit 9/11\ is being microscopically vetted for accuracy, with long newspaper stories scoring each of Michael Moore’s assertions and implications. Where were these avatars of “balance” when the Ronald Reagan mythos was being constructed daily by a print-electronic media collaboration that rivaled the Tower of Babel? The media snit suggests a …
My friend Michael Dorsey has a good story on his blog for June 29th about the U.S. Attorney’s insane charges against artist Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble. They started with bioterrorism and whittled the indictment down to something they thought might actually stand, petty larceny. But the crime the artist actually committed was …
A few days ago I alerted you to expect information about another great project by and for artists awakening to the crisis in democracy. SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, California, has inaugurated the National Call to Artists, a Web repository for images, songs, scripts, and ideas that can help increase …
In my blog entry for June 6th, I reported on a meeting of community artists. I described how the participants noticed that, out of political demoralization, we had silenced ourselves in the public arena, not even bothering to state our case. Unlike earlier times, we artists weren’t promoting a cultural policy agenda for the presidential …
People want things–lots of things–but what do we want most? What’s on top? It seems to me the failure to answer that question is at the heart of progressives’ proclivity for self-defeat. The typical pitfall of progressives is to load each decision with so many and varied significances that it becomes impossible to choose for …
There was an interesting article in the June 7th New Yorker about Ahmad Chalabi, the Manuel Noriega of Iraq (beloved and lavishly funded by our covert agencies, imprisoned when he became inconvenient). A schoolmate of Chalabi?s is quoted offering a psychological explanation for his determination to secure U.S. intervention in Iraq. “Ahmad wanted to avenge …
I suppose a worshipful tone is to be expected in the coverage of any presidential passing, but the Ronald Reagan hagiography has been a bit much. (The San Francisco Chronicle‘s coverage of Reagan as the avatar of family dysfunction was a point of light, however.) But what has really gotten me has been the headlines. …