News & Commentary from Veteran Writers/Activists
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. - D.H. Lawrence The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations … where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket … where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing. - Raymond … [Read more...]
When does a determination to look on the bright side turn into a state of denial? That is, when do leaders of a secrecy-obsessed US government admit the decision-making surrounding the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan was misguided from the beginning and the endgame is a mess because of it? While the leadership of America is mud-wrestling with itself in the election "silly season," the nation is watching the wheels come … [Read more...]
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (or AIPAC) is holding its annual meeting in Washington DC in an atmosphere of beating war drums and rattling sabers against Iran. It's a full-court press of pro-war power working to make the White House cave in and assume an even more belligerent posture vis-a-vis Iran that it already has. War is in the air. Israel preemptively starting a war with Iran would be bad enough, … [Read more...]
The United States is finding the occupation of other nations more and more challenging. Witness the clueless US soldiers or contractors who burned a dozen Korans at the Bagram Air Force Base trash dump in Afghanistan. The uproar in response has been wide spread and seems profound for the future of US occupation. Then there were the ace troopers who filmed themselves urinating on corpses. And let's not forget the … [Read more...]
I teach creative writing in a maximum security prison in Philadelphia. During the week I scour two thrift shops for 35-cent paperbacks that I haul in to stock a small lending library I created for inmates. Amazingly, the prison had no library. In the process of collecting used books, I’ve surveyed the crime, mystery and noir genre of popular fiction. I've read many of the books in part or end to end; the range of … [Read more...]
Honorable people like to debate whether the United States of America is a "police state," but when it comes to shutting down the expression of ideas on the political left, there's little room for argument. We are inundated in this country with propaganda boilerplate about being the greatest democracy in the world. No, we're not a police state like our friends in Saudi Arabia or our former friends, and current enemies, in … [Read more...]
