The backlash is back. This weekend it swept through Nashville when the city hosted that welter of right-wing populism, the Tea Party convention. America is under siege from traitors within. Grab your pitchforks. “Real America” is under assault.
February 4th, 2010
Global hegemony does not come cheap. The US’ military budget is almost as large as the rest of the world’s combined, and the tab keeps rising. If Obama’s just-issued budget request is approved, the Pentagon’s $708 billion yield for the coming fiscal year will set a record going back to 1946. Yet the US is running frightening deficits, begging the question whether an empire can be sustained with IOUs.
January 31st, 2010
America is a center-right country. Conservatism is in our DNA, a result of the peculiar circumstance of our nation’s founding. Those huddled masses yearning to breathe free who sought refuge on our shores from European tyranny brought with them skepticism of centralized power. Their worldview is ours. It animates who we are.
January 27th, 2010
“It is hard to make predictions,” Groucho Marx famously quipped, “especially about the future.” Not so American policy in Afghanistan. There it can be said with assurance that the US will continue to pound sand in a quixotic attempt to defeat an enemy strengthened by the weakness of our regional allies.
January 23rd, 2010
Is the game rigged? Barely a year after your historical triumph, it has all come crashing down spectacularly in a hail of death-panel demagoguery and birther bigotry. It seems so unfair. Eight-years of catastrophic bungling bought a mere 12-month honeymoon. Blame it on a credulous electorate, but it’s time for some introspection.
January 18th, 2010
Bless Arne Duncan. The Secretary of Education is daringly taking on that modern-day gladiatorial spectacle dressed up in pedagogical clothing, big time collegiate athletics.
January 13th, 2010
Behold China. The apple of many an economist’s eye is confidently marching forward, its dramatic rise seemingly unstoppable. Learn Mandarin. Consider Confucianism. The future belongs to the Middle Kingdom.
January 9th, 2010
Few jihadists hail from Beverly Hills. Or the French Riviera or St. Moritz. Most Islamic extremists seeking to sow panic and fear are from deeply troubled societies riddled by misgovernment and poverty. Curiously, though, a striking number are fortune sons with ready access to a world beyond their shattered homelands.
December 19th, 2009
These are strange days. The country is nearly insolvent and our creditors twitchy. Healthcare is scarce, foreclosures common, dreaded “Socialism” threatens, and our leaders warn us that we are in the grips of an existential struggle against “evil.” Freedom and liberty hang in the balance.
November 3rd, 2009
The Yugoslav freighter, Hrvatska, brought Penny and me with our dreams of being artists to the “Old World.” It would be there in Spain where things magical happened, where my past twenty-seven years of dreams of being an artist would actually become a reality. The planned one-year stay would become thirteen thanks initially to Dale Broza’s resurrection.
October 11th, 2009
Having lost the battle to support myself as an artist on the sale of my fine art, I would be exhibiting in desperation in the Washington Square Outdoor Art Show brazenly commercial sculptures. Ashamed at what I was being forced to do, I would exhibit this work under the made-up name of Dale Broza.
August 31st, 2009
I was determined to live as an artist but determination and doing were quite different. First, the minimal requirements of renting a studio and purchasing art supplies would have to be fulfilled. By good fortune, I learned of a sculptor who was looking for an assistant.
August 13th, 2009
An artist who can live on his art alone is a rarity. Having done it so far, I would like to describe how a mild-mannered art student became an artistic super-survivor. These next entries are excerpts taken from my unpublished autobiography titled, Self-Portrait, Artist Unknown. Let me start this tale of transition with my birth - no, not my actual birth, but rather my artistic birth.
June 2nd, 2009
Jeannette Walls knows about forgiveness. It is not the central theme of her memoir, The Glass Castle, which portrays in heartbreaking detail her penurious upbringing. Her story has drawn comparisons to Frank McCourt’s own memoir, Angela’s Ashes, which begins with the observation, “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all.”
May 26th, 2009
A few months ago I read James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, a book that describes the long history of European anti-Semitism, from Christianity’s break with Judaism to the present. It is a sad and painful story of the abuse and persecution of Jews at the hands of the Catholic Church as well as its Protestant offspring.
How much rejection can one person take?
Dear sir or madam, thank you for sending us your
poems unfortunately our publication does
not accept poetry that makes a comment.
On this short, very short, short, short,
shortest day of the year
You said at sunrise, come, come, come home with me,
lie with me,
On this short, very short, short, short,
shortest day of the year.
In the light of a winter’s morning is it sleeping lying face down,
face pressed into the cold sidewalk?
The hands, the fingers folded tight as if clutching at the earth,
digging with long black fingernails to make a hole against
Roots torn uprooted and worn, fighting back a sidewalk
for a small square of soil,
Short of sky, shade nourished, bark rubbed raw from car
bumpers and delivery boy’s bikes chained to its trunk,
Sought out by leashed dogs who have never known a forest
but somehow seek a tree.
States, like reptiles, social climbers, and casino high rollers, are not by inclination altruistic. Self-interest is their stock in trade. Indeed, international relations predicated on more high-minded principles invariably fails, sometimes spectacularly. Think of the League of Nations, which collapsed, amongst other reasons, because of the erroneous assumption that countries would go to war to defend the sovereignty of other states even if doing so was not in their national interest.
I think I have a stomachache
Perhaps what I ate was a mistake
Shellfish, fries, corn beef and slaw
Wine and beer and even more
addresses the gap between rhetoric and reality -- between what is and what might be, all analyzed with a keen eye for the absurd.
