I passed through southern Arizona last week and called up Shaine Parker. He lives in the little border town Douglas, and a couple of years ago he spent several months, full time on a grant, gathering into big, plastic garbage bags what undocumented immigrants throw out on their secret treks north. Shaine said he would [...]
Read MoreMy friend Jan Haaken is a woman for all seasons. Not only does she teach psychology at Portland State U. in Oregon, but she’s got a radio political talk show in that city, a psychotherapy practice informed by serious Freud and serious feminism, and a flowering career as a film producer and director. [...]
Read MoreMorten and I were at Bed, Bath & Beyond last night looking for Christmas cookie tins so he can send out his homemade Norwegian baked goodies to friends and family — including Scandos, boricuas, DR’s, and Jews. While he was poking through the shelves I spied a Martha-Stewart-fancy dreydl and took it over to show [...]
Read MoreSanta Claus is dead! At least, the charity Santa who was born during the first Gilded Age, and whose fantasies about the poor fueled Operation Santa Claus, an enormous, Victorian-mentality welfare program run for decades from the giant Post Office at 33rd Street and 8th Avenue in New York City.
Yesterday, three months after [...]
I just made another work trip to Mexico, starting with the bracing metropolitan capital then heading to aching little villages in the South. The US State Department has a travel advisory out for Mexico, mainly because of drug-trafficking related violence on the border. But Americans are avoiding the interior as well. One still [...]
Read MoreThis summer I was at the Carnavalet, a museum in Paris that reprises that city’s history, with emphasis on the events of 1789-1799. The coolest thing there is the collection of French Revolution tchotchkes — everything from sans culottes paper dolls to lumpily glazed plates and mugs celebrating “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” as well [...]
Read MoreI knew it would be standing room only at the Nation’s and the Brecht Forum’s “Emergency Forum on the Economy,” on Friday night. So I made plans to go downtown early. I decided to drop by the New York Stock Exchange first, to gauge the mood on Wall Street.
I arrived in late afternoon. The market [...]
Here’s a must-read from the wonderful writer Judith Levine, about how Wall Street is as irresistible to Americans as wife beaters are to women:
For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils [...]
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In “Born-Again Democracy,” a comment in the Oct. 20 issue of The Nation, William Greider notes that “Our country is at a rare and dangerous juncture. The old order is crumbling, and virtually all the centers of power that govern us have been discredited by events…Given that political paralysis, people have to find their own [...]
Read MoreJoann Wypijewski has a fine piece in The Nation’s Sept. 29 issue, about McCain’s political exploitation of Sarah P.’s MILFy, B&D, Book of Daniel sex vibe. This reminds me of how Sarah’s trotted her kids out. Not just their bodies and faces but their names, which Mom flashes like medals (go to CafePress.com and [...]
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