Song: On Hearing That the Obama Administration Intends to Cut the Budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities

Song
The fuck you say?
Two hundred million
(or whatever it is)
won’t keep the Marines
in bullets for a day.
The fuck you say?
The Pentagon won’t
deign to wipe its ass
with anything less
than a couple billion.
The fuck you say?
An ancient master
noted: All things
are empty, true, but
differences still count.
The fuck you say?
One does not use
the emptiness
of a shit scoop
to ladle out the soup.

Attacking the Rationalists

In the winter of 1906-1907, William James delivered a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston on the subject of pragmatism. They were, in many ways, the culmination of a lifetime of work (James would die only two years later) and they also have the virtue of what can only be called voice [...]

Anniversary

On this anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I simply note the destructive violent power of absolute belief. Certainty is so difficult to maintain that whole religions and political systems have to be created to prop it up. Those systems — theirs, ours — are inherently violent.

Health Care

I always like these occasional features in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about a mysterious medical diagnosis. This account, though, seemed particularly relevant at a time when the country is debating health care reform. [Spoiler alert] The patient, a sixty-four year old woman who is pretty clearly from the working class, loses her ability to [...]

Fairy Tales

The underlying narrative motif of this news story about the feud between Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly is And they lived happily ever after. And how did that wonderful result occur, children? It occurred because the corporations that own Mr. Olberman and Mr. O’Reilly decided that the feud was bad for business. Like many fairy [...]

They Should Be Happy

. . . because most of the crackers [more here] who live in Alabama think that government is the problem. This is the end result of radical right-wing-attacks on government and civic life in general, in favor of a kind of he-man individualism. Well, at least most of them are armed so they will be [...]

Henry Louis Gates Should Sue

That’s the provocative notion of Randy Cohen in the NY Times. I’m not sure whether it would be a good idea politically, but I think Cohen is right to point out that Gates has a legitimate case. My favorite line from the article — the the thing that struck me right from the start of [...]

A Crappy Plan . . .

. . . that does not lower costs or achieve fundamental reform. That is the “health care bill” that will emerge from Congress “before the end of the year.” Obama should veto it, but he won’t, since he has already bargained away most of the really progressive ideas he campaigned on in order to achieve [...]

A Great Quantity of Stupidity

I usually wait for the transcripts and news summaries rather than watching TV, but yesterday, because I am keyed up about the subject, I wanted to hear President Obama’s remarks on health care reform. That meant turning on CNN. The remarks were scheduled to begin at 3:15, but didn’t actually begin until a few minutes [...]

Surveillance Society

The surveillance was (is?) even worse than some of us suspected. The political right is already cutting Bush II loose, referring to Bush-Obama policies; the new president needs to draw some sharp distinctions between his policies and those of his predecessor.

keep looking »