This piece, on the perfidy of the GOP, was published in November of 2004. While no one cares much about George W. Bush and the neoconservative traitors who owned his foreign policy, it may serve as a useful reminder.
Jerry Jeff Davis Brown is taking California out of the Union. Is it too early to celebrate?
President Trump is undoubtedly a creep, but what else can one say of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton? Jack Kennedy and his disgusting brothers? Franklin Roosevelt? Lincoln, whose foul mouth around women, when he was in Congress, caused decent colleagues to shun his company?
Most Americans, hell-bent on success, do not dream of conquering nations or murdering our neighbors. Our vast ambitions are defined by bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger blonds.
To begin with I ought to reassure the gentle reader that any resemblance between the title of this post and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is purely coincidental, though a literary charlatan in the audience may well argue that, like the pretentious novel, my post “deals with issues of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception.”
In one of Douglas Addams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex. It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in it. The result is the annihilation of the self. The device was designed by a scientist who got tired of his wife telling him to put things in perspective. The nagging wife might just as well have been Adam Smith or William Godwin or any...
In which our hero discovers that not all dreams reveal the truth. We visit the home of the improbably named Shawn Borowski, who is beginning to imagine that he is a noble Aztec, whose world has been destroyed by people who look like him.
It seems hardly possible, but the Democratic Party is lurching even further to the Left. At this rate, they’ll soon advocate kidnapping missionaries to feed them to cannibals. (I hope I’m not offending a key interest group there.) California is the epicenter of Dem Party doctrines and cash. Silicon Valley Leftist oligarchs now form the money foundation for Dem candidates across the country. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is salivating at the prospect of again becoming House Speaker. Yet even she still isn’t Left enough for many in the party. The Sacramento Bee’s story after last weekend’s California Dem confab in...
Previous If you think any of this argument is overstated, just go to the library and look at the artistic masterpieces of Jacob Epstein and Andy Warhol, and, as you are reading the wit and wisdom of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, explaining the evils of Western culture, listen to some light background music from Ornette Coleman playing “between the notes” on his plastic saxophone. This was all decades ago, in the period that conservatives still celebrate as a high point of our culture, the time when “the Greatest Generation” was still ruling the planet, back before every imaginable ethnic,...
My impression is that 99.99% of all contemporary cinematic output falls into one of two categories. The first, by far the larger of the two, consists of brazenly exploitative commercial products, the medium’s equivalent of the Twinkie Cake or White Cheddar Cheetos, which are made by Hollywood’s lascivious Shylocks to fleece the common man. The second category is unlike the first in that a commercial return on the products of which it is comprised is somewhat less certain, and the reason for this is that they contain artistic pretension as a separate ingredient rather than the way a particular junk...
