Born Out of Due Time, Chapter I conclusion
The aspiring Aztec visits his office, where all is not well, and makes up his mind to consult the Paramoral Investigator, who turns out to be weirder and more offensive than he had imagined.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Truthers, Birthers, and Russhers
The left breaks out into these fits, it seems to me, when they have been temporarily frustrated in that long march toward moral anarchy and political tyranny that my late friend Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny. Not to worry, as they say. They can be as sure of their victory as Jeremiah was sure of the Babylonian triumph over the faithless people of Judah.
Where’s Joe McCarthy, When You Need Him?
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.
California People’s Republic
Jerry Jeff Davis Brown is taking California out of the Union. Is it too early to celebrate?
Donald Trump: My Favorite Sociopath
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?
The Plight of the Homeless, Conclusion
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.
Wednesday’s Child: To the Flophouse
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.”
The Plight of the Homeless, Part One
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...
The Language of Lying
North American English is now the dominant form of the language, and as one can tell by reading British newspapers or listening to British speakers, under American influence American English is edging out other, local varieties of English, bringing with it American habits of speech and the habits of mind that go with them as it does so. This is not necessarily a welcome development. As anyone who moves to America from England immediately notices, besides the obvious differences in sound, one peculiar, noticeable feature of North American English is a constant tendency towards euphemism, suggesting that Americans, however big-hearted...
Born out of Due Time, Chapter One, Part c
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.
