October 2011

More on How Occupy Wall Street and Liberals Will Lose

October 31, 2011

. Nothing that has occurred since my post on Thursday argues against its sad prognosis. Much argues for it. City governments are becoming less tolerant of the occupations, some of which are exhibiting more problematic behavior than earlier, with defiance of local ordinances and clashes with police growing in number and location. This makes the [...]

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Jazz Is: 33 – Occupy Love

October 29, 2011

. One of my occasional exceptions to the has-to-be-an-interesting-video rule. The last time I heard this, a couple of months ago, I was sitting in a storefront window on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan with a cup of coffee, thinking about love. There’s Wall Street and politics, and there’s real life, before, during, and after. A Billie Holiday original. Don’t bother. [...]

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How Occupy Wall Street and Liberals Will Lose

October 27, 2011

. I was against it before I was for it. Soon it may not matter. Occupy Wall Street was conceived and instigated by people who do not represent the so-named 99% in their greater and many specific political and social aspirations. Nonetheless, the movement has been able to focus rightful social anger on the causes [...]

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Slaying the Tyrant

October 24, 2011

. Qaddafi is dead. Now there is the period of questioning and examination, of the circumstances and of ourselves, and self-examination is always a good thing. There are areas of our social and political life – whole political parties – in which smug certitude reigns and the death of even the hapless is cheered. In [...]

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How We Lived on It (43) – Here’s to Hakram Bobo

October 22, 2011

. Friend X is is seeking to rent the attic apartment of her home. Youngest son is away at college, oldest son is off to explore a new career in a burgeoning South American economy, and the house is feeling just a lot of twigs and leaves right now. The money wouldn’t hurt, and with [...]

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“Emergency” Committee for Israel Uses Israel as a Wedge Issue

October 20, 2011

. The Emergency (sic) Committee for Israel video to which I regrettably subjected readers last Thursday is doing its job and drawing more attention. More people are talking about it and more people are talking about the bogus issue of anti-Semitism at the Occupy Wall Street protests. One point of hypocritical confusion requires immediate clarification. [...]

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In Memory of Elouise Cobell

October 18, 2011

. This blog began in late 2008 to recount my yearlong nationwide travels through Indian Country with documentary photographer Julia Dean. Those travels themselves were inspired by my publication earlier that year of “Aboriginal Sin,” in Tikkun. The article (scroll down for an image link on the right) presented an overview of the historic assault [...]

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Running for Office in Movies

October 17, 2011

. Within the political film genre, a sub-genre is the film whose focus is the run for office. Films outside that sub-category, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to All the President’s Men, offer similar lessons about American ideals and worldly reality, but what they offer are insights into established reality – the national establishment, the [...]

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Cinefile – Some Occupy Wall Street History

October 16, 2011

. The first clip below gives us Walter Huston as Judson Hammond, President of the United States in the 1933 Gabriel Over the White House, from Gregory La Cava. It is a typically idealized, absurdly stilted version, from the time, of American democracy. Its president confronts the film version of the real “Bonus Army” that [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXVII) – Postcard

October 15, 2011

. from somewhere… Postcard Margaret Atwood I’m thinking about you.  What else can I say? The palm trees on the reverse are a delusion; so is the pink sand. What we have are the usual fractured coke bottles and the smell of backed-up drains, too sweet, like a mango on the verge of rot, which [...]

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The Putrid Cynicism of the Emergency Committee for Israel

October 13, 2011

. Friend and managing editor of CiF Watch Adam Levick has offered a link in the comments section to my last post on Occupy Wall Street. I can imagine the concerns that prompted Adam’s offering. I would share them if I thought they were real. They are not. The link is to a one minute video [...]

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The Differences between Occupy Wall Street & the Tea Parties Made Easy

October 12, 2011

. James Rainey in today’s Los Angeles Times offers a mostly on-target piece on how the MSM tends to simplify in stupid mystification new social phenomena the news media have neither the patience nor insight to examine incisively. Way to go, Rainey. Rainey’s focus is on similar treatment of the Tea Parties and Occupy Wall [...]

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Occupy Wall Street vs The Tea Parties

October 10, 2011

. There is enough oversimplification in MSM political commentary about American political movements and tendencies – their origins, motives, and acts – to swirl perpetually down a drain of ignorance, but I don’t have quite that much time today. The opposition of the title above is certainly a current, favored topic of pundits. As it [...]

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Dear Nicholas Kristof, You Are a Fool

October 7, 2011

. Let’s begin with the title of that ejaculation of tendentious nonsense you and The New York Times have passed off as thoughtful commentary by a serious commentator on international affairs. “Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?” Really, you mean that? You haven’t heard that spoken around the block a time or two. It’s your [...]

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The Life with Death of Steve Jobs

October 6, 2011

. I was going to post on another topic today. Everyone is writing and talking about Steve Jobs, as they should be, but there was no call for me to add more of the same. I’ve read a lot of what has been written, though, and it occurred to me what part of the impact [...]

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The Hope of Occupy Wall Street

October 5, 2011

. I don’t mean by that title the hope of those who have organized the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. In some respects that isn’t clear, in others all too clear. The people behind the effort – Anonymous “hacktivists” and other left-libertarians and anarchists – are people with whom I share no allegiance. I was disdainful of “occupation” [...]

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Obama and the Vision Thing

October 3, 2011

. The big news of the weekend – bigger than the rise of Pizza Pie Guy in the John Birch Society’s GOP’s hot-air-balloon derby – is the growing rebellion against Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street may have been organized by the vanguard of diffuse, unfocused anarchy-romancing antiestablishmentarians railing against “the system,” but they have been [...]

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How We Lived on It (42) – Anti-Semitism, the Ur-Hatred

October 1, 2011

. I’ve been thinking since I wrote “The Uncanny John Mearsheimer,” in which I by the way proposed Jewish anti-Semitism and black-for-white passing as Ur forms of the uncanny, that anti-Semitism is one of the Ur forms of hatred – the group form. Hatred of the other, expressed as demonization, is a primal emotion. In [...]

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