Listening to Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opening remarks at his Senate confirmation hearing two weeks ago, I heard a roar of vitriol toward liberals, Democrats and “the Clintons” that reminded me of a book by Anne Coulter, arch liberal hater and basher, a rage-intoxicated screed of Rush Limbaugh, or a time-lapse explosion of […]
Columns
How Does a Polarized America Move Forward in a World It’s Helping to Tear Apart?
Kavanaugh, Trump, and the Republican Congress are finally on the verge of doing what right wingers and centrist Democrats have been trying to do for decades — crush the values and achievements of American liberalism, especially as it expressed itself in the counterculture in the United States in the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. If there […]
How Did We Get From the Age of Aquarius to Donald Trump?
When members of the United Nations laugh at the President of the United States, not at a joke, but at a preposterous ascertain of being “the best,” you can viscerally feel what the rest of the world really thinks about American exceptionalism and about Trumpian exceptionalism. When Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Senate GOP misogynists claim […]
Downwinders: Canaries in the Deep Vaults of the National Security State
American government and politics look more and more like the three-layer structure of the internet as described in the September AARP Bulletin out last week. That’s part of the reason why it is increasingly difficult for citizens to understand what their government is doing. Most of us live in a distracted vacuum dominated much of […]
Hanging On By Letting Go
Memoirs of the great gifts : the miracles of kindness, geode midnights: the universe a cave of stars securely filled with Eros, photosynthesis, the unimaginable delight of light, of warmth of any kind, body peace, dawn thrill, sweet death when you need it. Miracles of kindness, of someone knowing what you need to hear and […]
It’s All About Groundwater; First Things First
It’s still amazing to me after all these years how the vast amusement park of the news can distract us so thoroughly from the most intimate life and death matters. Even when you say it directly — we are more interested in the freak shows of Trumpian politics than we are in the purity of […]
What’s Wrong With American Political Culture? Has Our Excellence Turned Into Our Tragic Flaw?
Some hot afternoons when the battlefield of the news is filled with butt ends of breaking follies, you can hear flies buzzing all over American political culture. Swarms of gnats teeming with Trumpian hubris drive many of us to silly states of raging impotence or whimpering escapism. It truly is the chaos of bedlam. Some […]






