Even though we witness major historical transitions building like thunderheads on the horizon, we can never actually see them for what they are until the storm of change has come and gone. This year, 2017, feels like something deep and fundamental is overthrowing the predictable world as we know it. And it is both gloomy […]
Columns
The Brutal Right, the Amorphous Other Side—What Do We Do Now?
After Democrats lost special elections for the House of Representatives in Georgia, South Carolina, and blew a close one earlier in Montana, old school blue-collar lefty filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted last week that the Dems don’t have a “friggin clue.” “No message, no plan, no leaders.” Who can blame him, especially after losing again and […]
Can a National Culture Go Insane?
In the wake of last Wednesday’s shooting in Virginia at a Republican workout for the bipartisan Congressional Baseball Charity game, the murder of four UPS workers in San Francisco on the same day, and now a mass killing of five people in Northern New Mexico around Tres Piedras and Abiquiu, many of us are left […]
Does Our Constitution Still Work?
Obstruction of justice, nepotism, conflicts of interest arising from refusing to put his business empire in a blind trust, attacking the judiciary, flapping loose lips over top-secret national security issues, conspiring with the nation’s Cold War nemesis and adversary to fix our national elections – what more do you need in the way of probable […]
COSMIC RELIEF: FIVE COMIC SLIP-UPS ON THE ROAD TO PEACE OF MIND
Dear Readers, The Mercury Messenger is still on a summer holiday hiatus to recharge and regroup. The column will reappear June 12. In its place, a poem for laughter and sanity. Thanks for your interest and many comments. -V.B. Price Christmas 2016 There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and […]
FIVE REASONS WHY DESPAIR IS NO GOOD
Dear Readers, The staff of the Mercury Messenger will be taking an early summer holiday to recharge and regroup. Perhaps we’ll even come to believe in sanity once again. The hiatus will last two weeks. The column will reappear June 12. In its place, the Messenger will publish two suites of poems instead. Thanks for […]
La Vida Loca and the Illusion of Rationality
It’s always been a crazy life. The President doesn’t have a monopoly on self-induced chaos. The monster of history is one long tableau of illusions of rationality. Those demons are lurking in all of us. It’s just that we don’t have the codes to nuclear Armageddon at our fingertips. Crazy life is at home everywhere. […]






