Propaganda

Sunbeams

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.

Frederick Douglass

The Fourth Estate

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:45 -0500

I don’t believe we’re confined to the media business models that we know. As the information landscape evolves, there will still be journalism about what is happening now, and that will help people in the future who are trying to make sense of it. This work has value.

Sunbeams

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

The press must be free. It has always been so, and much evil has been corrected by it. If government finds itself annoyed by it, let it examine its own conduct, and it will find the cause.

Thomas Erskine

Sunbeams

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.

Newt Gingrich

Past Futures

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

It just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land. When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

Stay Safe, Be Well

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 17:10:00 -0500

Found poem from the corporate e-mails in my inbox, March 2020 | In these times In these unprecedented times / In these uncertain times In these trying times / You are probably exhausted by all the information. / Rest assured, we are vigilant. / The situation is complex.

Sunbeams

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

In the past censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.

Yuval Noah Harari

November 2020

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

Featuring Nicholas Carr, Julia Butterfly Hill, Jaron Lanier, and more.

Dark Corners

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

When COVID-19 hit, Dr. Anthony Fauci was portrayed on the Right as a deep-state villain, one of these “elitists” who are trying to tell “us” how to live in Middle America.

Blind Hate

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Generation Z, my daughter’s generation, is the most racially mixed and most diverse, and they are the worst nightmare of the old white supremacists.

What We Lost

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

We were losing parts of ourselves. A reporter discovered a trove of ears in a burlap sack. The leader said the papers were lying, and we weren’t sure what was rumor and what was fact. What happened to me, what happened to my neighbors — that wasn’t enough proof of all we had lost.

Sunbeams

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

New Strategy

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 11:45:00 -0400

Instead of attacking one more foreign city, hammering it into rubble, / we adopt a new strategy and start bombing with money.

Selected Poems

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400

— from “I Stand in the Doorway” | Sometimes when you say goodbye you know it’s goodbye for keeps. / You touch your lips to her cheek, or you squeeze his hand & walk off. / What else can you do?

The War Prayer

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken.

Indefensible

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The path to security can only be through total nuclear disarmament. We cannot indefinitely maintain a world of nuclear haves and have-nots, and we cannot go attacking every country that we think might be on the path to making a bomb.

Demagogue Days

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

This is the story of my descent into a modern sort of inferno, so I’m going to start the way Dante did back in the day. As our saga opens, I’m pushing forty, about halfway through my life’s journey. I’m not lost in a dark wood; I’m in Oregon, schlepping my suitcase through the Portland airport, where travelers are granted the foolish pleasure of free Internet access.

Sunbeams

Tue, 01 May 2007 16:48:00 -0400

What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.

Barbara Jordan

Mission Accomplished

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:01:00 -0400

I’ve become obsessed with George W. Bush. I spend hours Googling “George W. Bush low IQ” (500,000 hits), “George W. Bush stubborn asshole” (67,000 hits), and “George W. Bush deranged maniac” (43,000 hits). I loathe this man with an intensity that makes my stomach hurt. Why he wasn’t thrown out of office long ago baffles me.

Forget What They Told You

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The idea that America’s a democracy is a fucking lie. We’ve had one fixed election after another. By my calculations, Hubert Humphrey beat Richard Nixon in 1968. Of course, Humphrey was a jackal as well. But what is not widely understood is that we’ve always had a system in America of not counting certain votes. My good friends on the Left are afraid that the Republicans are going to steal the next election by computer — that the software is going to allow Karl Rove to change the vote. Well, most people who worry about that are white. Black people know they’ve stolen the vote the old-fashioned way for centuries.

An American In Syria

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:02:00 -0500

That night I sat on my couch, trying to work through what had happened. I realized that Mohammed had been telling me that he was secret police, and I should never forget it. We could talk about language, or food, or the World Cup, but whatever I told him, he had to report it. He had given me this warning as a friend.

Why I Am Not President

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

On January 19, 2004, the day of the Iowa caucus, I decided to run for president. Perhaps, in my tiny way, I reasoned, I can prevent America from becoming a Jesus-flavored neofascist empire. So I announced to the world (or, at least, to the portion of it that is on my e-mail address list) my candidacy for the Republican nomination. My campaign had begun.

August 2005

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

After 9/11, I promised to stop demonizing our leaders. That’s what al-Qaeda does, and it’s just a matter of degree.

Hidden Power

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The big popular movements in this country did not all come about in the sixties. The women’s and environmental movements both began in the seventies. The antinuclear and solidarity movements arose in the eighties. The big global-justice movements started in the nineties. The elites have to keep trying to beat freedom down, because it won’t go back into its shell.

Sunbeams

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

[The philosopher] Wittgenstein writes about a man who, not being certain of an item he reads in the newspaper, buys one hundred copies of the paper to reassure himself of its truth.

Richard Kehl

Sunbeams

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

George Orwell

Language Of Mass Deception

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

We’re invading Iraq. It’s as open an act of aggression as there has been in modern history. . . . It’s the same war crime for which the Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg: the act of aggression. There’s a pretense of self-defense . . . but it’s no more convincing than Hitler’s.

End Times

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

I am headed toward Florida as my country heads toward war with Iraq. Protests rage around the world, but I do not join the protesters with their “No blood for oil” signs. Every year I’ve been alive, there has been war somewhere. At the beginning of 2003 there were thirty wars being fought around the world.

The Disenchanted Kingdom

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Efficiency leaves no room for enchantment. Anything that is magical or mysterious is apt to also be meandering and inefficient. Furthermore, enchanted systems are often complex and highly convoluted, having no obvious means to an end. And how do you quantify the enchanted? Since it cannot be readily calculated, it is ignored and quite often eliminated.

A Month Without Rest

Fri, 01 Feb 2002 03:00:00 -0500

My first night, I am awakened at two in the morning by either a bomb or a gunshot; I can’t tell which. Then at 4 A.M. the Jews start singing their sad song down at the Wailing Wall, followed by the bells from al-Aqsa Mosque at 4:45: the sounds of two great monotheistic religions disturbing a good night’s rest.