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Secret Smoker

I first smoked in the spring of 1970, when I was sixteen years old. I found a pack of cigarettes in the hallway of my high school, the Bronx High School of Science. It was a box of Marlboros. I hesitated for a moment, then reached for it. The pack was more than half full.

One Patriot Acts

Daniel Ellsberg’s Crusade Against The Abuse Of Presidential Power, From Nixon To Bush

There were times during the Vietnam War when I feared that if the escalation went on and domestic resistance grew, our system of government would move toward a totalitarian state. The FBI was abusing its power. The CIA was illegally spying against domestic “enemies.” There was a tremendous amount of wiretapping going on.

On The Bus

Stephen Elliott Trails The Candidates On The Road To The Nomination

Lieberman stayed out of the race until Gore had announced that he wouldn’t run. Now the man Lieberman considered his friend has gone on record as backing Howard Dean. Lieberman must feel like a plane overhead just cracked in half and dumped fifty tons of shit on his campaign bus. How does a person recover from that?

Twenty-Eight Words That Could Change The World

Robert Hinkley’s Plan To Tame Corporate Power

We can’t solve the problem of corporate irresponsibility by imposing volumes of laws and regulations that try to restrain the system, because the system is designed not to be restrained. I believe the solution lies in redesigning the corporation itself to build in some self-restraint.

Sunbeams

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.

Bill Vaughan

The Experiment

At first it was just another dream that floated out of the sixties, a time of many dreams. There were dreams of peace, of social justice, of people working together and living together and sleeping together and getting high together and making music together. Our particular dream was to move to the country and produce radio.

Rise Like Lions: The Role Of Artists In A Time Of War

An Interview With Howard Zinn

We’re fooling ourselves if we think that, because we don’t have a totalitarian system or a military dictatorship, we have a real democracy with free elections. How hypocritical it is of the United States to demand that other countries have free elections, when we ourselves have elections that are not free.

Stories Hollywood Never Tells

However hateful they may be sometimes, I have always loved the movies. When I began reading and studying history, I kept coming across incidents and events that led me to think, Wow, what a movie this would make. I would look to see if a movie had been made about it, but I’d never find one. It took me a while to realize that Hollywood isn’t going to make movies like the ones I imagined. Hollywood isn’t going to make movies that are class-conscious, or antiwar, or conscious of the need for racial equality or gender equality.

In A Dangerous Time

Bruce Cockburn On His Rage, His Music, And His Hunger For The Divine

What the occupation of Iraq, and the public perception of it in the U.S., reminds me of is the German occupation of Holland during the Second World War. The Germans thought that the Dutch would welcome them with open arms, but of course the Dutch hated them. And the German people were offended. That’s what we’re seeing in the United States. People were told before the war that the Iraqis were going to welcome Americans with open arms, because the U.S. was saving them from this horrible dictator. But they haven’t.