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Sunbeams

Paradise is exactly where you are right now, only much, much better.

Laurie Anderson

Why Didn’t You Vote For Me?

A Diary Of My Presidential Campaign

I wasn’t going to run in 1996, until Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire Republican primary. For ten days, the leftist agony came over me — the certainty that Bakunin was right: the ruling class does wish to extinguish us! I saw vividly a white-supremacist army occupying the White House, closing our borders, and setting up Christian reeducation camps. I knew I had to act swiftly. So, on March 4, I declared my candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

One Man, One Vote

Clinton knew that the federal government was the last line of defense for millions of poor people against the predatory forces of the free market. He signed the bill anyway. Clinton understood that there could be no meaningful welfare reform without a guarantee of decent jobs. He signed the bill anyway.

Reading Between The Lines

How Compulsory Schooling Has Failed Us

Modern schooling is a kind of religion. Its goal is most certainly not to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and thinking, although sometimes learning happens because teachers — and even administrators — don’t realize the kind of enterprise in which they are engaged. But this does not happen too often.

On Regret

Of all the things Greenfeld said, the word that resonates most when I ponder the question of regret is kittenness. “It’s hard when they lose their kittenness,” he said.

Sunbeams

Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places . . . live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Sunbeams

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

Thomas Carlyle

Deus Ex Machina

Get A Job

Why Welfare Reform Is An Attack On All Women

What is being proposed under the title “welfare reform” is cuts in programs for the poorest and most vulnerable members of American society: nutritional programs and Medicaid programs and housing programs and programs for the aged, impoverished, and disabled. But the program that is most targeted for reform is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program for poor mothers and their children. Men can get benefits, too, but the overwhelming majority of parents on AFDC are women, about five million of them, with about nine million children.

Out Of The Psychedelic Closet

Last spring, I celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest turning point in my life. In April 1970, at the age of twenty-three, I found myself climbing the western slope of the Mount of Olives, facing Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock.