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Glide Path
They had circled for fifteen minutes before heading into the airport from the east, over the Hudson, across the turnpike. They should have come in from the north or south.
July 1994Hero With A Thousand Faces
One of Bill Clinton’s favorite movies, according to the newspaper, is High Noon. It’s one of my favorites, too, a classic Western about a lone man standing up against evil. I watched it again the weekend before the inauguration.
March 1993Answering Phones In A War Zone
Bryant-Maddox makes war. It’s hidden under files of paper covered with legal jargon and beneath sappy 1970s love songs droning from ceiling speakers. It’s hidden under the respectability of secretaries and file clerks and men with ties who go to meetings.
February 1993When A Tree Falls In The Forest
An Interview With John Seed
Let me give an example of the scale of the destruction that’s going on. We know that the amount of solar energy necessary to sustain the hydrological cycle in the Amazon jungle — the energy necessary to lift that water into the atmosphere — is equivalent to the energy put out by two thousand hydrogen bombs a day. The vegetation that grows there captures that much energy. It creates a huge heat engine that drives the winds of the world, those winds that the ancient mariners knew, and the same winds that deliver moisture regularly and predictably to North America and to Europe. Those winds don’t simply exist — they’re continuously being created and maintained by large biological systems. The Amazon is one of the vital organs of the living planet.
January 1993Russia, My Heart
Russia, once the poor turned to you, but you betrayed them. You told them how hard it was. You went on vacation and said help would arrive on the next train. In the bitter cold, they waited at the station, while their children starved, and still they waited.
November 1991Bad Magic: The Failure Of Technology
An Interview With Jerry Mander
In this culture, we have science and technology as religion. We no longer have a religious or philosophical basis for making choices regarding the evolution of technology. All those decisions are made in the corporate world.
November 1991Euclid’s Hell
It’s amazing to me how little respect most people seem to have for reality. The mind is capable of tricking us into accepting its version of what takes place around us. We repeatedly mistake our perceptions for the stuff of existence, even when we know better.
August 1991Beating Off In Mexico
It bothers me to age; I won’t deny that. I am bothered by what time does to my notions of invincibility. I am not bothered by the inability to remember — but by the inability to forget.
May 1991Class Struggles In Sweet Cider
This is the part where Karen Wheeler jumped in and turned the world around, whether because Karen Wheeler is one fine bowler herself and enjoys as much as anybody kicking the butts of the folks over in Greensboro, or whether, as I’ve said, her heart has spots soft for Gus, I don’t know.
September 1989Occupational Disease
Loggers are notorious hard-asses. Hard labor, danger, long hours, and constant, male-only intimate companionship almost guarantee a hardening of the heart. Work gloves can protect soft hands but psyches protect themselves with calluses. It seems simple enough when seen from a distance, but up close, like everything in life, it gets more complicated.
February 1988
