Browse Topics
Politics
There But For The God Of Grace Go I
He decided that if looking into the darkness could evoke both bears with frying pans and wonderful fantasy worlds, then it was all a matter of the manner in which he went about looking that determined what would confront him. He was still scared of the dark so he limited his looking to moments of strong neurotic necessity, but the vision had been so powerful he never again seriously considered brick and mortar as being in any way, shape or form representational of reality.
January 1980Apocalypse Later
Turning The Vietnam War Into A Cartoon Lets Everyone Off The Hook
Years ago I read an essay by Hannah Arendt in which she said that the Nuremburg trials were necessary because they assigned responsibility for crimes to people who, in fact, had the responsibility not to commit them. Her concept was that if one declared everybody in Germany guilty, then no one was guilty — guilt became a condition of being, or something connected to the stars, a notion antipathetic to anyone interested in establishing a little decency on earth.
December 1979Why The News Spreads Fear Rather Than Light
If there is no way to separate story and story teller, there is no way to avoid facing the fact that the press never simply covers news. It defines and authenticates certain ways of seeing. It does this by the way it focuses, the way it names, by its choice of authenticating authorities and of story parameters.
October 1979Sunbeams
September 1979Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.
People’s Park: Ten Years Later
Before it was over, there were nearly 1000 police and 2300 National Guard troops called in to augment local police. There were nearly a thousand arrests, more than 100 people shot, one killed, one blinded, and a million dollars in property damage in one of the longest-running civil disturbances in the nation’s history.
September 1979Means Of Survival
Book Review
Though Sophie’s Choice handles larger themes — the nature of evil itself, for instance, which Styron examines through the literature of the holocaust — it is really a book about guilt, in particular, the guilt of survivors.
August 1979Peace Nigger’s Long March
A Pedestrian Journal
After quitting his job on public television last year, David Grant decided to maintain a month of silence. This journal was written during the last two weeks, when he travelled on foot, carrying a petition calling for military disarmament. His only companion was his goat, little Iowa, who carried provisions.
August 1979“Truth” Crisis, Not “Energy” Crisis
It was all blamed on the “Arab oil embargo” but who really believed that? There were the tankers, filled to the brim with oil, being kept waiting off-shore. The figures that would authenticate a “shortage” just didn’t add up. Arab oil is just a fraction of U.S. supply and is mainly controlled and pooled internationally by the U.S.-dominated world oil industry.
June 1979
