W.J. Astore It’s Black Friday: shop ’til you drop! I watch my share of TV (mainly sports), and this week I’ve been subjected to a bumper crop of commercials showing me that my happiness–even my life–depends on buying more and more stuff. People on these commercials experience paroxysms of pleasure when they save a few…
W.J. Astore In 1936, my dad was nineteen and serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, fighting forest fires in Oregon. Due to a dry summer, 1936 was an especially bad year for fires, and my dad fought a killer one at Bandon-by-the-Sea in Oregon. After a tough fall, he and his…
b. traven With its interim Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama Administration has finally shown a measure of Chutzpah. But can they stand the heat? Those who’ve read my previous posts and comments may have noticed that I am no fan of Obama or his two Secretaries of State. Nevertheless, I must admit that the decision…
W.J. Astore Tom Engelhardt has a stimulating article at TomDispatch on the many monsters stalking us, both real and imagined. The imagined ones we can deal with; the real ones, well, not so much. As Engelhardt notes: “we’re living in a country that my parents would barely recognize. It has a frozen, riven, shutdown-driven Congress,…
W.J. Astore Five years ago, I wrote an article for Nieman Watchdog with the title, “Networks Should Replace Pentagon Cheerleaders with Independent Military Analysts.” Major media networks rely on retired colonels, generals, and admirals to give “unbiased” and “disinterested” commentary on military matters to the wider public. At the same time, many of these same…
W.J. Astore and b. traven The Contrary Perspective (TCP) has reached its six month birthday and welcomes its 88 followers. We’re happy to see that our readership in that short period is now over 10,000. (We should maybe discount that a bit due to our own eager “hits” to see how things are going.) Regular…
W.J. Astore One of the occupational hazards of being a historian is reading old books. The one in front of me is John Fiske’s The Destiny of Man (1884). Fiske was an American philosopher and popular writer on Darwinism, Spencerism, and many other representative isms of his day. Like many thinkers of the late 19th…
b. traven and Alex Dunn Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul known for espousing conservative causes on Fox News, the New York Post, and other venues, built his empire on reporting the sleazy side of news. His editors specialized in looking down on those caught with their pants down, especially when they were liberal politicians…
W.J. Astore Jeremy Scahill is a reporter for whom the word “intrepid” may have been invented. He’s been remarkably bold in covering the creation of private mercenary forces in the United States (as documented in his bestseller, Blackwater) as well as America’s “turn to the dark side” after 9/11/2001, which led to “wars of choice” in…
Daniel N. White. Introduction by W.J. Astore. Is the United States an empire or umpire? This is the intriguing question raised and interrogated in the latest probing article by Dan White. Since I’m a baseball fan as well as a student of the U.S. military, let me take a swing at an answer. An umpire…
The Contrary Perspective 