“War is like love; it always finds a way.” So wrote Bertolt Brecht, and when it comes to American politics and foreign policy in 2014, you can bet on Brecht being right. There is no major anti-war party in the USA today. Despite claims to fiscal austerity, Democrats and Republicans fall over themselves to fully…
W.J. Astore My wife and I always watch “A Christmas Carol” around this time, the classic version with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. Before his redemption, Scrooge is the ultimate miser, a mean-spirited soul who refuses to give to charity since he’s already paying taxes to support prisons and workhouses. For his fellow man Scrooge…
W.J. Astore Note to reader: I wrote this back in 1988 when I was a first-year graduate student in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University. I took my first graduate seminar with Owen Hannaway, a distinguished professor of early modern science and alchemy. He asked us to do a book review, and I…
L.N. Davout. Introduction by William Astore. Back in 1990-1991, my good friend Louis-Nicholas Davout [a pseudonym] and I debated the merits of the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. At the time, Davout was a graduate student in Political Science at a major research university, whereas I was a captain in the Air Force teaching…
W.J. Astore President Obama’s recent ten-year commitment to Afghanistan (until 2024 and beyond) put me to mind of a line from The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), the classic Western starring Clint Eastwood. Eastwood plays the “outlaw” who just wants to be left alone in the aftermath of a brutal civil war. But another character, the vicious…
W.J. Astore Back in July, my wife and I visited the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass. At the shrine, there’s a simple, moving, memorial to the Sandy Hook children (see photo above). Rarely has the Biblical phrase, “Jesus wept,” been sadder or more appropriate. Christ said to suffer the children to…
Richard Sahn In contemporary American society virtually every adult citizen knows how difficult it is to obtain medical information regarding one’s spouse, parents, or other close relatives. Agencies–notably insurance companies–are adamant about not revealing even payment data if you are not the patient. Agents or receptionists working for health organizations fiercely insist they are not…
W.J. Astore Beverly Gologorsky has an insightful article today at TomDispatch.com on the lack of references to America’s wars in U.S. contemporary fiction. She traces this to social class: the fact that most troops come from the working classes, to which most contemporary fiction writers (and doubtless editors and agents and publishers as well) have…
W.J. Astore If you’re in education, you’ve heard the acronym STEM. It stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As a country, the USA is behind in STEM, so there are lots of calls (and lots of federal money available) for improvements in STEM. Usually the stated agenda is competitiveness. If the US wants to…
b. traven As a repentant psychologist with some experience in aberrant and self-delusional human behavior, I was recently struck by what passes for meaningful and heartfelt discourse in American conservative circles. The subject: Nelson Mandela. The conversants: the smarmy conservative Rick Santorum and the bullying Bill O’Reilly. Their conversation would be ludicrous if it wasn’t…
The Contrary Perspective 