b. traven There’s an old comedy routine by Abbott and Costello. Abbott tells Costello, “Who’s on first.” (It’s a baseball routine.) Costello, not getting that the player’s surname is “Who,” keeps demanding: “No, I want to know who’s on first?” It goes downhill from there as the two comedians talk past one another, each exasperating…
James Keye I created this list of “American Myths” 25 years ago thinking that some significant part of the people would begin to understand them over time. What seems to be happening is that the country is dividing into those who cling with increasing aggression to these myths as others realize the falseness of them.…
Originally posted on The Contrary Perspective:
Trust me! W.J. Astore Once again, Hillary Clinton is in the news for the wrong reason. She used a private email account while she was Secretary of State, rather than an official government email account. As a result, not all of her (unclassified) emails are part of the public…
b. traven We’ve spent the last twenty-five years pulling Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s chestnuts out of the fire in the Middle East. First with Desert Storm in Kuwait in 1990-91, then Iraq in 2003, and now Iraq redux. We’ve made such a hash of these military interventions that only a mixed metaphor will do…
Nicolas J S Davies As I wrote this essay on the 12th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (March 19-20), the news was filled with its violent repercussions across the Middle East and the world. The latest atrocity was a multiple suicide bombing at two mosques in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, that have killed…
Richard Sahn In 1933 Dorothy Day, a progressive journalist and Catholic convert, and Peter Maurin, a French peasant and philosopher, founded an anarchist-pacifist movement and newspaper they called the “Catholic Worker.” The paper was meant to be the Christian answer to the Communist Party paper, “The Daily Worker.” Not affiliated with the Catholic Church,…
Michael Brenner Why bother with facts? That question threads its way through political discourse, through educational philosophy and through observations on the media. Rarely is it confronted squarely. For the lines between actual reality and virtual reality have been so blurred that the distinction itself no longer is generally recognized. The axiom that since I…
W.J. Astore There was a time when American democracy, however imperfectly practiced, and American ideals served to inspire peoples and independence movements around the world. Heck, even Ho Chi Minh in the 1940s confessed his admiration for Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. But now it seems all that really matters in our…
Walter Stewart (Major General, U.S. Army, retired) Sniper Chris Kyle did not live long enough. I don’t say this in the context of his and Chad Littlefield’s senseless murder at the hands of a supposed brother-in-arms, but in the context of the American Sniper movie trailer that has Kyle saying, “I’m willing to meet my…
W.J. Astore I’m a Catholic, so of course I know all about Original Sin. For disobeying God and tasting the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Eve would suffer the pains of childbirth, and both she and Adam would age and die, their earthly bodies returning to the…
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