W.J. Astore I wrote this for Truthout but debated whether to publish it. I just didn’t want to deal with all the gun enthusiasts who equate liberty with owning lots of guns and ammo. This article is not specifically about guns. It’s about our propensity for seeking quick and violent solutions to societal and political…
W.J. Astore I love movies but I can’t say that I love Hollywood. My wife and I sat through the interminable Academy Awards last night; we should have received an Oscar for patience. What amazes me is the lack of thanks the winners express to movie-goers. You know: the little people who shell out $12…
Brandon Lingle [Reprinted from the New York Times by permission of the author] At an outpost surrounded by blast walls and scrub brush, I huddled in an auditorium with two dozen other airmen to watch the Super Bowl streamed via a jerry-built cellphone Wi-Fi connection. “We probably have a worse broadcast than Kandahar,” said a…
b. traven Until I was about 23 I never thought about the “meaning” of words. I spoke and I listened to words, but I didn’t assess all of the nuances that they can contain. It was a simpler time (or so it seemed to me during the Great Depression and World War II) and people…
Don Rose I am a sinner with a criminal past. Since the statute of limitations has run out (I hope), I confess that as a kid I once or twice shoplifted the local dime store, swiped a 78 rpm platter at the record shop and even snuck into a movie now and then. Later ingested…
Imperial Proconsul Bremer, desert boots and all, in a distinctly American moment Michael Brenner There are more reasons for Americans to feel aggrieved today than at any time since the Vietnam War ended nearly 40 years ago. At no time before or since has there been so little effort to remedy those conditions. That contradiction…
Michael Murry. Introduction by William Astore. Robert Plant in “Stairway to Heaven” sang that “you know sometimes words have two meanings.” As Michael Murry powerfully shows in his first essay for The Contrary Perspective, nowadays words have innumerable meanings, or simply no meaning at all. And it’s by design. We live, as he memorably suggests,…
Richard Sahn These days, when you talk to college students, you quickly discover the extent to which they view education as the means for getting the better jobs American society has to offer. Put bluntly, they see education merely as a means to an end, the end being a rewarding job that they otherwise…
JEREMIAH GOULKA Originally posted at the American Prospect. Used by permission of the author. Chances are that you missed the State Department releasing the final environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline last week. You were meant to: it came out on 4pm on the Friday before Super Bowl Sunday. The mainstream media only had…
W.J. Astore As a historian, I like to think we learn valuable lessons from history. Those who don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them, or so my students tell me, paraphrasing (often unknowingly) the words of George Santayana. We applaud that saying as a truism, yet why do we…
The Contrary Perspective 