Daniel N. White Testament of Youth, based on Vera Brittain’s autobiography of the same title, was showing at the arthouse multiplex where I decided to spend the day in the HVAC out of the allergens. For all my complaints about Austin, at least it is a large enough market to have…
W.J. Astore My dad was in the Army in World War II. He was a dental technician in an armored headquarters group and never went overseas. But many of his friends did go overseas and saw combat. What follows are some excerpts from letters sent to my dad. Bill Zerby was attached to the 781…
Michael Brenner Is Bernie Sanders halfway there? No – not to the nomination, much less the White House. What Sanders has done is to establish himself as a force in the Democratic Party’s selection process. He has done so by demonstrating two qualities that have largely disappeared from America’s political life over the past few…
W.J. Astore August 6, 1945. Hiroshima. A Japanese city roughly the size of Houston. Incinerated by the first atomic bomb. Three days later, Nagasaki. Japanese surrender followed. It seemed the bombs had been worth it, saving countless American (and Japanese) lives, seeing that a major invasion of the Japanese home islands was no longer needed.…
Intro by Stuart Lyle It is not hard to spot creeping authoritarianism in the US. The Snowden document cache makes clear that the government has a voracious appetite for data, our data: the digital traces we leave whenever we are online. It is no longer an unsubstantiated suspicion. The UN has documented and ranked the…
W.J. Astore Any optimism that the Iran nuclear deal might slow the momentum of weapons sales to the Middle East has already been strangled in the cradle. Consider the following news item, courtesy of FP: Foreign Policy: While U.S. Defense Department officials make promises to partner with Middle East allies nervous about the Iranian missile…
W.J. Astore When I was a teenager, America’s two biggest allies in the Middle East were Israel and Iran. We considered the Shah of Iran to be a strong ally in the region, and sold him some of our most advanced weaponry, including the F-14 Tomcat fighter with its powerful radar as well as HAWK…
b. traven Alice may have survived her trip down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, but it is an unseemly place for the president of a powerful but feckless nation to venture. Nor is it likely that Obama will emerge unscathed – or further enlightened. How so? President Obama seems to have cut a deal with…
W.J. Astore A century ago, the USA was a dynamic, forward-looking, freedom-espousing country that was focused on science and technology and its practical applications, as represented by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. We were about to reelect a president, Woodrow Wilson, precisely because he had kept the country out of World War I. With the exception of…
b. traven I look at the “The Contrary Perspective” as a community of citizens interested in challenging the accepted views of our society, a community interested in seeking different or contrary views. But what if what you see (or think you saw) is so out of your experience of the physical and social world you…
The Contrary Perspective 