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(86 comments) SHARE Friday, November 2, 2012 Open Letter To Green Party Candidate Jill Stein
am a supporter and an admirer of yours. However, I sincerely believe that you should discontinue your run for President and encourage your followers to put their votes and their energies behind President Barack Obama. The possible alternative to the reelection of President Obama is chilling and unacceptable.
(45 comments) SHARE Monday, October 12, 2015 The Rise of Shallow, Demonstrative Religion
The Reagan Revolution was as much about the public dumbing down and aesthetic corruption of spirituality as it was about trickle down economics. Public pronouncements on the nature of God in the context of political campaign drivel is a crime against beauty. Watching Mike Huckabee talk about religion is like watching Jabba the Hutt explain the contents of the Louvre.
SHARE Wednesday, November 30, 2016 Kellyanne Conway/Joseph Goebbels
A country very aware of the horrendous, destructive fascist horrors of just over seventy years ago that elects a man like Donald Trump as President is either doomed or...
SHARE Friday, November 20, 2015 The Little, Slightly Tilted Church
Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump wants to close down Mosques. This reminds of a little story that came to me after I heard that Presidential Candidate Donald Trump wants to close down Mosques.
(34 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 21, 2010 BECKWATCH: Ayn Rand Would Have Absolutely Hated Glenn Beck
Like "Finding Waldo", see how many times you can find Glenn Beck holding or referencing Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" on his talk show ( I use the word "talk" here because "drivel" was hard to work into the sentence gracefully).
(16 comments) SHARE Monday, March 2, 2015 Bill O'Reilly Must Go
Bill O'Reilly is the worst sort of trash. He is the sort of trash that is consciously built. He has worked without rest at creating an oeuvre and persona built entirely on the ravaging and profaning of his occupation. He is, whether one considers him one or not, a journalist. He is the ultimate Anti-American.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 26, 2014 The Wolf Lady
The political and social narrative of the American right is more and more beginning to resemble the old time xenophobic, nationalistic and racist European fascism of the early 20th century. Conservatives and religious fundamentalists are becoming the social monitors of the behavior and motives of just about every type and group that they consider the other...
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 13, 2014 "F**kit, Torture 'em!" -- Apple Pie and Rectal Feeding
"Proud Papas out there can now openly discuss their son or daughter's patriotic duty violating the rectum of one or another evil "terrorist." How many proud parents will now be able to display their child's torture toys on the Christmas mantle, above the brightly brimming stockings?"
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 16, 2014 Israel: Servicing the Dysfunction
The State of Israel is currently deep in the throes of "Servicing the Dysfunction". In its service to the tragic past of its people and "Never Again", Israel is a nation of mentally ill warriors. To willfully destroy the beautiful and cherished lives of innocent Palestinians as a panacea for your own tragic loss is, although common, crazy.
(33 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 8, 2019 How Did "Liberal" Become a Foul Epithet?
The chilling thing about my personal experiences with being called a "liberal" is that my fellow Americans, smiling or not, hated me and what I represent and are being taught this in their churches. It was precisely this type of activity that motivated the nineteen men to create death and destruction on September 11, 2001.
(44 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 3, 2016 The Election: This is a Culture War, Not a Battle of Economics
We as a nation are presently in the throes of a second civil war. The first was fought over the preservation of a culture -- the economic and social culture of slavery. This time it is being fought over what we, Americans, want the culture of America to be.
(15 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 4, 2012 Our Local Racist: A Note To Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges, who I admire tremendously, posted an article here last week advocating not voting or voting for a third party. I strongly disagree and here are some thoughts on the subject.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 8, 2016 The Failure of Religion in America
The failure of the Republican party and society preventing the rise of Donald Trump and his angry, proud, bigoted supporters is apparently also a failure of large swaths of organized religion in this country. So much time has been spent condemning and accusing and defining the Other that much brick and mortar Christianity has lost all connection to Christ and is now nothing more than the handmaiden of fascism.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 13, 2019 The Garden of Karam Baba
A Story. Thinking about The Kurdish Freedom Fighters and Syria and the rank stupidity of war.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 19, 2019 The Monkey in the Room With a Knife
...some people see the monkey, some don't, some think he's cute, he scares the crap out of others. Metaphors can be effective things, if you get my drift.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 28, 2018 They've Sown The Wind It's Time They Reap the Whirlwind
Trump and Conservatives have made their chops on the backs of minorities, women, the environment, children -- their primary victim, adversary is humanity...Forgiveness can and will come, but first, because they have sown the wind, they must reap the whirlwind.
(51 comments) SHARE Friday, June 3, 2022 The Possibility of a Humongous Con
What if Putin knew that if one wanted to rule the world all you had to do was pretend your feelings were hurt because folks were throwing a NATO party in your backyard and feign Nazi phobia, then make war in Ukraine and sit back...
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 30, 2018 The Man That Married a Monkey
A Story.
As Authoritarianism and Fascism proliferate across the globe, many are marrying monkeys.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 20, 2015 Charlie Hebdo: A Missed Bottom-Up, Kumbaya, Opportunity?
Is the Paris Charlie Hebdo affair, the subsequent march in Paris and the surrounding furor a missed opportunity for the growing bottom-up movement? And, probably missed intentionally by our government because maybe it truly was a "Kumbaya" (in the spirit of the song) moment?
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, June 4, 2018 It's Time to Talk About Dental Floss
MY buddy, Richard, came by this morning. We talked about the state of things in the country. He started sweating. I was turning red and my left arm was hurting-- I had already taken my blood pressure medicine but the dose was obviously too small. Richard looked as if he needed to run and hide in Hitler's bunker -- since he wasn't using it anymore. Fortunately we chose to talk about dental floss instead...
(15 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 9, 2016 The Presidential Election is Over -- Was Trump Ever Truly a Threat?
With the coronation of Hillary Clinton have we just witnessed a spectacularly orchestrated coup d'etat? Has Trump simply been the rodeo clown that has kept the bull away from the Champion rider?
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 6, 2016 The Christian Strip Club
I now understand how Nazi Germany came to be. We are watching it play out across our country. Those that care and those that truly love religious freedom, personal freedom and freedom of expression (patriots?) need to speak out -- loud and clear, in all ways at our disposal. Satire has traditionally been very effective.
(21 comments) SHARE Friday, May 25, 2018 Dresden, February 17, 1945
A Story.
NFL teams will be fined if players kneel during playing of "The Star Spangled Banner."
Trump says players that kneel "maybe shouldn't be in the country."
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 18, 2016 Hillary and the Bushes
If you had any doubts about whether Hillary would become more populist or progressive -- I think you can quit worrying about that now.
(16 comments) SHARE Friday, March 28, 2014 Building Cabinets
This piece, ostensibly about carpentry, is really about climate change and global resource exploitation.
Simple drawers made in the old way, wooden boxes sliding on wooden guides or simple planes of wood, ring out with a comfortable low clatter. They resonate and chime. Modern drawers guided and fixed by steel and nylon, whir and buzz. They sound like machine. ...They reek of technological masturbation.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 15, 2018 Conservatives and Slave Owners
Thinking about our national, almost forty-year, slow, but inexorable fall into the whirling room of mirrors, propelled by mountebanks and posers and just downright cruel and stupid folks. Ronnie Reagan ushered in what has become, living in the White House, our national disgrace and possible downfall.
(22 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 14, 2013 Ted Cruz Disrespects Mandela and Christ
"Ãet the American dread of Communist infiltration underwrote one of the most repressive ideological assaults in the nation's history, with the right wing effectively eliminating from the nation's political discourse appeals to the Socialist idealism that was, in the same period, reinvigorating politics in Europe..."
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 14, 2015 The Wisdom of the Laughing Nun
As we tumble, slink and slide into another national election cycle, one thing is abundantly clear -- this place is about as functional as a knotted intestine.
The rest of the industrialized world appears to be attempting to address issues that matter and the Exceptional One, the "Shining City On The Hill" is promoting midget wrestling in its own vomit. This place is a wreck.
SHARE Saturday, February 1, 2020 Menudo and Pancakes
A short story about pancakes and menudo and Nazis.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 1, 2014 The Filth Eater
I attempted to write play years ago entitled "The Filth Eater." The protagonist was a seducer of women -- leading them happily into various circumstances and occasions of sin...The play was allegorical, however I was not fully aware of this until recently. I thought I was simply creating an interesting character based on the Aztec (Mexica) goddess Tlazolteotl.
(20 comments) SHARE Friday, May 4, 2018 Faith Is Not An Excuse
Faith is not an excuse, it is a gift. The Religious Conservative Right, in these morally topsy turvy days of Trump, has exchanged a gift for an alibi.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, July 8, 2022 Thinking About Guns, Aesthetics and E.F. Schumacher
America has a "big" problem. We kill ourselves with "big" guns, we sicken ourselves with "Big Gulps" and "big" burgers, we challenge the environment with "big" houses and "big" trucks and SUVs - big is everything - even boats and televisions and RVs have gotten big.
(16 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 22, 2015 Thoughts on Reviews of "American Sniper"
I haven't seen The movie "American Sniper." I've read many reviews and commentaries here and elsewhere. The overwhelming verdict from the left is that it is wrong. I viscerally believe this to be true. However, there is a flaw that seems to travel through most of the lefty writing on the movie. Or, maybe I should say: from my experience as a young man growing up a young man the reviews are flawed.
(19 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 4, 2022 A Thought About Story
Anthropologists must be chuckling and shaking their heads, if not wringing their hands. There was a singular, very important component of the rise of civilizations -- story. Without it they would have stayed just a bunch of loosely connected hunters and gatherers, individually avoiding catastrophe, trotting into oblivion.
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 31, 2018 Roseanne and the Art of War
The entire soul of Trumpism, current Republicanism and conservatism is contained in Roseanne's compulsion to tweet.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 9, 2018 The Iran Deal: It has Truly Begun
A Story
"It had truly begun and the end was years away. No one could have predicted the horror they had watched arrive, and once they understood -- it was too late, much too late..."
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 23, 2018 The Inevitable Failure of the Conservative Blitzkrieg
Winning and success are not identical twins. The Republicans won enabling and inciting class warfare, white nationalism, xenophobia and fear mongering. What genius Republican strategist determined that the road to success could be paved with issues that alone cannot foster success and cumulatively are ultimately disastrous for society?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 17, 2022 Kerouac, Agee, and Wolfe
Kerouac is still a literary god. Them that influenced him, Thomas Wolfe and James Agee, have fallen away.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 12, 2016 Nobody Will Take My Gun
A little ditty in response to a middle aged Texas woman wailing about Hillary getting ready to take away her guns.
(35 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 22, 2016 Scapegoating Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism certainly has failed America but blaming Neoliberalism for the Trump phenomenon is like blaming the Treaty of Versailles for the horrors of Nazi Germany.
SHARE Sunday, November 11, 2018 The Mexicans are Coming
A Story.
Roll out the razor wire.
Refortify the Alamo.
Ransack your peace of mind.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 1, 2010 Similitudes: Hitler, Obama, & Beck
Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor Rally" got me thinking about truth, similes, and unfortunately, Adolf Hitler.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, July 9, 2018 The Shame of the Serious Left
The hard-core left, the leftist intelligentsia, the radical left has been emasculated by the Trump regime. The Serious Left wanted to use Trump as both an exemplar of sticking it to the man and the man. Unfortunately, he hasn't turned out to be as hapless as they had hoped.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 4, 2014 Don't Let the Least of Us Destroy the Best of Us -- The Danger of the Rise of Dodofascism
Dodofascists are small minded, intellectually lazy people who don't understand that their stances (facile, jingoistic Nationalism, Militarism, denial of the Separation of Church and State, Bigotry and Xenophobia, etc.) will ultimately lead to the destruction of the thing they are claiming to protect.
The Dodo is an extinct flightless bird. There is a metaphor here somewhere.
SHARE Wednesday, June 6, 2018 Jesus Worked
A story.
"Dr. Benjamin Schlinky, a psychologist and arch-Conservative, had written numerous books on the virtues of hard work and was a frequent contributor on Fox News, talking about the evils of welfare and social security. He traveled the country talking at Right Wing Conservative events. His most recent book, "Jesus Worked" was a big hit..."
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 27, 2014 Sexy Loco Curandera
I've been hearing lately the old tired bigoted bigots trot out the old tired bigoted line about immigration and those that illegally immigrate from south of the border. It's time we move on. This is a story I wrote about it awhile back.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 30, 2014 Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest
This popped up this morning and it is pure historical magic. It's Pete Seeger's televison show, "Rainbow Quest", from the sixties...I've noticed over the last few years that the controlled media is now trying to marginalize and disparage Bruce Springsteen, just as it did Pete back in the fifties. The torch does pass and the light it casts, shames and burns just the same.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 31, 2015 A New Years Resolution: Disrupt, Live and Create with Intention
Benzene killed my Father and may yet get me...How do we live in the face of impending, painful, global change? Plant trees. Become aware that an idling automobile in Dallas is killing someone in Sudan...Explain the dangers of unchecked livestock flatulence to a Republican spinster. Find that amazing pinata maker in Monterrey, hook him up with your salesman neighbor and blanket the world in Donald Trump Pinatas...
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 28, 2010 BECKWATCH: Is He Systematically Going To Appropriate All Of Our National Symbols?
REMEMBER THE ALAMO! Glenn Beck held a rally in front of the Alamo in San Antonio Texas on Tax Day last year. I've recently had conversations with a couple of Glenn Beckers and neither would or could make the connection between taxes and national infrastructure and services - they simply ranted about Obama and how it was all his responsibility: Mr. President, you need to sharpen your shovel and get yourself some rubber boots.
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 10, 2011 Hating Barack, the President
To understand where we are now, I would suggest reading Joseph Campbell and seeing the movie "The Help"
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 28, 2018 The Barren Plains of Depravity: A Western Morality Play
A Story
The Western was where America worked out the conflict of good and evil in the past. England had King Lear and Richard III, we've got Trump.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 11, 2017 The Chupacabra, A Poem
The Chupacabra is a mythical beast reported to roam the brush country of South Texas. It is supposed to be a blood sucker. Some of the grown men that cross the border to work here are afraid of it.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, April 29, 2016 The Train Wreck That Is Becoming This Country
Mr. Trump is not a "believer" in climate change. He claims it's a Chinese conspiracy. His followers are willing to take up the proverbial sword and go on a crusade against us that respect science. It's the same old story, umpteenth verse.
I guess I should have kept my casual remark about the weather to myself. You know what they say about talking about politics and religion -- especially when they are one in the same.
SHARE Tuesday, December 24, 2013 Merry Christmas Duck Hunters
Phil Robertson, the Duck Dynasty dude, is a duck-call maker and outdoorsman, he's not a prophet, leader, or philosopher. Although it does appear that he has an interest in gynecology or porn -- it's hard from what he's said to make a distinction. He has every right to speak his mind.
SHARE Thursday, January 24, 2019 The Washington Interviews: A Story
"There was the guy, Dickie Kirk, he had worked for the CIA for fifty-three years, he was an analyst, at least that's what he said he did. He died last November, he was eighty-seven years old...
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, July 4, 2022 The Sad Answer in the Indian Wars
All the handwringing going on now on the Left, liberals, and progressives, over the conservative blitzkrieg is warranted. Because the Right has absolutely become a tribe. And this should scare the sh*t out of us.
SHARE Saturday, August 18, 2018 The Ghosts of Algiers
A Story. "She would be grinnin' and shakin' her head at this new President fella, him callin' up all kind of ghosts: Al Capone and Slave Masters and that Italian fella Mussolini and them Mississippi Klan fellas..."
(18 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 8, 2015 The Way of Trump: Building Walls
Are national boundaries as absolutes healthy for us moving forward? I think a perusal of the history of the rise of the city state in medieval Europe would be enlightening considering "GOP Presidential Front-runner," chatty Misogynist and shallow Nationalist, Donald Trump, is proposing a really big wall on our southern border with Mexico.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 17, 2017 La Pared: The Wall
Real life is complicated. It cannot be contained in a tweet.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 3, 2015 Art as a Vehicle for Dissent
I feel sorry for many young folks living in this time. Their lives are in many ways bereft of connection. They have seven thousand friends on facebook but do they have a single song that they can hum that connects them in, what can be, a spiritual, cathartic way; explaining the churning in their guts?
Art as protest is a bottom-up eruption that flows over everything, regardless of ideology or aesthetic predilection.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, August 19, 2022 Wake up! We Live in a Nation Waxing Fascist Now!
Election officials have resigned in Fredericksburg, Texas because of stalking and death threats. The "Big Lie" that Trump won the election is traveling through the Texan populace faster than gonorrhea through a border town zona rosa.
SHARE Saturday, April 14, 2018 The Whore of Babylon Visits the Whiter House
"I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don't know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013," James Comey.
SHARE Friday, June 29, 2018 Wilmer's Socks
A Story
"The war began in my front yard and ended in my parlor." This statement about the start and the end of the U.S. Civil War was spoken by Wilmer McLean and is surprisingly almost perfectly true." From 'Today I found Out'
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, January 9, 2017 "Don't Threaten Me You Creep!"
She dresses like a dominatrix. Her looks are much more Disney than Marque de Sade. With beautiful Wedgwood blue eyes, a restless little nose and a skyfield of twinkling freckles from her blonde hairline clear down the front of her leather corset, Beatrice does appear much more of a Gidget at Halloween than an aspiring guerrilla...
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 13, 2015 America: Je Suis Not Interested
The USA didn't send a meaningful representative to the Charlie Hebdo march in France. I think this situation should have all Americans asking themselves -- what are we? The scale of this symbolic blunder is huge and we should be asking what the folks that run this place are truly made of? We can make big movies about snipers but we can't send a meaningful symbol to represent what we claim that sniper was killing for?
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 23, 2014 The Wrestlerization of America
Are Tony Stewart, the poor young man he accidentally killed and Ferguson victims of the Wrestlerization of America?
I guess, like all of those wrestling fans I sat with as a young boy, we Americans can continue to sit ringside cheering or booing the villain, but that's not really fake blood down there anymore.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 27, 2022 The Murder Foretold
"The attempts to rationalize the murderer's motives got louder and louder.
"The victim's family sat on their couch and cried..."
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 22, 2014 Gifted
A story about those left behind.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 29, 2016 Ode To a North American Asshat
Our British cousins have been referring much lately to one of our presidential candidates as an "Asshat." I decided to compose an ode to the "Asshat."
(11 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 30, 2015 What if Serious Energy Was Expended on Being For Something?
A Tragic thing happened and then a life affirming, wonderful thing is happening. Over Memorial Day weekend here in Texas a much needed, but not in the quantity and rapidity, rain event occurred. Creeks and rivers were very quickly inundated, many rose above all recorded flood stages and something we desperately needed, tragically, destroyed property and lives.
SHARE Monday, February 6, 2017 "Don't you never be callin' our President a scumbag boy!"
A Short Story.
"Well, he is, my Pa said it. He was tellin' me how to know a scumbag when he was tellin' me why that fella, Tin Draper, that stole that money from your store and put a bunch a hurt on his wife was one."
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, June 27, 2014 Hardhead Catfish?
"If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world's oceans aren't curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report." From a story on the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) by The Huffington Post
Hardhead catfish are usually scorned and thrown back -- maybe not in the near future.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 3, 2015 The Gun Always Wins
I got a call four days ago that the son of one of my oldest friends had been shot. The United States of America is a very sick place. Progressives and liberals and just plain good, old mentally healthy folks have sat on their hands while the nut cases have monopolized the National conversation, dragging Christ around with one hand and a gun with the other.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 29, 2017 This is Ridiculous: The Fringe is Now in Charge
Last night I got to personally witness the effect of Trump's ban on Muslims entering The United States. This is ridiculous. What is happening here right now is the national, radical stuffing of the agenda of an American fringe element down the throats of the majority.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, April 10, 2017 Trump Supporters Aren't Afraid, But You Should Be
To claim that Trump's Presidency's raison d'etre is fear based is a big stinking bag of bologna. Can you imagine the outcome if Abraham Lincoln would have explained away the intransigence of the South on the issue of slavery by blaming it on the fear of contract labor?
(21 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 2, 2016 Packing Pistols in Texas -- "The Tonto Open-Carry Tragedy"
It is now legal to openly carry firearms in Texas. Texas is a magical place where fact and fiction merge and some folks are driven to madness by their proximity to other mad people. Many simply watch in amazement from the security of their sanity.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, August 8, 2016 Who is Hillary? Someone Please Tell Us
We deserve someone that actually represents what this place, very vocally, says it's all about. At this juncture we do need someone exceptional. AND, maybe it is Hillary -- let's find out.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 18, 2010 PEOPLE OF THE BOOK?
Reverend Jones relented and now we should talk of such things - how this may have been about most of us.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, July 4, 2016 Musing About Things This Fourth: What's a Liberal/Progressive American to do?
Thinking about the presidential circus going on.
It's a confused, disturbed Liberal/Progressive, rapidly mutating, semi-psychoanalytical trip of anxiety and a bit of self-loathing swirled in a sweating cocktail glass...
What's a Liberal/Progressive American to do?
Move? Wave flags? Scream? Light up some bottle rockets? Enjoy a hot dog?
How about looking in the mirror.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 31, 2016 A Whole Bird: The Left Wing Talking to the Right Wing
I have read much about us liberals needing to have empathy for and needing to try and find common ground with right-wing, white America that elected Donald Trump.
First, what does this mean?
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 8, 2016 Trump the Expectant Fornicator
We are in a very dangerous interlude as a country. Moses has gone up the mountain and the idol that has been created is exposed as truly a grotesque blasphemy. Where do all the confused apostates go now?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 18, 2018 Rasputin's Daughter Speaks at Whole Foods
"And then, Rasputin's illegitimate daughter, Dorothy, stood, stern and wispy, she was 104, "I've seen a lot in my lifetime: murder, destruction, passion and good things..."
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 2, 2022 The Ghost of Taras Bulba
"They all left. She resisted. Her grandchildren tugged at her beautifully embroidered apron. She resisted..."
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 31, 2018 The Deep Prairie Pool and the Man
A story about a man and other things. I must admit that it was inspired by watching five Evangelical women from Dallas with big hair and a National Lampoon concept of Christianity.
(16 comments) SHARE Monday, July 25, 2022 Vladimir Putin is Murdering Innocents and the Planet is on Fire.
"Climate Change is the phenomenon which has the potential to unravel and declaw the "deep state." The solution to it will require global cooperation and clear, honest assessments and solutions. It will require transparency, not fog..."
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 30, 2022 We Needed the Truth, We Need it Now
How culpable are left-leaning writers, editorialists and pundits and others that sold us the bunk that the disgruntled masses that followed Trump were upset about economic concerns and not because they were rank racists, unhinged anarchists, radical white nationalists and just plain woefully delusional, irrational individuals?
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 20, 2018 Chasing Thing One or Thing Two
Bottom-up is a big part of the discussions here at OpEdNews. This talk by The Talking Heads' frontman, David Byrne, is very interesting and instructive I think. It got me to thinking about Dr. Seuss.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 5, 2014 What I Learned as a Mayoral Candidate
Are we coming to the logical end of this "American experiment?" I think so. I ran for mayor of a very small town of sixteen hundred and fifty citizens this past spring and have been trying to write something about it for the last six months...Small towns and cities are where it's at.
SHARE Friday, February 25, 2022 The Lindbergh Phenomenon
I remember when it was obvious that Fox News had the power to destroy the country -- many Lefties equivocated. I remember when Trump slithered forth from the rotting Republican womb -- many Lefties equivocated. Now we are watching a nuclear armed madman march into Ukraine, and many are equivocating.
(22 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Bernie and Hillary: It is a New Day
Bernie's money is coming from small donors and unions. Hillary's money is coming from not small donors nor unions. She is the Democratic money raising equivalent of George Bush, both. She is the past. She may be the ideological anti-Bush but she is structurally a peer.
SHARE Tuesday, April 15, 2014 Machismo
I recently had a conversation with someone that served in the U.S. Army in Iraq. He told me that he had just gotten a call from a former fellow platoon member informing him that another of their fellow soldiers from Iraq had killed himself. He said that this made the tenth suicide of guys that either he or his army buddies had known. This is part of a story compelled by this conversation.
SHARE Saturday, February 4, 2017 They Stand Before A Gilded Donut
"You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who lived a clean life in Galilee." Carl Sandburg
(40 comments) SHARE Monday, June 6, 2016 Is a Bernie/Hillary Ticket Necessary?
Hillary Clinton is the worst, most destructive candidate that could possibly run and or win against Donald Trump. Rush Limbaugh et al. have been deconstructing and demonizing her and her husband since their days in Arkansas. And, she has since built her own particular oeuvre to hate as Secretary of State...in spite of everything I've said above...
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 22, 2022 Climate Alarmists, Amateurs, Hobbyists and Conspiracy Addicts
There is little more annoying than amateurs, hobbyists and conspiracy addicts posting line after line of information they have found somewhere to prove their, uneducated and typically emotional, point.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 20, 2016 Not Falling With The Angry Man
A new Christmas story.
"...let's show him and those that follow him, in the mirror of our love, that his large ass is hanging out and it's not becoming of a people that claim to be a beacon to the world, "a city on a hill", not a brothel in a swamp..." The assembled mothers, a hungry plumber, stockers, wine salesmen and checkers cheered wildly when she finished. Cereal sales spiked..."
(11 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 14, 2016 Bernie's Story -- A New Ghost Dance
The extreme sadness I felt when reading about the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee was even more poignant for my young self because it was, in part, initiated by a story (The Ghost Dance) told by a shaman called Wavoka that promised a devastated people a new beginning and hope.
Bernie is trying to tell such a story.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 8, 2013 The Bullfighter's Monkey
The following is a kind of stream of consciousness riff instigated by reading a biography of the writer, John Dos Passos. His book, "The 42nd Parallel" impressed me greatly as a young man. However, Ernest Hemingway was my idol. Things have changed.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 23, 2016 Building Boats
Texas has typically been a place of rugged individualists and entrepreneurs: makers. If you listen to the pathetic Right-bound drivel rising from this place now -- you'd think we're all a bunch of illiterate, unseasoned, callow, cry babies.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 27, 2015 Beckwatch: Glenn as "The Brain", Ben Carson as "Pinky"
I submitted this piece a couple of days ago and then deleted it because it's pretty goofy. Today I read how Presidential Candidate Ben Carson is now ahead of Trump in the polls. What an amazing country we now live in. I don't understand it. Where did these people come from? How did they grow up in the same country that I did. What was done to them to cause them to flirt with fascism? It's still goofy but..well...
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 25, 2014 Don't Got "The Urge For Going" Back
There is a bunch of discussion about marijuana these days. Most of it is dishonest bullsh*t, on both sides -- I've been thinking about it too.
SHARE Tuesday, January 16, 2018 The Last Happy Girl
"The Last Happy Girl had made many people happy, many laugh. However a great darkness had spread across the land. Laughter and happiness were dwindling at an alarming rate. A dark, sad man was elevated to the status of a King. He had discovered the need of many to hate and fear. The word "Liberal" became a foul epithet..."
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, March 1, 2021 Back to Ukraine
"For over a hundred and fifty years Oleksander Andrii Dobroshtan's family have awaited the day when the 'Messenger' would arrive, the index finger and the heart reunited..."
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, May 12, 2014 WWJD, a fable
The understanding of the racial and philosophical person of Jesus, especially as applies to current events, by fundamentalist or just about any kind of conservative Christian is fascinating.
SHARE Saturday, July 21, 2018 Ramon and the Lizard: A story of Redemption
A Story
The imagination is really strong tool, as John Lennon knew. Just maybe, what's missing from today's discourse is imagination.
"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it." William Arthur Ward
SHARE Saturday, August 27, 2022 AI: The Writer Dies
Artificial Intelligence soon at a bookstore, art gallery, poetry reading, photography exhibit, war zone and furniture store near you.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 22, 2018 The Boxer's Lament: A Story
"Unfortunately, after many years of success and contentment, things changed -- a new President was elected. He was mean-spirited and set-out to make the country mean-spirited too. It didn't take long for his proclamations, rants and policies to take effect..."
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 17, 2018 Candide's Ladder
A Short Story
"Like a carnival barker barking out the show that was his life, he irrepressibly climbed Candide's ladder and exclaimed to all that would hear, " Take heart my friends.."
SHARE Saturday, May 12, 2018 El Santo de Xilitla
A Story.
Thinking about war -- the ease at which those in power send young people off to face the unnecessary evil they support and their rampant, insidious, self-indulgent hubris.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 16, 2016 Lake Wobegon Shuttered: Garrison Keillor is Retiring
I've been thinking and talking about the power of metaphor lately. Every Saturday morning it was in its full glory -- ringing through my shop, appropriately mingling with the clatter and the buzz. 'A Prairie Home Companion' encapsulated the best and the worst of what we are in farce and prose; sending us angels, dressed like us -- building empathy anew each Saturday on the streets of Lake Wobegon.
Thank You Garrison
SHARE Thursday, May 19, 2022 Imagining Ukrainians
"At dinner we imagined the couple at the next table to be Ukrainian. They spoke with Slavic accents. They were melancholic, ordering mushrooms and beets...
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 13, 2018 When Auntie Got a Chair
A story
Sometimes winning is a simple thing.
"Alex's Mother still had her great great grandfather's war shirt. She kept it in an old cedar chest that she used as a coffee table. When she was away from home Alex would open the chest and sit and stare at it until his eyes hurt."
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 3, 2016 Little Houses
Thinking about how we as a people are not up to the task presented us right now. The following is part of a story about the folks that lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
SHARE Friday, August 19, 2016 A Rant and A Question
How to not talk about climate change -- talk about Melania's t*ts, Donald's pecker, Hillary's e-mails. How did "the greatest country on earth", "the exceptional one", become a pathetic, freak laden sideshow. Many "lesser" countries on the planet are serious about the most important issue of the day.
SHARE Wednesday, February 20, 2019 All Along "the wall"
A Story
"The wall" sits atop a land both harsh and carrying the lost and discarded items of people passing for thousands of years.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, April 23, 2018 An American Love Story
A love story about a mailman, Merle Haggard, Readers Digest and Vietnam.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 3, 2014 A Sticky Wickiup
Israel and Native Americans have quite a lot in common. So, why do the Israelis have so many friends and so much clout and America's homegrown tribes are denied?
SHARE Wednesday, September 5, 2012 The Shark and the Warthog, a Fable
Thinking about this political season. Sometimes a certain situation or aspect of life is better handled with allegory.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 2, 2014 The Power of the Word: Inciting Violence
A disturbed man shot-up Austin Texas last week. It's time to hold those that incite violence responsible for their actions.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, January 23, 2017 Don't Just Stand There With That Pink Hat In Your Hand
So, it's time to cut the defeatist, hyper-analytical crap and simply mobilize, make a plan and hit the streets. It happened forty-nine years ago. It happened forty-three years ago. It happened six years ago. It happened two days ago. Make it happen again.
SHARE Tuesday, March 29, 2016 The Empathetic Neanderthal
Empathy is what makes us special. Empathy distinguishes us from most of the animal kingdom. However, and unfortunately, empathy is becoming a rapidly atrophying appendage of our collective American consciousness. I have tried to write about what is going on politically with the Republicans lately but it is so stupid, ugly, shameful, disgusting and inevitable that I failed. I have decided instead to simply write a little...
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, January 6, 2017 Pogo and the Gollum
Donald Trump is the ultimate example of a rank narcissist rising to the top. This country is ripe with others of much better temperament, intellect and motive for the office of President. Yet these possible leaders are not stepping up. The voters are not stepping up. Much of America appears to be disgusted with itself -- sitting disconnected, ambivalent -- surrounded by a dubious bounty and not willing to engage...
SHARE Saturday, September 10, 2022 Scribblers Struggling with the Hollow Man
Trump is a problem for many opinionators, commentors and editorialists. He just is. There is no nuance. There is no equivocation. There is no mystery, no depth.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 10, 2016 The Day that Trump Quit Being a Fascist, a Sexual Predator, "Hitler", a Racist, and On and On
Interesting how folks that don't do the right thing or don't advise doing the right thing, the day after an election magically start seeing 'The Fascist', "The Sexual Predator", 'The Racist", etc., etc. as possibly a "Progressive", the answer to the Hillary problem, the solution to the Russia problem...
SHARE Sunday, January 25, 2015 Without Hard Work There Are No Kolaches
This is a little story I wrote this morning after I posted a piece here yesterday. It got me thinking about someone I used to know. The response to the movie "American Sniper" has been strong and Chris Kyle, the sniper, has been personally savaged and disparaged. Did he deserve it. I don't know.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 6, 2016 Sunday-Morning Soundbites
Is the argument for not voting or voting for a failed third party an act of cowardice and surrender? Is it the sports equivalent of a pitcher in the bottom of the ninth, behind by five runs, deciding to become a bowler and roll the ball up to the plate? Is it existential surrender? Does it howl of self-loathing, a form of psychic suicide saying, "I have no power, I will toil desperately in the present moment because..."?
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 29, 2014 Love In The Time Of Collard Greens
With all the ugliness in the world right now I needed something to cheer me up. So I wrote this little story this morning -- it's about seventy-five percent true. Hope it makes you smile too.
(25 comments) SHARE Friday, January 8, 2016 Surprised by Joy
This is the first installment in a series of interviews I am going to try and have with, hopefully, a varied assortment of folks concerning their aesthetic awakening. My definition of aesthetics being what Santayana, Emerson and Thoreau defined as a "lived aesthetic." A combination of Nature and Spirit. I am going to steal from C.S. Lewis and title the series, "Surprised by Joy."
SHARE Friday, March 30, 2018 Thinking About Easter
"Kenjiro Watanabe stood on the corner of Rasmussen and Twelfth streets. He held a beautifully made, thirty seven inch Samurai sword. His battered cowboy boots and jauntily canted cappello romano hat marked him either as very eccentric or possibly an interesting antique picker..."
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 1, 2016 Bernie, You're The Best of What We Are
There has been much discussion here lately about what Bernie should do. Here's my suggestion:
Don't wait for Democracy to work -- make it work!.....
SHARE Friday, March 23, 2018 A Boat Called "Us"
A poem about Aqueducts, Boats, Pets and Singing Waiters.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, April 11, 2016 The Celebration of the Simpleton: The Lessons of Al Andalus and Weimar Germany
Weimar Germany, just before Adolf Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich, and Al Andalus, medieval Muslim Spain, just before the Reconquista, which brought with it the Inquisition and the destruction of the indigenous cultures of Mexico and South America -- Weimar Germany and Al Andalus flourished with high culture, the pursuit of knowledge and, to a varying degree, the acceptance of different religions and cultures.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 27, 2013 Suzi
A story about today.
(13 comments) SHARE Friday, January 29, 2016 Quirky White Guys
Robert "LaVoy" Finicum would probably be alive today if law enforcement hadn't treated the occupiers like quirky white guys... If I were the family of Robert Finicum I would be very angry with my government today -- he was crazy, a danger to himself and others, and the government simply treated him like a quirky white guy. We have become very tolerant of quirky white guys lately.
SHARE Tuesday, March 15, 2016 The Time of the Surrogates
The golden haired despot drove the cart erratically down the dire, blessed fairway, threatening all who disagreed -- with the anointed spiky putter or jagged three iron; Mexicans, bookreaders and those of the desert ran before him like turkey in late October. Many called it the epoch of the Loathsome and Unholy coiffure...Bernie needs to get out the Surrogates.