Last week I went to Port Townsend, Washington, for some “executive training,” since I’ve taken on full management responsibilities at the paper where I work — the revenue side as well as the content side. During our session, each of the participants was invited to make a one sentence statement about what makes us tick. I did not miss […]
Dispatches From The Wasteland — No. 2
• Chemical atrocity. The Syrian government allegedly unleashed another chemical attack on its own people last weekend. Russia is warning of “most serious consequences” if the U.S. strikes Syria over the attack. Get the feeling that we’re walking along the crumbling edges of an abyss? From the New York Times: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Dozens of Syrians choked to […]
The Circle Of Trust
I like big things: Big mountains; vast swaths of desert; endless forests lorded over by towering, majestic trees. Big steaks. Big-bored blackpowder rifles that make a big boom and a tremendous cloud of white smoke. A big, steaming mug of coffee on a chilly morning. Big books. But big human organizations suck. A great many of modern civilization’s discontents can […]
Repair As Rebellion
“…When fixing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, repair becomes a political act.” — Stuart Ward, repair café volunteer My grandfather made his own electric lawn mower out of a pair of scrap metal blades and a washing machine motor that he pulled out of one of the machines at an apartment complex he owned, and repaired. One of […]
A Relic Of The 18th Century
“…Demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.” — Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens I have been naïve. My temperament has always bent toward seeking common ground — the Willie Nelson ethic of bringing the cowboys and the hippies together. I have opined multiple times in the newspaper […]
The Myth Of Rugged Individualism
No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance. — Ernest Hemingway, To Have And Have Not On March 1, 2017, I did something dumb. Call it an error of judgment. The winter had been hellacious: Unusually cold and one heavy snowstorm after another. We were measuring the stuff in feet, not inches. The weather warmed […]
A Lighthouse And A Field Hospital
Recognition was a long time a‑borning. Not the recognition that something is deeply, profoundly wrong with American culture and society — and that of the West generally. That has been easy enough to perceive for, well … decades. It’s only been in the past few years that I have been forced to reckon with a hard truth: What’s broken […]
Dispatches From The Wasteland — No. 1
The social and economic fabric of the 21st Century world is a highly complex, interconnected web. And all complex systems are fragile. Best to keep in mind that we’re ALL no more than a few days or weeks of disruption from the world of Max Rockatansky. Those charged with holding the lid on the cauldron can testify […]
The Radical Underground — All Foco’d Up — Part II — The Right
There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutions to cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. Eric […]
The Radical Underground: All Foco’d Up — Part I: The Left
I see a bad moon rising I see trouble on the way I see earthquakes and lightning I see bad times today — John Fogerty The “bad moon” Creedence Clearwater Revival songwriter and frontman John Fogerty saw on the rise in the fall of 1969 would become an eerie, unsettling Blood Moon as the tumultuous ’60s became the pervasively violent and […]
Red Killer: The Long Afterlife Of Che Guevara
“If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” — Che Guevara, November 1962 Many of the violent protesters at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, in July were clad in standard-issue anarchist-nihilist riot gear: […]
One Steel Knife; One Copper Kettle — Killer Consumerism
Consumerism is killing us. This is known. The oceans are choked with plastic from billions of packages, used once and discarded. Landfills are crowded with acre upon acre of … stuff. Our insatiable appetite for more and more stuff is not just burying the planet; it’s killing us spiritually. We know this, too. We feel in […]
