In a classic essay[1] George Orwell describes himself as "amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations." Rather it leads to "orgies of hatred" as "young men . . . kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators."
Category: Culture & History
A Taxonomy of Capitalist Sharks
Trying to reform Capitalism is a futile as preaching Vegetarianism to a Shark. And nearly as dangerous. Stay away from those gaping greedy Jaws if you don’t want to get eaten alive—the sorry Fate of many idealistic Liberals and Social Democrats! (See fig. 1)
Eagleton on Marx
Review of Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011, 258 pp., $25.00
Hannah Arendt Against the Facts
[The publication in 1963 of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt provoked a storm of controversy which has been going on for decades. Arendt, the author of the famed The Origins of Totalitarianism claimed that Eichmann, organizer of the Holocaust, was not a fanatic who hated Jews but a normal man, and that Jewish leaders and organizations cooperated with him to an extraordinary degree.
Blues on the Border: Legendary Rock Guitarist Javier Batiz Plays and Sings for 'My Beloved and Beautiful Tijuana'
Javier Batiz, the great Mexican rock-and-roll guitarist, played and sang last week in a concert that embodied and gave voice to everything that is most wonderful about Tijuana and the U.S.-Mexico border region.
review
The Inner Lives of the Conquerors
The United States’ status as some form of imperial power is scarcely disputed on the Left. Richard Immerman’s Empire for Liberty: A History of America from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz is not a book written particularly for or from the Left, yet in some respects it goes further in defense of this idea than many leftists have allowed.
review
Reading People’s Mail Should Be Fun — Not This Time
I found this volume of edited letters disappointing, particularly so since I agree with the critics, that Saul Bellow was a great writer, one of very best in the second half of the 20th century. Alfred Kazin compared him to Melville, and Norman Podhoretz declared that Bellow was "a stylist of the first order, perhaps the greatest virtuoso of language the novel has seen since Joyce."
review
Is a Dream a Lie if it Doesn’t Come True (or is it something worse)?
Let me begin with a confession: While the 1980s are a blur to me, I recall the 1970s with a crispness and precision that has led me ever since to replaying the mental tape of those years, trying to understand how things ended up as they did.
Cockroft: Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now
James D. Cockroft’s "Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now," written for the centennial of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, is a radical scholar’s guide to radical Mexico and well worth the read. Both a scholar and a political activist, Cockcroft writes as a partisan of oppressed and exploited and an opponent of capitalism.
review
Fate of a Champion
It used to be said that if you walked down any street in a black neighborhood during a Joe Louis fight you would not miss a word of the broadcast because every radio in every house would be tuned to the same station … and turned up loud. A few years later, the same thing could be said about a Sugar Ray Robinson fight. Sugar Ray and Joe Louis dominated their respective divisions for nearly three decades.
Contextualizing the Threat of Radical Islam
Note: This article begins a series by Richard Greeman. Longtime socialist and international activist Richard Greeman is best know for his studies and translations of Victor Serge, the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary.
Update to "Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes"
A note on "Mean Bastards": This short piece, posted after the death of George Steinbrenner, has received a kind of confirmation in Ellen DeGeneres walking out on her five year contract worth tens of millions with "American Idol." I had criticized Simon Cowell (a former AI judge) along with Steinbrenner, Trump, etc.
Hacker and Dreifus’s Higher Education? A Neocon Screed
I admire Claudia Dreifus’s interviews with scientists in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, and particularly her attention to women in science, and I know of her honorable history in the left and feminism. So I befriended her on Facebook. There she publicized her book, with Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About It, to be published by Times Books/Henry Holt on August 3.
Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes
All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard — even in the Seinfeld version — and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would seem paradoxical to be deep in grief over a man universally acknowledged to be a Mean Bastard.
Foosball with the Devil: Haiti, Honduras, and Democracy in the Neoliberal Era
From the perspective of Honduran and Honduranist scholars, the most common reference to Haiti is as a point of hemispheric comparison. Whether measuring GDP per capita, state legitimacy and citizens’ political tolerance, or corruption, the phrase “Honduras ranks last…after Haiti” seems to be de rigueur. This is no coincidence: the policies and structures that have effected extreme poverty and highly concentrated wealth in both places are very much connected.
Los Suns
It's not unprecedented for athletes here to object to racist policies, military invasions, and various other crimes and stupidities.
The raised, gloved fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Olympics provide the most dramatic and public example of athletes taking a public stand against oppression. For their courage, Smith and Carlos were demonized and hustled out of town by the U.S. Olympic Committee, though today they are celebrated, at least in some circles.
"Drunk, crazy, and manipulated by their betters" – Sailors and Democracy
My research on Jack Tar, the American colonial seaman, began in rebellion against the highly politicized historiography of the 50s and early 60s, which reflected Cold War values, stressing the classlessness of American society, the lack of conflict, and the irrationality of those who dissented. A conservative historiography saw crowd actions in early America as drunk/crqzy, or manipulated by their betters.
Phil Ochs – The Struggle Continues
Phil Ochs was, until his untimely death in 1976, one of the great American folksingers and songwriters, whose powerful lyrics — political and poetic — helped to inspire a generation. His sister Sonny Ochs has worked to keep Phil’s memory and his message alive by organizing concerts bringing together current-day folk singers, offering a mix of their own material and Phil’s.
Hic Jacet Humptus – with a bow to the late William Buckley
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again
How much can a citizen expect of his state?
Before we rush into the breach with solutions that only create more problems, solutions like more welfare, more job-retraining programs, more touchy-feely therapy, in short, more middle class boondoggling in a mind-boggling bureaucracy, let us try to find out what caused the problem.
9-11 Revelation
Conspiracy theorists often take evidence of government cover-ups as proof that a conspiracy occurred. Sometimes a conspiracy may indeed have occurred, but often the cover-up was designed to hide not some grand conspiracy, but malfeasance, incompetence, or wrong-doing.
Top