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Dear Frank Bruni,
I enjoyed your restaurant reviews in the NY Times. Reading your descriptions of the food and ambience allowed me to experience vicariously many restaurants. We seem to have a similar sensibility — about food. You seemed not to allow restaurant publicity and PR to influence your ratings or judgment, maybe because you know good food and the restaurant business thoroughly enough so that you could see through hype.
In the past few weeks, New Politics has published two valuable commentaries on the role of socialists and the Left in local electoral campaigns, first a broad overview by Dan La Botz and then a response by David Judd specifically on Dan Siegel’s campaign for Mayor of Oakland.
Only large-scale civil disobedience will make our leaders address economic injustice.
In 1989, Bob Dylan recorded a song titled “Everything Is Broken”. That song seemed to go largely ignored, perhaps because it seemed to be only a pessimistic lament that offered no suggestions for how to go about fixing the “everything”.
But as with many of his songs, it was prophetic. Lately, many Americans are experiencing the feeling that everything is broken, but people in many other countries have had this feeling for a long time.
I would like to thank Bennett for his kind and appreciative comments on my artcile and use the opportunity presented by his letter to answer some essential points of contention.
In 1968, the Mannington Mine in Farmington WV owned by Consol Coal, caught fire, blew up, and 78 miners were buried, many likely alive.
In 1972, a Consol mine in Blacksville, WV, caught fire and 9 miners were buried (again, likely alive) when Consol sealed the mine off to stop the fire and save the coal.
[Because Kshama Sawant is at the moment the leading elected socialist official in the United States her opinions carry a weight far more important than those of many other socialist groups and activists. We print below Sawant's recent statement on Israel's attacks on Gaza made in the Seattle City Council and reprinted on the Socialist Alternative website. – Eds]
I wish to commend Barry Finger for his analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict dating back to the establishment of 1947 UN Partition Plan. (Finger makes a minor error in calling it the “1948 partition.”)
Review of Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. New York, Metropolitan Books, 2013. 238 pages. Endnotes. Hardcover $26. Paperback $16. Kindle $11.04
There is so much wrong with Michael Walzer’s brief essay on the New Republic website, supporting Israel in its latest onslaught, while criticizing “a little uneasily” some of the excessive civilian deaths, that it is hard to know where to begin.
Daniel Bensaïd. An Impatient Life: A Memoir. Foreword by Tariq Ali. New York: Verso, 2013. Photos. Notes. 358pp. Hardback – $34.95.
Daniel Bensaïd, raised in his Algerian Jewish and French Communist family in Toulouse, was strongly affected as an adolescent by the revolutionary movements in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam. At the university, he became swept up in and was soon a student leader of university strikes that set off the great upheaval of May 1968 leading to the strike by 11 million workers.
The discussion of a socialist strategy towards Palestine never recedes from global pertinence and urgency. The basic terms of the Palestinian tragedy established in 1948 remain a festering wound—unaddressed, malignant and oozing in blood and rot. With it the Israeli garrison state continues to descend, and rightfully so, into isolation and disrepute in the court of civilized opinion.
Last Thursday was a national day of protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza, with demonstrations being held across the United States, with follow-up events in many places. There was also a Friday demonstration in New York City that I attended.
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