Heather Havrilesky of Salon is a gifted writer, indeed. She opens a recent article by discussing the delighted innocence of her baby girl, "my own happy tadpole, who just arrived on this overheated blue sphere four months ago, gazes at the branches of trees and feels the cold noses of…
After Gerald Ford died, we had non-stop ceremonies, processions, rituals and headlines. Except for his family and close friends, though, most of us didn’t really know him.
What did Gerald Ford’s death mean? A few days before the funeral, a state worker told me that a former president died and that “everybody gets the day off.” I suspect that there was very little mourning done by state workers on this day off.
The social vultures smelled the national spotlight, though, and they descended to partake. After all, did you ever hear of anyone overdosing on notoriety?
Almost nobody discussed Gerald Ford in the months and years before he died. He was ignored until he died. There is no logical reason why Ford’s death should make his life interesting. If his accomplishments were worthy of discussion at all, they would have been compelling topics while he was alive. My suggestion: The nonstop public rituals following Ford’s death were not really about Ford. They were opportunities to gather together in Machiavellian fashion to pursue our own needs and wants.
I know that this sounds counter-intuitive, but please hear me out. Almost every time you see tremendous energy being put into rituals or festivities, it’s not about the thing that people claim that it is about. Whenever you see such great social energy being poured into anything, it’s about relationships among the living. It’s not the thing on the stage. We feed off of corpses, especially famous corpses, whether they be Gerald Ford, …
Truthdig.com reports: The results were startling. Only 13 percent of congressional Republicans say they believe that human activity is causing global warming, compared to 95 percent of congressional Democrats. Moreover, the number of Republicans who believe in human-induced global warming has actually dropped since April 2006, when the number was…
Here's Robert Sheer's take on the new budget: Ever since some lunatics, mostly citizens of our longtime ally Saudi Arabia, used $3 knives to hijack four planes on the same morning, President Bush has exploited our nation’s trauma as an opportunity to throw trillions of dollars at the military-industrial complex…
President Bush’s new budget proposal cuts more than $53 million money from the budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the agency that allocates federal money for NPR, PBS and other federally funded media. This is a quarter of the CPB budget. This same budget will drastically crank up…