Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are,Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good. — W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939” This week has seen a most welcome return of Arthur Silber after yet another long absence due to abysmal health. In a brief but penetrating post, he manages to crystallize some penetrating insights on the nature of politics, and political writing — bringing into sharp and eloquent

May 9, 1952 (WASHINGTON) — President Strom Thurmond announced today that his thinking on race relations has “evolved,” saying that he now favors equal rights for Negroes. The president, a long-time supporter of segregation who broke with the Democratic Party over the issue and won the White House as a Dixiecrat in 1948, said his views had changed in part because of prodding by friends and family, and by his admiration for the “sacrifice and service” of Negro soldiers fighting in Korea. “I had hesitated on racial equality in part because I thought that separate-but-equal laws would be sufficient,” Mr.

We’ve been remiss here not to draw more attention to the incisive work being done by the legendary Vast Left in his series of “American Extremists” comics. VL’s ability to distill the political poisons abroad in the land — especially the “progressive” worship of the warmongering, Wall Street-coddling, liberty-choking, whistleblower-whipping, death squad honcho in the White House — into the brief dialogues of his talking heads is truly remarkable. Day after day, the pointed insights come, puncturing the afflatus-gorged bubbles of the powerful — and their treacly sycophants. He is a veritable Socrates of satire. If you are not already

  A few months back, I reposted here an article that I wrote 10 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq: a fictional scenario of how the Terror War would play out on the ground of the target nations — and in the minds of those sent to wage these campaigns. I was reminded of that piece by a story in the latest Rolling Stone. The RS story, by Michael Hastings, depicts the drone mentality now consuming the US military-security apparatus, a process which makes the endless slaughter of the endless Terror War cheaper, easier, quieter. I didn’t anticipate the

It’s always amusing to hear people say that the United States is “not an empire.” The substance of this “argument” (if we may so dignify such a completely unfounded assertion) seems to be that America can’t be an empire because its agents don’t swan around in white suits, pith helmets and jodhpurs while exercising direct and open colonial rule over its subjects. In other words, it doesn’t look enough like vaguely remembered movie scenes about the British Raj in its heyday. The fact that the British Raj was only one particular manifestation which imperial rule has taken down through the

Below is a brief instructional video delineating some possible approaches to the relentless series of challenges presented by the psychobiological, sociocultural, and political-historical elements of the turbulent, multivalent process known as — in the highly technical nomenclature of the Mississippi Delta school of analytical philosophy — life its own self.  

I.The ordeal of Fatima Bouchar, detailed by Ian Cobain in the Guardian, exemplifies the vile essence of the ‘Terror War’ being conducted by United States and its abject satellite, Great Britain, against large swathes of the world’s population (including, increasingly, their own people). It is a case of brutal torture against an innocent, defenseless pregnant woman, whose only “crime” was to be married to a man who belonged to an organization which had long been supported by the US and UK — until the geopolitics of oil made the group expendable. It is a tale of cowardice and cruelty, of

In two brief posts over the past week, Scott Horton at Harper’s gives us a harrowing sketch of the entrenchment and ever-spreading expansion of the Torture Matrix that now sits enthroned at the very heart of the American state. This entrenchment and expansion has been carried out — enthusiastically, energetically, relentlessly — by the current president of the United States: a progressive Democrat and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Horton notes the uncovering of the Zelikow Memo, written by one of the chief factotums of the Bush Administration, Philip Zelikow. While serving as a State Department lawyer in 2006,