06/29/2026
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250 Years of America

693 Words: 250 Years

In this bizarrely polarized nation, most of us either think of its history as the greatest feel-good story ever told or the direst nightmare ever experienced.

Of course, it’s neither. Or, more accurately, it’s both.

My friend George Bull, as voracious a reader as I know, pointed out to me a neat little piece that ran in The Observer this weekend, a reflection on the USA’s 250 years, penned by a passel of noted scribes. They are:

That’s quite an all-star cast, including a bunch of Pulitzer Prize winners, a screenwriter, an Ivy League professor, both a National Book Award winner and a nominee, a New York Times Notable Book honoree, and a satirist. Their essays do well to prove a point that I’ve long held — that the United States of America, being the most diverse nation on the planet and, throughout its 250 years, a destination for immigrants from every corner of the world, represents both the best and worst, the full range of thought, feeling and behavior, that humanity has to offer.

Our current president and his MAGA worshippers would love for us to see this place as a holy land, bestowed upon us special people by our gracious god (well, they’d capitalize the word, but I never do), and a beacon on a hill that too many of the Earth’s bad guys would like nothing more than to be destroyed from without and within.

The purists who form the religious wing of the “woke” crowd view the US as a cesspool of greed, violence, slavery, rape, hatred, toxic masculinity, cutthroat competition, and crushing conformity.

Again, like any stew, this nation is a mix of all those ingredients. And, again and again throughout our history, we’ve swung back and forth between one extreme and the other.

BTW: My reference to woke’s “religious wing” means just this: my sisteren and brethren of the Left, the progressives, the liberals, or whatever you wish to call us, too often slip all too easily into a priestly orthodoxy. At worst, they excommunicate erstwhile allies who split hairs in a taboo manner and wind up always and forever paring down our numbers. All those strategically unified Right Wing, free market, authoritarian, Christian nationalist Republicans, maintaining their maximum numerical advantage, of late have been able to wrest control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, most statehouses, and too many other levers of power hereabouts.

They know how to keep the tent big; we don’t.

Purity’s nice when it comes to drinking water, It sucks in a democratic-republic political system.

Anyway, I figured why don’t I have a go at this exercise? Why don’t I cherry pick the highs and lows of this country’s story? So I’ll start, appropriately, at the beginning.

Of course, both historic landmarks I begin with represent contradictions. I mean, what are we if not a nation of contradictions?

Contradiction No. 1: The White proto-Americans who came to this “New World” from the British Isles between, oh, 1600 and the mid 18th century, came here primarily, to escape religious intolerance in their homeland. Upon arrival here, they promptly imposed their own religious intolerance.

Contradiction No. 2: Those White, erstwhile Brits decided to form their own country, issuing a Declaration of Independence, and then writing themselves a Constitution. They preached, “All men are created equal.” Beautiful words. Gorgeous words. No society had ever before advanced the notion that people could govern themselves, without relying on a god-given noble class, without submitting to a powerful priesthood, without acknowledging that one group of people were superior to another. Except, women weren’t included under the rubric “people.” Nor were non-landowners. Black’s were fractions of people, 3/5 to be precise. It took fully 188 years before the United States got around to ensuring that every human being, no matter their sex, gender, skin color, wealth or lack thereof, was equal under the law. And to this day, forces within this nation continue to chafe against those guarantees.

Good and bad. There’s more, Oh, there’s more. I’ll get to more over the next few days as we approach the Fourth of July.

06/24/2026
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History, Rick Perlstein

612 Words: The Five Most Important Days

Historian Rick Perlstein says he’s been assigned by one publication or another to come up with the five most important days in the world over the last 175 years. Why 175? Search me.

Out of curiosity, I typed the following into Google:

What were the five most important days of the last 175 years?

Here’s what Google’s AI came back with:

  1. April 25, 1953, The discovery of DNA’s structure
  2. November 9, 1989: The fall of the Berlin Wall.
  3. September 2, 1945: The formal end of World War II.
  4. July 20, 1969: The Apollo 11 moon landing.
  5. August 15, 1947: The partition and independence of India.

That’s it. Nothing beyond 81 years ago. Nothing that happened between 1851 and 1945, AI contends, is as important as five things that happened since. Who knows? Maybe AI is right. Although I might suggest Lincoln’s wholly un-American Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, might give at least one of those five a run for its money.

By the way, I call Lincoln’s EP “un-American” because it was just that. It was the first time in our weird nation-state’s history that the chief executive ever prioritized human beings over property rights. And, for the life of me, I can’t think of a single other time a president — or Congress, for that matter — has done it again. If you don’t see how very, very un-American Lincoln’s act was (and is), then you don’t understand this place at all and/or have bought in to your seventh grade social studies teacher’s happy horseshit.

What about, as well, July 16, 1945: The Trinity test? I’m guessing proving humanity’s capability to invent, produce, and detonate a weapon that, in sufficient numbers, could potentially wipe out all of us might be a tad important.

How about the unspecified date in October, 1879 when Thomas Edison demonstrated the first practical incandescent lightbulb. Time magazine around the tunr of this century ran a series on the greatest inventions of the preceding millennium and concluded with the claim that the lightbulb was Number 1.

Then again, I’ve got a book somewhere in my library that claims the nail might be the most important, transformative invention in human history. Once our species started nailing, screwing, and bolting things together we Homo sapiens began separating ourselves from the rest of the food chain. I don’t know if I buy it but it’s an argument.

Philo Farnsworth ought to put in a claim — September 7, 1927: The first television signal transmission. Farnsworth, of course, is the poor schlub who invented the one thing that has come to dominate our every waking moment — and even our non-waking moments if we forget to turn the TV off before we fall asleep. The corporate monster, the RCA Corporation, got all tumescent when it heard about Farnsworth’s TV system and tried to buy his patent for it. He refused and the company responded by…, well, crushing him. The poor sap.

My personal favorite is the day in 1933 when Frances Perkins told the soon-to-be inaugurated Franklin D. Roosevelt she would reject his request that she become Labor Secretary unless he pledged to enact what would become the New Deal. We’re talking about a bold, straightforward woman leveraging the President of the United States into providing electricity for rural Americans, putting the Great Depression unemployed back to work, repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, protecting people’s bank accounts, investing in the arts, initiating Social Security, and so, so much more.

Too, there was October 1, 1949, the day Mao Zedong stood in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China. The country’s then population of more than a half billion might consider that front-page news.

Anyway, Perlstein’s assignment sounds like fun. I look forward to finding out his five most important days in the last 175 years.

 

06/22/2026
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Michelle Obama, Misogynoir, Moya Bailey

776 Words: Creative Hate

The latest trend among the anencephalics who populate the MAGA-sphere is to brand Michelle Obama a man. One meme I saw the other day made specific reference to her “dick.”

So, I nosed around a bit and discovered there’s a type of sociological cancer called misogynoir, a mash up of misogyny and racism. By golly, we’re such a creative species, aren’t we?

Moya Bailey coined the term nearly two decades ago and I thank all my lucky stars that I hadn’t heard of it until just now. For the last ten years, my faith and hope in the human race has been bottoming out anyway, without me knowing about it.

Moya Bailey

Better I should concentrate on who Moya Bailey is. She’s a professor in the Communications Studies Department at Northwestern University. Acc’d’g to her school bio, “she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine.” And if you think, as many MAGA-ists do that such academic inquiry is silly or useless, consider the media landscape of, say, a quarter of a century ago. Back then, I noticed that whenever the big corporate media outlets ran breathless stories about young women and girls who’d been kidnapped or killed (long a staple of news coverage, guaranteed to rivet viewers, readers, and clickers) the victim, invariably, turned out to be young, pretty, innocent-looking, and blonde. Nobody else…, well, mattered.

If a victim happened to be fat, homely or, god forbid, Black, her disappearance or demise wouldn’t be worth a moment of anyone’s time.

And if I, a White male, noticed that trend, you can be sure scads of Black people did, too. Thus was born Black Lives Matter.

White America, and the MAGA cesspool in particular, could never understand that daily slap in the face Black people suffered. Black people’s sisters, daughters, and friends disappeared too. Kids and twenty-somethings in Atlanta’s Vine City neighborhood, New York City’s Washington Heights, Chicago’s North Lawndale, or St. Louis’s The Ville went missing and met untimely ends too. They rarely, if ever made the front page. Their pictures rarely, if ever, were posted on CNN or Fox News. They weren’t important enough.

Black lives, “woke” folks said, matter too. Young Black women and girls were important too. That’s all they were trying to say.

Of course, even that simple sentiment was twisted, mangled, misinterpreted, and made toxic by right wing commentators, lunkheaded social media influencers, and the eventual goddamned President of the United States.

So, yeah, delving into how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in the media, the pursuit Moya Bailey has dedicated her professional life to, is as important as all hell, no matter what the late Charlie Kirk or Joseph Goebbels mimic Stephen Miller have to say.

Bailey first used the term misogynoir back in 2008 while writing her dissertation at Emory University. “It is a portmanteau of misogyny and noir–referring both to the French word for the color black as well as the film genre noir, because one of the ways that I see misogynoir showing up is often in media,” Bailey told Northwestern magazine in 2023. That year, Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionaries. Here’s M-W’s online definition:

Bailey has written the book, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021) and co-authored #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020). While an undergrad at Spelman College hoping to become a physician, she “fell in love with Women’s Studies” and turned to that academic discipline instead. In 2004, she and other women at Spelman staged the “Nelly Protest,” objecting to the rap star’s and other hip-hop artists’ hateful, dismissive representations of women in their lyrics and videos. (And, by the way, whenever I’m in the car and I hear gangsta rap and other such macho-porn booming and blaring from a nearby vehicle, the driver and other occupants invariably turn out to be White boys. You’re welcome to make your own conclusion about that.)

On a very cool note, Moya Bailey serves as the “digital alchemist” for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, Butler was  a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. Butler, who died in 2006, was a member of a still all-too-rare demographic: she was a Black woman science fiction novelist. She also was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship prize, in 1995.

There. Phew! After having my soul tainted by learning about accusations that Michelle Obama has a dick and the malignancy that is misogynoir, I feel refreshed by having discovered Moya Bailey. And, as an added bonus, I got to think about the imaginative and fabulously accomplished Octavia Butler.

Maybe humanity isn’t so rotten after all.

06/15/2026
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Fascism, Revolution

1068 Words: An Unforeseen Consequence

From this…

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…to this?

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I’m spending a good long time reading the new book about the lives of Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayres, and Zayd Ayres, the family on the run from the law in the 1970s and into the ’80s. Bernardine Dohrn was, for a while, on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. She and Ayres had founded the militant wing of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) known at first as the Action Faction, then the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and eventually the Weathermen. Then, the Weathermen declared war on the US empire, armed themselves, made and exploded bombs in public buildings, and aligned with the most militant faction of the Black Panther Party.

The accidental explosion of a homemade dynamite bomb that killed three Weathermen and destroyed a Manhattan townhouse in March, 1970 sent Dohrn and Ayres scurrying underground where they renamed their group, naturally, the Weather Underground. Dohrn and Ayres eventually became a couple, married, and had two kids even as they moved from place to place in the United States, assuming aliases, constantly looking over their shoulders for G-men, and hoping against hope no one would recognize them in a grocery store line.

I started reading Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young about two weeks ago. I’m a notoriously slow reader, plus the story is so compelling I find myself putting the book down for long periods of time just to contemplate, to digest what I’ve read. I try to cut through my emotional reactions and put myself in the shoes of Dohrn (mere) and Ayres as they lug their two little boys (one of them being Zayd, who authored this memoir of life on the run and the history of the radical groups his parents were involved with). Just as important, I try to empathize with the people affected by Dohrn’s and Ayres’s actions, including their parents, their former friends, law enforcement officials, and plain old folks at home, in their living rooms, watching TV news reports about the latest bombing of the US Capitol or a police station.

It might take me another two whole weeks to finish reading the book. That’s okay. I’m immersed in their world, trying to grasp it, and trying to understand my own feelings about the people involved. As noted previously in this global communications colossus, I idolized the militant radicals who scared the bejesus out of everyone from Richard M. Nixon to J. Edgar Hoover to Mayor Richard J. Daley to countless next door neighbors across the country.

I realize, at this remove, that my affinity for long-haired radicals hollering for an end to the war in Vietnam, to institutional racism, and to American imperialism around the globe was as much driven by my own teenaged urge to rebel as by a moral revulsion to America’s sins.

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres were not wrong for opposing, strenuously, the war, Jim Crow and other American evils but their “war” (yep, in May 1970, the Weather Underground issued a manifesto titled a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States) was as fatuous, albeit homicidal, as anything conjured up by previously comfortable, entitled white kids.

That’s what Bernardine and Bill were, at first. Comfortable, entitled white kids. Members of the post World War II generation, they were the most well-fed, well-clothed, provided for generation in the history of the human race. Their country was the most powerful in the world and had just won, in part, a pitched battle against tyranny, the Holocaust, book burning, and more. Dohrn and Ayres grew up not only believing so much was due to them within their homes and families, but their nation believed the rest of the world owed it. The Baby Boomers understood from birth that whatever they wanted, they could get.Their parents stood on their heads to provide everything their kids needed. Their nation provided them fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter, a car for every member of the family, cheap gasoline, grocery store shelves packed to overflowing with countless brands of breakfast cereal. University education was either free or easily affordable even for families just scraping by. They had record players and braces on their teeth and princess phones and good shoes.

They naturally grew up thinking that whatever they wanted was attainable.

Until what they wanted was peace in Vietnam and a fair shake for Black people.

Suddenly, they were frustrated for the first time in their lives and, goddamn it, they weren’t gonna take that lying down. I know this sounds as though I’m minimizing Dohrn and Ayres et al’s commitment to justice. Yes, they truly wanted peace and harmony and racial equality. But when those ideals weren’t coming in the snap of a finger, they reverted to the entitled, privileged kids they still were. If they didn’t get their way, they were gonna throw a tantrum and wreck the house.

Their “war” against the US, their revolution, appealed to an entire generation of people, many of whom wouldn’t give a second thought to Vietnam or voting rights in Mississippi. It was appealing because it allowed them, metaphorically, to thumb their noses at square Mom and Dad, to flash the finger at their mean old high school principal, and to tell the cop busting them for smoking pot to fuck off. Radical revolutionaries in the 1970s were the ultimate rebels, James Dean, Bob Dylan, and Hunter S. Thompson on steroids. All authority was evil. Everybody in a suit a tyrant. We could do whatever we wanted and fuck you if you didn’t like it.

And the funniest thing of all is, that train of thought is what led us directly to MAGA, a nation of rebels uprising against,.., well, everything. Morality? Please, don’t make me laugh. Justice? Don’t try to force that shit on me. Regulations? Try and stop me from doing what I want to do whenever I want to do it.

Doctors, lawyers, priests, politicians, experts, scientists — anybody in charge of anything must be defied. Wear a mask during a pandemic? Why, it’s tyranny! Electric cars? How dare you — I love rolling coal! And worst of all, a black man has become President of the United States of America? Damn it, we have to tear the whole thing down!

What a bizarre irony. The revolution of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres was an arrow pointing directly to the neo-fascist Donald J. Trump.

Who could have ever guessed?

06/13/2026
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Hope, Protest, Repression

966 Words: Is Hope Enough?

I was fourteen years old when four Kent State University student protesters were gunned down by Ohio National Guard riflemen in 1970. Not two weeks later, a college student and a high schooler were killed by local police and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers who shot wildly at dorm windows on the Jackson State University campus during an antiwar, civil rights protest.

Kent State, May 4, 1970.

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Phillip Lafayette Gibbs (L) & James Earl Green, Jackson State Shooting Victims, May 12, 1970.

In the days between those killings, a mob of 1200 construction workers and well-dressed Wall Street hoods went on a rampage in New York City, stopping traffic, smashing windows, and beating the hell out of anti-war protesters and any passersby who appeared to them to be long-haired peaceniks. The incident was called the Hard Hat Riot.

A Hard Hat Pummels a Bystander, May 8, 1970.

I was 69, just a few weeks shy of 70, this year when protesters Renee Goode and Alex Pretti were summarily executed by federal ICE agents.

In October, a US Border Patrol agent who’d been helping round up people in the president’s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, shot Marimar Martinez five times after the vehicle she was driving collided with the agent’s. Somehow she survived.

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Fifty six years have elapsed between the first and last of these incidents. I’d have bet, back when I was an idealistic, hopeful teenager that even though America’s Vietnam War was a colossal fiasco and this nation’s race relations were a miserable mess and armed and dangerous authoritarian thugs, both deputized and ad hoc, were visiting violence upon dissenters, that a half century hence we’d be living in a better place.

The year 2026 in America, I’d have been certain, would be a utopia of peace and harmony, with whatever technology that’d been invented making our lives a whirl of leisure, pleasure, and discovery.

Last I checked, things haven’t turned out quite that way.

That’s one of the beauties of youth. The young can dream. They can hope. The future is a world of infinite possibilities. Young people possess a certainty that they, unlike their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, can fix this world.

Well, that was one of the beauties of youth. It seems young people today are lonely, alienated, pessimistic, even hopeless. Too bad. A person without hope is the walking dead.

What got me thinking about all this was an interview I did this week for a Bloom magazine article. It’ll be about a new development at the Stone Age Institute, that world-renowned center of inquiry into human evolution just northwest of Bloomington. Founders Kath y Schick and Nick Toth are building a new wing on their facility to house a huge gift of materials and fossils that recently came their way. The wing and the stuff it’ll hold will  turn their academic operation into the world capital of research into early human history. It’s already one of the top places on the planet to come to for academics who are nosy about our species origins.

The Stone Age Institute.

If you’re curious about what’s going on there, you’ll just have to wait for my story to appear in the August/September issue of Bloom.

Anyway, I spent an afternoon with Kathy and Nick, who’ve been married for 49 years, for pete’s sake, and who attribute at least some of the success of their half century-long relationship to the fact that they spent countless nights in tiny tents at archeological digs in the Serengeti and other proto-human birthplaces. If the couple was heading toward one of those typical blowouts that young marrieds experience, they’d have to make amends fast because they’d be cooped up with each other all night long.

“You just can’t slam a tent door,” Kathy Schick says, laughing. “And there’s no place to go!”

Toth (L) & Schick in Kenya, 1977.

Kathy wasn’t laughing on May 4, 1970. That day, when four anti-war protesters were killed by National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus, she dodged a metaphorical bullet.

You see, Kathy Schick had been standing at almost precisely the spot you can see in the top photo, the iconic snapshot of the young woman, Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming in grief and terror over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, a Kent State student she’d just met moments before. That photo is sometimes referred to as the Kent State Pieta, after Michelangelo’s La Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

Kathy was protesting the Vietnam War that day. She was an undergrad at Kent State at the time, studying to become, eventually, a paleoanthropologist and archeologist. She’d earn her doctorate years later at the University of California-Berkeley.

She was damned lucky to be able to become a renowned scientist. That Monday, she was part of a small group of geology students and their professor among the larger mass of protesters. At one point the professor, in  tears, began imploring her students to leave the protest. The professor could sense that the confrontation was about to swirl out of control. “There are gonna be deaths if you guys stay here,” the professor said.

Kathy found herself in tears, too. Hers were caused by the clouds of teargas hanging over the grassy knoll Commons, a big open space on campus where the protesters and Guardsmen faced off against each other. Her eyes burning, Kathy rushed into a nearby campus building to wash the chemicals out. She could barely see. “I was just inside,” she says, “and the shots rang out.”

Some young people who dare to protest never make it to old age. Some do. It doesn’t matter if they’re optimistic or pessimistic. And that utopia of peace and harmony is forever tantalizingly out of reach. Maybe today’s jaded youth have a more realistic outlook than I had way back in 1970. But I had hope.

06/01/2026
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Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers

1030 Words: Rife With Contradictions

I’m always excited when I get my hands on a new, compelling book. Right now, I’m gobbling up Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of radical revolutionaries, longtime fugitives, and legal and education activists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

It’s the author’s memoir about his family’s years on the run. Mom Dohrn, Dad Ayers, and their two small boys (they called their dad Bill) lived out of their vehicles and in communes or roadside motels, assumed false names, and were constantly on the alert for tails and phone taps. Mom and Bill fretted endlessly that they’d be recognized in public or some trusted friend (of whom there were few) might blow the whistle on them. Bernardine had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List at the onset of their fugitive years (she was removed after some charges were dropped due to police misbehavior) but Bill never made the cut despite the fact that the two were co-founders of the Weather Underground that was responsible for bank robberies, bombings, and other crimes.

Bill, in fact, was one of the leaders of the Days of Rage, four days of mayhem in Chicago in October 1969 including pitched battles between street protesters and the cops, vandalism, and physical violence. Bernardine and Bill had been leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society and had grown disenchanted with the SDS’s talk-rather-than-action ways. The SDS was committed to demanding an end to the Vietnam War and for full civil rights for Blacks. Dohrn and others felt the war and the country’s endemic racism had to be challenged actively, passionately, and violently. So she  helped form a splinter organization called the Revolutionary Youth Movement which eventually morphed in to the Weather Underground, or the Weathermen (from the Bob Dylan lyric, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.”

The RYM/Weathermen declared “a state of war” on the United States and planted bombs on college campuses, at police stations, in  the US Capitol, and other places. Famously, three Weathermen were killed when a bomb they were working on in a Greenwich Village townhouse prematurely exploded. (Factoid: the then-unknown Dustin Hoffman lived next door; he wasn’t home at the time of the blast.)

Greenwich Village Bomb Blast, March 6, 1970 (Credit: Neal Bonzi/New York Times)

The Days of Rage, by the way, coincided with the start of the Chicago 8 trial. (That’s right, it was the Chicago 8 at first; Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, one of the original defendants, would be separated from the case by Judge Julius Hoffman.) I idolized the eventual Chicago 7. I was 12 through 14 years old when they became known for purportedly conspiring to riot at the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago through their trial and acquittal in federal district court. My high school nickname was Abbey, a misspelling honoring Abbie Hoffman, whom I thought was the coolest human ever to walk the earth.

(L-R, top row) Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis; (bottom row) Bobby Seale, Leew Weiner, John Froines, David Dellinger

Here’s a poster calling out for participants for the upcoming Days of Rage in the summer of ’69:

For this rebellious, theatrical teenager growing up in a profoundly racist, Mob-infested, crushingly provincial neighborhood, home to cops, firemen, politicians, and working class families, the Chicago 8/7 represented my own individuation, my statement that I was never gonna be like the rest of you people, that as soon as I could, I’d get the hell out of the northwest side’s boring Galewood precincts, and see the world. I wasn’t going to work in a factory. I wasn’t going to be a cop. I was scared of heights so being a firemen was out. And my hair was too long for me to be a politician. Oh, and the Mob guys were assholes who saw me as a hippie fag.

I could have fit in nicely with the Chicago 8/7.

That is, until I figured out too many of them were overbearing, spectacularly hypocritical stage hogs. As I grew older, I realized my own hunger for attention was better sated on the actual stage or by my newspaper and magazine byline.

Not that the 8/7’s dedication to ending the war and securing equity and equality for Blacks and other oppressed minorities of the world were false or wrong. Abbie Hoffman might have been a ham, Jerry Rubin a self-serving bullshitter, and Tom Hayden a prime example of male arrogance, but the things they opposed were worth getting busted for, getting clunked on the head with a nightstick, or running wild down Michigan Avenue to dramatize the madness of it all.

They were, in other words, human beings rife with all the contradictions of our species. Within every saint there is a sinner, and vice versa.

That’s why Zayd Dohrn’s memoir is so riveting. He reveals Bernardine, the true center and power of the family, as a complicated person, difficult to analyze, impossible to confine within a box, ultimately unknowable. She was constantly a center of attention yet she hated having all eyes on her. Humorless. Unyielding. Doubt is alien to her.  She was flamboyantly imperfect even as she sought a classless, communist, equitable — and, yes, perfect — society.

The statues of all my heroes are chipped, partially broken, discolored, and teetering. Mark Twain wrote a lot of crappy stuff. Mike Royko was a drunken brawler. FDR was a scheming charmer. JFK a slave to his dick. Too many of the men i revere share Kennedy’s addiction to sex. Perhaps that’s a feature, not a bug, of male “success.”

The women I lionize — Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Dorothy Parker, Rebecca Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and others — seem less obsessed by accumulating a lengthy roster of sexual conquests but they, too, are imperfect, each in her own way.

So it is with Bernardine Dohrn. Seventy-five to eighty percent of what she has said and done are worthy of admiration. But that other twenty or twenty-five percent? Communism? Bombing restrooms in police stations? Forcing two little kids to live a life on the run from the law?

Nobody’s perfect. Me among them.

(L-R) Bill Ayers, Zayd Dohrn, Bernardine Dohrn (Credit: David Handschuh/AP)

05/27/2026
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Anti-intellectualism, Education

795 Words: Assembly Line Education

The late George Carlin had a bit about parents, kids, and schools. Carlin, for my money, was one of the few American standup comedians who could also be called philosophers. He and Will Rogers and Mark Twain.

And, yeah, Mark Twain was a standup comedian, arguably the first in history. He made a living mainly by making public appearances before packed houses around the world and…, well, talking. About life. About people. About current events. About god. About, for pity’s sake, everything and anything. His audiences, as a rule, laughed themselves silly.

Carlin joked about all the ubiquitous suburban moms with messages on their Dodge Caravans in the 1980s and ’90s. He ranted:

These people with bumper stickers that say “We are the proud parents of an honor student at the Franklin school,” or the Midvale Academy, or whatever other innocent sounding name has been assigned to the indoctrination center where their child has been sent to be stripped of his individuality and turned into an obedient, soul-dead, conformist member of the American consumer culture. Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see: We are the proud parents of a child whose self esteem is sufficient that he doesn’t need us promoting his minor scholastic achievements on the back of our car. Or, We are the proud parents of a child that has resisted his teachers’ attempts to break his spirit and bend him to the will of his corporate masters.

His audience roared. Like Twain’s. Carlin employed hyperbole. Like Twain did. And, like Twain’s, his exaggerations were firmly grounded on simple, unassailable truths.

Not that teachers are villainous tools of corporate America. They’re not. But schools are. And that’s one of the reasons, in these polarized times, that teachers are viewed as The Problem by the Right and heroes by the Left. That is, if you accept my assertion that the Right is firmly in the clutches of corporate America and has bought its self-serving messaging hook, line, and sinker. Teaching is one of those vocations wherein liberalism, progressivism, or woke-ism is endemic. If you define liberalism as an open, embracing, understanding, respectful, sensitive, non-rigid way of looking at the world — which I do — then teachers, artists, musicians, librarians, psychotherapists, journalists, homeless advocates, settlement house workers, day care providers, and many others are, almost by definition, liberal, progressive, or woke.

Hedge fund managers, surgeons, gun shop owners, military careerists, law enforcement workers, and many others tend not to be.

Of course, there are exceptions to both of the above generalizations but if you pick out a random cop and a random teacher and ask each whom they voted for in 2024, you’ll likely have been able to guess accurately beforehand what their answers’d be. Want evidence? A Princeton study looked at police officers’ voting patterns; the Educational Freedom Institute pored over teachers’ political campaign spending. Seems pretty clear to me.

For soldiers, inquisitiveness and empathy rank low as necessary traits. For reporters and social workers, they are paramount. Yeah, careers, by and large, can be categorized as liberal or conservative.

Teachers don’t want your kids to be brain-dead malleable consumers. But they’re forced to helm classrooms that really are factories turning out obedient, conformist products. Also known as graduates.

Those American graduates, according to one non-American observer, are “easier to manage.” That non-American is a woman named Samantha Waite. She offers a slicing, dicing, crushing perspective of American schools and the anti-intellectualism that is built into them over the last 200 years. She cites the outsized influence of educator Horace Mann, who traveled to Germany in 1843 and was spectacularly bowled over by the Prussian System of school teaching. Nothing illustrates that line of pedagogy (I hate that word, so forgive me) more than the Prussian “innovation” of bolting kids’ desks and chairs to the floor in rigid rows. Mann loved that idea and American school systems similarly ate it up.

The Prussian System and its subsequent American offspring, says Waite, became itself a factory. US industrialists and the American politicians they controlled, she argues, saw the Prussian System as the perfect assembly line for a workforce. She says:

Children sat in rows, faced forward, memorized what the teacher said, and did not question. They received, retained, and repeated. Teacher was the authority and the authority was never to be questioned. This model suited American industrialists perfectly. The country was industrializing rapidly. It needed workers who would show up, follow instructions, operation machinery safely, and did not organize. It did not need workers who asked why. The Prussian System delivered exactly what was required and it became the foundational architecture of the American public education system. Much of it remains intact today.

Aw, hell, why should I make Waite’s argument for her? Listen to her for yourself:

 

05/25/2026
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Artificial Intelligence

267 Words: Artificial Idiocy

As if you didn’t know, AI is full of shit. Or at least LLMs are full of shit; the overall term, AI, is more accurately described as a ticking time bomb, let’s leave it at that.

I had to google an old Electron Pencil post just now and the AI result read as follows:

The “Electron Pencil” is a publication run by writer and activist John Keith that frequently covers historical injustices and social movements, including the tragic 1985 MOVE bombing.The MOVE bombing was a catastrophic event in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985, when the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a C-4 explosive bomb on a row house in West Philadelphia occupied by MOVE, a Black liberation group. The resulting fire destroyed 61 homes and killed 11 people, including five children.For a deeper dive into the historical timeline and the aftermath of the tragedy, consult the resources below:The MOVE Bombing: Read the detailed historical background on Wikipedia’s 1985 MOVE bombing page.Media Coverage: Stream the PBS Newshour segment exploring the largely forgotten history of the event.Electron Pencil: Access the publication’s commentary on civil disobedience and history on The Electron Pencil.

I have no idea who John Keith is. And, for pity’s sake, I am not an activist, as that would entail me working with a group of people (and everyone knows how much I have an aversion to working with groups of people). The result at least did go on to accurately give my URL I did once ramble on about the MOVE bombing, too.

Bear with me a moment while I run to the bathroom and check the mirror to make sure I’m not John Keith.

Me. Not John Keith.

Okay, I’m back. I’m not.

 

05/19/2026
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Christie's Auction, The Painted Word

537 Words: Art 101

The auction house, Christie’s, sold more than a billion dollars’-worth of art last night.

To be precise, $1.1 billion.

Even in this era of wartime, post-pandemic inflation, that’s a lot of scratch.

If you spend, for instance, an average of $225 a week on groceries, $1.1 billion’ll keep you rolling in potato chips, bananas, Black Forest ham, and frozen peas for the next 94,000-plus years. That is, you, your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, and what the hell ever humanity evolves into following our species’ inevitable nuclear holocausts, climate disasters, the Trump presidency, and other horrifyingly adverse developments in store for us.

The artists whose works were peddled last night include Jackson Pollock, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. Of that list, eight won’t see a penny of the take because they’re dead. Only Johns remains alive but he’s 96 as of today, so I don’t think another few zeroes added to his savings account total would mean terribly much to him.

Then again, at least one artist’ll see a payday.

The art world is full of shit. We’ve known that for at least a half century. In 1975, the “New Journalism” author Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word was published by Farrar, Straus. In it, Wolfe revealed and lambasted the kings of “Cultureburg,” the tight-knit little bunch of art critics who told the world what was good and what was not in the realms of painting, sculpture, and other creative pastimes.

Pastimes being the operative word here inasmuch as artists rarely make enough money to purchase even a ten-year old car but their artwork sometimes can enrich the already rich by millions, hundreds of millions, or, like last night, billions.

It’s a racket, I tell you.

Wolfe wrote that 20th century art had devolved from the representational — that is, pictures of things — to a lawyerly brief arguing nuances of Art Theory. In other words, bullshit.

In fact, a 2021 essay in the venerable British journal ArtReview was entitled, “Why We Tolerate the Art World’s Bullshit.”

Pollock, by the way, most specifically embodied the art world’s bullshit with his dribs-and-drabs, streaks-and-splotches canvases that resembled the colorfully oil-splattered jeans and smocks of countless painters, pros and hobbyists alike. A plumber viewing any of Pollock’s works might be ridiculed for commenting, “My kindergarten kid coulda done that,” even though that critique was more true and astute than a thousand reviews penned by the habitués of Cultureburg.

A woman contemplates a Pollock.

It puzzles me that some enterprising artist has yet to offer up her rainbowed blue jeans as an actual work of art and made scads of dough on them. Proof positive that artists, by and large, are lousy businesspeople. The greed monkeys who excel in business ought to have come up with this idea themselves but so far have not. Just wait.

As for Pollock, at least he did something, as infantile and pretentiously pointless as his work was, as opposed to the moneyed art collectors who bid obscene amounts for his painting at Christie’s last night. People cheered for and congratulated the winning bid as if the painting’s new owner had, y’know, actually made something.

Yeah, the art world’s full of shit.

 

 

04/23/2026
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InfoWars, The Onion

646 Words: The Joke’s on the Joker

Definitions from Merriam-Webster:

Laughingstock: Noun, an object of ridicule.

Joke: Noun, something said or done to provoke laughter or cause amusement, as a witticism, a short and amusing anecdote, or a prankish act.

If Alex Jones’ old InfoWars website wasn’t so hateful, deceptive, inane, hurtful, and…, and…, well, you get the picture, it’d have been a laughingstock. Jones was the noxious gasbag who, during the years of InfoWars’ ascension, polluted the airwaves and the internet with preposterous accusations and outright lies. For instance, Pink News in 2018 published a list of “The 11 Craziest Conspiracy Theories InfoWars Pushed about LGBT People.” Here they are:

  1. Barack Obama is having gay sex with 10 dudes a day
  2. Schools are turning your kids gay to make them want to have sex with your car
  3. Violent lesbians are coming to eat your brains
  4. Drag queens are putting chemicals in the water to recruit your child
  5. Joan Rivers was murdered for calling Michelle Obama transgender
  6. Anderson Cooper is an undercover CIA agaent sent to take down Donald Trump
  7. Lady Gaga is a Nazi stanic goddess and her Super Bowl performance was an eleborate ritual to summon the anitchrist
  8. The governemtn is putting chemicals in the water and turning frogs gay
  9. The US is getting ready to nuke the “fairies and pansies” in China
  10. LGBT people are creating cyborgs to destroy civilization

The eleventh item was just a catchall for Jone’s long history of mentioning, slurring, libeling, and obsessing about LGBTQI people.

Jones thought and opined about LGBTQI people a lot. A lot.

I wonder why. In any case, that’s a matter for him and his shrink.

Jones would go off on every other hot-button issue, too, making crazy shit up, amplifying other conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams, and demonizing anybody who didn’t own a pickup truck that rolled coal.

Alex Jones’ Kind of People.

By 2017, InfoWars was getting more than ten million views/listens/clicks a month. Jones made hundreds of millions of dollars peddling his fuckery. That says more about America than a hundred elementary school US history textbooks ever could. Oh, and guess who dug the hell out of Alex Jones — need I reveal this person now lives on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC?

It all came tumbling down for Jones after the horrifying Sandy Hook massacre. Jones screeched that the shooting and killings were staged, popularizing the term “crisis actors,” and convincing millions of coal rollers that all those grieving parents were in on the scam.

Those parents, doubly traumatized, responded by suing the bejesus out of Jones. They won and Jones was forced into the earthly hell of bankruptcy. Of course, I can only hope and pray there is an afterlife hell, if only to house the likes of Alex Jones for eternity.

Jones’ bankruptcy executors are seeking a purchaser for InfoWars, as a way to maximize financial payouts to the parents who sued him. Lo and behold, one of the potential buyers for the media operation is The Onion.

Yep. That fabulous, indispensable satiric website, one of my go-to reads since the early ’90s. Just this week, The Onion has proffered a plan to license the InfoWars name and infrastructure so it can begin publishing a parody version of it.

I hope the plan is accepted. There’s scads of legal folderol that have to be navigated, sure, but the sooner Jones and his evil creation become punch lines, the better.

You might say it’ll never be appropriate to laugh at such poison. I’ll counter with Mel Brooks’ masterpiece, The Producers. Staged on Broadway just 22 years after Hitler’s Nazi’s were crushed, The Producers brought down the house with ditties like “Springtime for Hitler.”

Don’t be stupid/

Be a smarty.

Come and join/

the Nazi party!

From the Movie, The Producers.

Brilliant! It’s never too soon to reduce the worst among us to laughingstocks.

Alex Jones and his Infowars were never jokes when they were at their height.

They are now.

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