“In a dark time, the eye begins to see…What’s madness but nobility of soulAt odds with circumstance?…A steady storm of correspondences!”Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time We are all obscurantists now, deep in crepuscular propaganda, looking for light. “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” as Bob Dylan’s sings in “Not Dark Yet.” […]
“An example that shows the radical devaluation of thought is the transformation of words in propaganda; there, language, the instrument of the mind, become ‘pure sound,’ a symbol directly evoking feelings and reflexes.”Jacques Ellul, Propaganda “A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is the master […]
That the United States of America is controlled by a criminally perverse, two party ruling class should be obvious to any reasonable (not rational, for the above-named people are very rational) person not living in what Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existential writer, called bad faith (mauvaise foi). Bad faith is […]
“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman […]
There is history worth remembering as Trump is lauded in certain circles on the so-called “right” and “left” as a peacemaker with Russia over the US/NATO proxy war against Russia via Ukraine: President Richard Nixon, who ran as the peace candidate in 1968 with a “secret plan” for peace in […]
I was asking this question recently when the nightmare of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians greatly disturbed my reflections and took me in another writerly direction. Now I wish to return to this matter that seems perpetually pertinent, a pertinence, of course, not unconnected to the dead in Gaza, Ukraine, […]