A Website of the Radical Imagination
Mirror I am white, I can feed silence. My children can breathe, though the air’s fetid with fear extinguished Black men shared. Who will keen for them? Outrage must be boots on blood-stained streets. Can you hear each victim’s last words echo? Each victim’s last words echo. Boots on blood-stained streets – can you hear … Read more
David Brooks agrees with the substance of Obama’s executive action on immigration, but believes that he has transgressed the Constitution in the process. The president has usurped the role of the legislature. For Brooks, process transcends substance, so apart from expressing sympathy for the substance of Obama’s action he has little to say about what … Read more
A few months before her death, Ellen Willis emailed to say pieces by Charles O’Brien andFredric Smoler on the Danish Cartoon Controversy posted on this site were “good.” (That was high praise from Ellen whose mode of approbation was the opposite of American idolaters.) Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d … Read more
It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside … Read more
When last we spoke… One squireen was eulogizing yet another one [[http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2014/06/lineages_of_the.html]. The still living one, Perry Anderson, found hope in the existence of a newish magazine, Jacobin. It’s been said before: hope that is seen is not hope. So: to the moment. Jacobin wasted no time posting a comment on this week’s killings in … Read more
I’m going to begin with an olive branch: not all of Sunday’s “Unity March” in Paris was a proto-fascist omen (Marine Le Pen and her National Front goons were, after all, cheerleading and hurling scatological slogans from the sidelines, which is a lot like when coaches of certain national soccer teams keep their divas or … Read more
I “Scripture tells us we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger. We were strangers once, too.” That line from Barack Obama’s speech on his executive order protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation took on a different resonance in the wake of Grand Jury decisions in Ferguson and … Read more