Category: American cantos
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Dawn Breaks
A few minutes ago, Fox News — Fox News! — called the Presidential race for Senator Barack Obama. By now most networks have agreed, and apparently Senator John McCain has conceded the race. Wow. It’s going to take a while to absorb this. Words like “historic occasion” don’t cut it. This was an epochal moment…
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Why Bother to Vote?
I wrote this at the request of my friend Maureen Leming, who is also Director of Annual Giving and Communications, and who wanted to send it out to the local media. No one bit, but I like it enough that I want it out there. So, self-publishing to the rescue! Why Bother to Vote? I…
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What’s Going Wrong
The failure to enact the bailout bill, or indeed, any economic recovery bill, has shaken some people to their core. It’s heightened a sense that our politics is broken and that we as a people no longer have what it takes. Someone wrote something at Political Animal that stirred in me a passionate response, and…
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Memory in Song (II)
More oddly-prescient musings of Jackson Browne. “Lives in the Balance” Jackson Browne Lives in the Balance I’ve been waiting for something to happen For a week or a month or a year With the blood in the ink of the headlines And the sound of the crowd in my ear You might ask what it…
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Memory in Song (I)
It’s still surprisingly hard to write about 9/11. It galls me to see, again, our national “leaders” exploit this tragedy for political ends. And it saddens me that we don’t seem to have learned any lessons. So it’s really not in me to pen something deep and insightful. Instead, I’ll fall back on the melodic…
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I am a Values Voter
After the election in 2004, we were preached at that George W. Bush won election (not re-election) due to the rejection of John Kerry by “values voters” .. as if the millions who voted for Kerry had no decent values. That spurred me to write the following, which I still embrace today. In this election,…
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Recycled: What’s So Wrong About Military Tribunals, Anyway?
Another piece written some time ago (circa 2002 January) that reads chillingly a propos today. This was written before the series of judicial rebukes to the President’s overreaching constitutional “doctrine” of unlimited executive power. Sadly, those rebukes have not rendered the points raised moot.
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Waterboarding
I don’t like me-too blogs but every once in awhile, someone writes on a topic in a way that exactly captures my own feeling, a way that I could never match, much less trump. This piece by Joe Galloway is one such. My God, how did we come to a point when Senators and Representatives…
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Recycled: Just Wrong
Long before this blog, I kept an equally-erratic literary journal called A Voice in the Wilderness. And while nothing written there was particularly world-shattering, I don’t want it to get lost in the mists of cyberspace. So to do my part to save the planet, I’m going to recycle and reuse that content, putting the…
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Alternate History: The Speech that Wasn’t
In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly…