In 2015, I met a retired lieutenant commander in the United States Navy who had purchased a small townhouse about a block down the road from mine. He was often in the yard doing renovations […]
Class - Culture - Politics
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President Pennywise and the (Un)real Reign of Terror
An appliance can become art, like Duchamp’s urinal did. But to do that it must give up being an appliance. A gallows installed on the National Mall on January 6, with a sign on it […]
Class - Culture - Media - Politics - Technology
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Zuckerbucks Says Later Days to the Facts
During the 2016 election, a Buzzfeed News analysis found that “fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.” This, no doubt, is what […]
Class - Politics
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Fascism: How We Stepped in It
You know the joke about the three guys who encounter dog shit? They smell it, touch it, taste it, confirm that it’s dog shit and walk away glad that they didn’t step in it. America’s […]
Class - Culture - Labor - Technology
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Temporary Life 5: Survival of the Absent
When I started temping, the personal-computing revolution hadn’t yet rescued the American economy. The Internet as we know it did not exist—it was something called “The Well,” which had to be accessed by a 96-kb […]
Class - Culture - Politics
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If It Ain’t Private, It Ain’t Republican
A few years back, when Dubya was ridin’ his wooden horse hard, I was in a bar talking to a gal who at some point proclaimed, or admitted, that she was a republican. I asked […]
Class - Culture - Labor - Politics
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Temporary Life 4: Attitude Is Servitude
The drawbacks of a positive attitude are clear enough: first, you can assume one in regard to almost anything from the beneficial to the depraved, thus it is arbitrary; second, having encountered a number of […]
Class - Culture - Labor - Politics
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Temporary Life 3: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Getting hired by a temp agency is relatively easy: make an appointment, appear in your second-hand monkey suit, fill out the application, take the software test, and discuss your resume with the “analyst.” Provided you […]
Class - Consumerism - Culture - Politics
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Liberty: Tied, Beaten and Blown
Awhile ago I was flipping through the New Yorker and saw an interesting cartoon: two men in uniform, guns trained on a pedestrian, behind them a van with “Fashion Security” on the side. The caption […]
Class - Culture - Politics
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Class War? Not Yet
On the October 14, 2005 Diane Rehm Show “Friday News Roundup,” David Corn of The Nation complained that the Administration’s policy to rebuild New Orleans as a tourist town would permanently exclude many of the […]