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 […]
Culture / Politics
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Mitch McConnell: Master of the Obvious
In two years, a great iterator of the evident will retire from the United States Senate. He was a man who stood for undeniable truth. A man who destroyed the separation of church and state […]
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 […]
Consumerism / Culture / Dystopia / Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Brave New World
Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And […]
Culture / Dystopia / Literature / Philippic / Politics
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The Dystopia Files: It Can’t Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis wrote this political satire of American exceptionalism in the early 1930s, when one in four Americans were out of work and the complacent assumptions he’d ridiculed in Babbitt were rasped away by real […]
Culture / Dystopia / Literature / Philippic / Politics
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The Dystopia Files: When the Sleeper Wakes
H.G. Wells originally published When the Sleeper Awakes in 1898 as a serial in The Graphic, an illustrated London newspaper. In his preface to the 1910 edition, The Sleeper Awakes, he expressed disappointment with the […]
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 […]