Change has come
Change has arrived. After all the hate-filled, mudslinging nastiness, after soaring rhetoric and hollow promises, after lies, rumor, and innuendo, after poor predictions and poorer behavior, change has finally arrived.
Do the media get it, or not?
Here’s an interesting story, if only to me. I submitted the piece below as a guest commentary (i.e., op-ed piece) to the morning daily in this benighted town.
The editors found it absurd, as expected. Actually, the editor who responded wrote, “there are many facts and statements in your article that appear to be wildly exaggerated” (exaggerated facts?), and asked for evidence to support a few of the statements. So I provided him a handful of links from the mainstream media, at which point he ran away. No great surprise there, I suppose. If you’re addicted to economic growth, as required by newspapers, the truth is damned inconvenient.
The Way Out of Weippe
That was 1971. Before the first oil crisis. Before the Iran hostage crisis. Before globalization ruled our lives. Simpler times, for sure. Just about everybody in Weippe was an FDR Democrat, dedicated to strong workers' rights and a decent social safety net.
The Role of a Social Critic
The semester is steaming along, and steamrolling me. Wonderful discussions yesterday in two of my classes, both part of Poetry Inside/Out, contributed to the steamrollery and also inspired me to further consider the role of social critics and social criticism.
Endgame for the world economy?
Even though it seems we’ve seen the end of $4 gas, the economy is not quite out of the woods. Demand destruction and a severely constricting economy have driven down the price of oil and its distillates. But the resulting economic bounce has resembled a dead cat tossed off a skyscraper.
Crash course
I appreciated an article by Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil in 2004, which appeared in the June 2008 issue of National Geographic. But I enjoyed the resulting letters to the editor even more. The six letters published in the magazine’s print version covered a wide range of beliefs, and I print two in their entirety because they represent the end points as I’ve come to see them.
Reason: Four Classics
While reading through an earlier post, it occurred to me that it might have relevance to today’s political drama. So I tracked down a few essays and put a contemporary spin on the year-old post.