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Lincoln, Marx and "the true people"
While I haven’t gotten around to finishing part two of my previous post, I did manage to get to the movies and see Lincoln. I was impressed not just by the quality of its acting and its script, but by its close adherence to historical fact. More often than not, “historical” films leave me muttering under my breath, “No, no, no, it wasn’t like that ( Read more... ) -
"Support Mental Health Week - Or I'll Kill You!"
That was scrawled on the wall above a urinal in the men’s room of an East Side Milwaukee bar. It was back in the ‘70s. I remember smiling at it, but also getting a little tense when a guy came in and remained behind me, in my estimation, a little too long. Since I was doing something that was hard to hurry, I tried thinking of something nice to say ( Read more... ) -
The End of Something
The passage of a “right-to-work” law in Michigan shows that the sorry state of this country’s auto industry is surpassed only by that of its organized labor movement. A decades-long retreat can now be declared a rout. This is the end of the unions as we know them.
At least I hope so. That’s not because I’m anti-union. I got my first union card in ( Read more... ) -
Death and Freedom
Recent news brought word of the death of Marvin Miller, and of over a hundred garment workers in Bangladesh. They wouldn’t seem to have much in common. He was the retired head of the Major League Baseball Players Association who led in revolutionizing the economics of sports. They were $40 a month cutters, sewers and pressers who turned out the T- ( Read more... ) -
Tragicomic
The next four years: the tax burden will continue to fall on the working classes; unemployment will get worse; the cost of living will keep going up; and we’ll be at war with somebody, somewhere. The picture would be the same if Mitt Romney had defeated Barack Obama.*
That’s not the picture we got in news coverage of the campaign though. In the news ( Read more... ) -
From the blog "Along the Malecon"
(the blog is by Tracey Eaton, former Havana bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News)
Proof of life: Searching for Ivan
Deep, real and patriotic.
Tremendous.
Respectful and honest.
Those are some of words readers are using to describe a moving letter that was ostensibly written by a 28-year-old man who left Cuba two years ago and settled in Bulgaria.
I ( Read more... ) -
Air-brushing history
What does NCAA President Mark Emmert have in common with Josef Stalin?
Well, certainly not mass murder. The college-sports executive, however, seems to have one thing in common with the “Cain of the Revolution.” History, in the hands of either turns out to be not a record of things past (subject to whatever interpretation), but a malleable substance ( Read more... ) -
Black Dog (Mark Shurilla)
Blackie got his nickname, I guess, from his long jet-black hair and beard. He was fairly well-known at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee when I started there in 1970. It was my sophomore year, I think, when I met him at the campus radio station where I, thinking about a journalism major, did some occasional news-reading. He had a late night ( Read more... ) -
Latitudes and Attitudes
Gyres and high-pressure vortices are natural features of the earth’s oceans. There are at least five, all centered around the thirtieth parallels north and south, regions known as the horse latitudes, supposedly because the windless conditions there so slowed down Spanish sailors that they had to throw their horses overboard to conserve water.
( ( Read more... ) -
Rendezvous
It’s after midnight. I’m in a king suite at the Hotel Indigo in downtown Dallas. Julia left a little while ago. She’s the Marxist-humanist-feminist I met in October in those Occupy Dallas days, then lost track of, then found again. She of the tantalizing remark, “married, but I’m not a fanatic about it.”
We got together a couple of times, for coffee ( Read more... )