Fathers and Sons
“In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.”― Friedrich Nietzsche Early June. Dawn brings mist covered mountains and an empty road. The car’s capsule draws us together. I…
Edward Curtin
The Lesser of Two Evils: The Burning of Children Instead of Paper
Israel Has Wiped Out Over 1,000 Entire FamiliesInternational Middle East Media Center, 27 May 2025 Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of…
Memorial Day: It’s Not About the Dead Soldiers but About Glorifying War
Although Memorial Day in the United Sates is ostensibly a day for honoring soldiers killed in wars, it is, rather, a day for promoting war. If it were to honor…
Gatsby Meets Nietzsche on the Train to Town
“Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.What might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always…
At the Lost and Found
The following is the Introduction to my new book, At the Lost and Found (Clarity Press). My dear mother, who had an artistic temperament that tended at times toward the sentimental, liked…
The Assassination and Resurrection of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we live by stories. We live by others’ stories while we tell our lives by how we live. Our actions tell our…
A Tuneful Irish Tale
“Accomplished fingers begin to play.Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”– W. B. Yeats, Lapus Lazuli The old man in the Irish cap sat on a…
Modern Times and Ancient Truths
Eighty-nine years ago this month, the film Modern Times, starring Charlie Chaplin, was released. Considered one of the greatest movies ever, it was a comedic but savage critique of industrial capitalism…
Hold the Applause for Trump, the “Peacemaker”
There is history worth remembering as Trump is lauded in certain circles on the so-called “right” and “left” as a peacemaker with Russia over the US/NATO proxy war against Russia…
Are the Dead Nostalgic?
I was asking this question recently when the nightmare of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians greatly disturbed my reflections and took me in another writerly direction. Now I wish to…
Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged An Apartheid State From River to Sea By Thomas Suárez
A Review Much has been written in the alternative press over the past year about the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and its other war crimes in Lebanon, Syria, Iran,…
Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, and Gaza
Before my mind was turned to the subject of my title, I started to write a piece called “Are the Dead Nostalgic?” It’s a touchy philosophical question that has no…
My Internal Exile
“Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d,…
Everybody Knows: Do They?
“Everybody knows the boat is leaking/Everybody knows the captain lied”– Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows” When the polls closed on Tuesday, November 5th, I was sound asleep, like a baby rocking…
October’s Surprise Party
As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England. Call it October’s Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the…
Mirages
I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy. The…
Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad
“With a click, with a shockPhone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latchSomething’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . . “– “Something’s Coming,” lyrics by S. Sondheim, music…
The Ardent Pipe Dreams of American Voters
“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of…
Caged in Oligarchic Contradictions
A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee, and…
Biden and Trump Battle over a Rattle
“Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.”– Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass Once you understand that profound poem,…
Acting As If It Weren’t Really So
Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, “Be careful his bowtie is really a camera” – America by Paul Simon…
If The Wars Go On
I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World…
Fire in the Soul: Nick Lyons
With lilacs in the dooryard blooming a week ago, I was struck by a sense of synchronicity so strong that I stood stone still and sniffed the air for its…
The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus
To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly. It was a common form of execution in the ancient world. It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of…
The Immense Hunger
Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance. All across the world…
Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space,Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earthSwung blind…
“The World As It Was”: A Masterly Documentary Film
Here’s a film about the 1950s – “The World As It Was” – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of…
Sick, and Sick of It All
Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent…
The Unexpected
Despite calendars and clocks and all the mental gymnastics we use to control life and time, surprises are at the heart of existence. This may seem like a truism, but…
Biden in Rags
“You used to be so amusedAt Napoleon in rags and the language that he usedGo to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuseWhen you ain’t got nothing, you got…
“Not Wanting” A Wider Middle East War, the U.S. Has Started One
You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness. In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with…
An Immense Hunger
Now that our revels are ended, the holiday celebrations and feasts, if one had them, just a dream melted into thin air, our hungers perhaps richly satiated temporarily or not,…
Jesus, Gaza, and the Murder of Useless People
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew born in Bethlehem. He grew up in Nazareth and was executed as a criminal in Jerusalem. It is because of him that we celebrate Christmas. …
Four Died Trying: A Powerful, Riveting, and Masterful Documentary Series Begins
It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today. Many might assume that that was then…
An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Dear Bobby, As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring. I have admired and believed in you for years, and when…
The Roots of Radicalism and the Structure of Evil
My title is redundant for a reason, since the root of the word radical is the Latin word, radix, meaning root. For I mean to show how the use and misuse…
Chance Encounters as the Walls Close In
“Apple Blossom – Blue Sky” by amandabhslater “A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’;…
Numbed by Numbers on the Way to the Digital Palace
“But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who…
Mr. Blue and the CIA
“This is slavery, not to speak one’s thoughts.” – Euripides, The Phoenician Women Some time ago on a Sunday evening when my wife and I had just sat down to dinner,…
Do People Change?
Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment,…
Trinity’s Shadow
I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the…
How So Many Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nukes
Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind,…
Sea Monsters Threaten the World With Their Tridents
Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what…
There Is No Escape From Telling
By the lake’s lapping shore above the town and the railroad tracks, my wife and I stopped and marveled, struck stone silent by two dazzling Baltimore Orioles, clawed together as…
“Facing Clear Evidence of Peril” in a Country of Lies
“In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder. The joke is on us. Ha Ha Ha.” – Oliver…
The World Wants to Be Deceived
My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a…
Who Knew: We’re Here Because We’re Here Because We’re Here Because We’re Here
My title comes from a song sung by soldiers as they marched to hell in the trenches of World War I and the same song my sisters and I sang in the…
The Last Temptation of Things
Zero Waste Solution, Wareham, MA PHOTO: DAVID RATCLIFFE “I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.” – Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical…
Only Adult Children Still Believe U.S. Propaganda
It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so. It has already…
It’s About Time
Isn’t it always? With the start of World War III by the United States “declaring” war against Russia by its actions in Ukraine, we have entered a time when the…
On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss
Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but…
War or Images of War?
Experienced foreign policy analysts such as Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, and Pepe Escobar, while agreeing that the Biden administration is clearly guilty of provoking Russia over Ukraine, are divided over…
Nostalgic for the Future
Despite its pedigree as a fundamental element in civilization’s greatest stories, nostalgia has come to be associated with treacly sentimentality, defeatism, and spurious spiritual inclinations. Homer, Vergil, Dante, the Biblical…
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone
A Film Review Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at…
President John F. Kennedy: His Life and Public Assassination
The following article on the life of President John F. Kennedy, and his assassination on this date, November 22, 1963, is the lead piece in the eighth issue of Garrison: The…
U.S. Terrorism 101: The Bert Sacks Story
Since the annual U.S. Veterans Day holiday honoring military veterans was just observed on November 11, it seems more than appropriate to suggest the creation of a U.S. Victims Day,…
A Quest for Wisdom: Inspiring Purpose on the Path of Life by David Lorimer
This is a fascinating and beautiful book, one of those gems you serendipitously discover and shake your head at your good fortune. Although it is new and I received it…
The Banners of the King of Hell Advance
“Vexilla regis prodeunt Inferni” – Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno Try to look ahead and see if you can see what’s been coming for decades. Try to climb higher…
The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere
There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human meaning, for people lived within the limits of the natural world of which they were…
The Houses of Dead and Crooked Souls
“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space There is a vast and growing gulf between the…
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