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…
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…
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…
“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…
“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…
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…
“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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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 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. …
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…
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…
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…
“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’;…
“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…
“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,…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
“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…
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…
“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…
It’s been raining incessantly for three days. It is a cool early morning in the beginning of July and I have just made a cup of coffee. Now an electrical…
“I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorian people…” – Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred, 24 March 1980 Whether we are aware…
“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime. This is true. The corporate mainstream media…
A Review: JFK vs. Allen Dulles by Greg Poulgrain Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is…
“Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of…
A Review of The Plot to Kill King by William Pepper Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Few books…
“Something is happening here, But you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones?” — Bob Dylan, Ballad of A Thin Man It’s hard. Life today seems like a dream,…
Here where I dwell in the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice has just occurred. The darkest day of the year in a dark year. A few days ago was also…
“He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.” – William Blake, Eternity Great…
In 1997, Don DeLillo, the author of seventeen novels, published what many consider his masterpiece, Underworld. It was a prophetic book in many ways, especially with its focus on the…
“They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still…
In lieu of writing reviews of their own books – with the exception of Walt Whitman, who did that with Leaves of Grass – writers often write introductions or…
“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world, which operates on the basis of necessity. The laws of necessity are as unexceptional as the laws of gravitation. …
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” – Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, 1998…
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