Traipsing after Sawada: An American Foreign Correspondent’s Memoir
Until the road I took became the road I knew, the journey I envisioned wound through the world just as any Western traveler might map his way across the seas to see all the popular sights. Upon escaping a circumscribed, middle-class California existence, I would set off to destinations mostly familiar to me in all…
Read MoreJack Hirschman Poetry
The House of the Setting Sun “Become a rag again and the poorest may wave you” —Pier Paolo Pasolini: To the Red Flag I put my mouth to your misery, New Orleans, inundated and soaking with death. Here lies: war lies piled so high, this floating prison of a cemetery cries out of rage at…
Read MoreAnother Side of C.Wright Mills: The Theory of Mass Society
Now that the 50th anniversary commemorations of C. Wright Mills’s sociological triptych of America in the latter half of the 20th century, The Power Elite, White Collar, The Sociological Imagination, have come and gone, there are still many reasons for continued interest in C. Wright Mills’s, The Power Elite. Before the end of Barack Obama’s…
Read MoreTwo for the Road
The Dallas show was over; the crowd had dispersed and the campgrounds were deserted except for the Prankster’s four buses and a couple of rented Hertz trucks for the Querry, the band that had played on the free stage at Woodstock and followed us here. I overheard one of the Pranksters say, “There’s a faint…
Read MoreMary Shanley Poetry
Hands She was an apparition. One of the infinite sorrows, dropped out of eternity and onto a bench in Washington Square Park. Where she sat, gray of hair. Her delicate, wisp of a body enwrapped in a black lace shawl. She buried her face in deeply wrinkled, heavily veined hands. I bowed my head as…
Read MoreThe Importance of Being Earnest: Documenting Experiments in Anti-Systemic Lifestyles
Barbara Kingsolver Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins, 2007). Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet (Three Rivers Press, 2007). Sara Bongiorni, A Year Without “Made in China”: Our Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy (John Wiley & Sons, 2007 Colin Beavan, No Impact…
Read MoreBringing Authoritarianism Back In: Reification, Latent Prejudice, and Economic Threat
Introduction During the run up to the 2010 mid-term elections in the United States, the NAACP published a controversial report on “Tea Party Nationalism,” documenting what was perceived as racist elements within the emergent conservative grassroots organization.[1] The NAACP’s report became a lightning rod against which supporters and critics of the Tea Party vented their…
Read MoreYear Two of the Arab Revolutions
I. Prologue The 2011 Arab revolutions have shaken the world, toppling three well-entrenched dictatorships – in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya — in a battle not only for democracy, but also one that raised issues of economic and social justice while attacking neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, they touched off a year of upheaval, from Wisconsin to Spain,…
Read MoreLooking for Woody
If I now put myself in Dave Huehner’s 1948 Studebaker heading for San Francisco, from Champaign, Illinois, in 1961 I remember studying its single blue front fender which pointed us West while Whitman whispered:“ The only home of the soul, is the open Road.” The world is open to you when you’ve a hundred bucks…
Read MoreOn Weber’s and Habermas’ Democratic Theories: A Reconstruction and Comparison
Preliminary Observations. While the meaning and possibility in modern times of democracy has been a central concern for Weber and Habermas, and both thinkers’ political theories have been the subject of several inquiries, there is a lack of comparative investigations on this particular subject. This may be surprising as Habermas is himself a Weberian scholar,…
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