Then There’s None and one went into academe…

Archive for March 2008

Who Sings the Unforgiving Wilderness?

On the fifth anniversary of war in Iraq, I have been looking back to the 19th century. And back to New Hampshire and over two long months ago, when Senator Barack Obama gave his “Yes We Can” speech that has since sparked its own pop cultural movement reflected in will.i.am’s video. Embedded within that […]

The Age of Jackson

Lately, I’ve been pondering this quote from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses […]

And then yet you’ll find Hawai‘i

Jodi Kantor at the New York Times writes:
Since he was very young, Senator Barack Obama has been something of a mediator of racial concerns, shuttling between black and white worlds and trying to translate the concerns of one to the other.
But how might the Hawai‘i of Senator Obama’s youth signify outside black/white divides where the […]

“None but ourselves can free our minds…”


“The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

Supreme Court Justice Kennedy during oral arguments yesterday on the Second Amendment:
“It had nothing to do with the concern of the remote settler to defend himself and his family against hostile Indian tribes and outlaws, wolves and bears and grizzlies and things like that?”
Also yesterday, a more perfect union.