Born In The U.S.A. or, Every Day Is Veterans Day (Revisited)
Sean MurphyI. Personal Remember when Born in the U.S.A. was ubiquitous? The album and the song. Bruce was already big, but he wasn’t over the top. Born in the U.S.A. put…
Charlie Pierce and the anesthetized fairy tales of reasonable men
That sound you hear is the joyful noise of Charlie Pierce's rhetorical 4-wood going upside the head of the insufferably smug and obtuse Tom Brokaw. Here is a snippet that…
Hicks Keeps it Real
ON THIS DAY On Sept. 27, 1964, the Warren Commission issued a report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
The Catholic Church is (still) Decadent and Depraved
Follow the money. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. These are the two oft-invoked quotes I kept thinking to myself as I read Sabrina Rubin Erdley's piece, "The…
The Real Life Fable of Charles Mingus and Orval Faubus (Revisited)
On Sept. 4, 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. Charles Mingus had many…
Newt, Not The Onion
Someone has needed to pull a Josey Wales on Newt Gingrich for a very long time. It turns out he can do it just fine himself, thank you very little.…
Repent Sinners; Sean Penn Is A Saint
Sean Penn is a saint. Did that get your attention? Good. Since we know that there are no such things as saints, and we also know that the people we…
20 Years Later: How Rodney King Helped Us Plug In, Dial On and Wake Up
ON THIS DAY On March 3, 1991, in a case that sparked a national outcry, motorist Rodney King was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in a scene captured…
Coal Mines, Unions, Big Business and (of course) George Orwell
Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. --George Orwell Quite by chance (no, really), I saw an old classic that had been languishing in my…