War
May 22, 2009
- War correspondent Matt McAllester fled into the fields of battle to escape an alcoholic, mentally ill mother. In his memoir, Bittersweet, he tries to make amends with her, in the kitchen. Read my interview with McAllester on The Daily Beast.
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May 16, 2009
- Bay windows shimmer where he standson a picture perfect afternoonframed in flashpoints of sunlighthe is desperately in search of coveracross the living room she glowedexulted in his safe returnhowever unsteady his directionback in the world, walking pointfrom kitchen to backyard barbecuethick carpet, forest greenobliterates their teakwood floordisguises her barefoot stepsas she glides ...
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May 13, 2009
- Veterans deserve competent counseling and they need it now.Pressure the Pentagon and the VA, the President and Congress, until somebody listens.Increasing numbers of combat personnel are returning to the U.S. with ptsd; several have turned their weapons on strangers, colleagues, their families and/or themselves. Berkeley poet Julia Vinograd's powerful poem appears below.Instructions for ...
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May 11, 2009
- The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats [published after the Great War of 1914-1918]Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon can not hear the falconer.Things fall apart; the center can not hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate ...
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May 4, 2009
- My parents were married in 1933 at the young age of sixteen. During their blessed marriage they had seventeen children. The reason that they had so many children? They believed it to be a sin to prevent life from coming into the world. According to their faith, children were an act of God. My father served in World War II and was called again to active duty in the Korean War ...
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May 3, 2009
- Afghanistan is rich in history and culture, unfortunately the war continues. Seven years have passed; the U.S.A. still has troops and contractors in Afghanistan. What should the Obama administration do next? I returned to sources I had studied in 2001 in order to get a feeling for the progress or lack of progress the U.S.A. has made in Afghanistan with the U.S. government's decision to use ...
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April 28, 2009
- Now that the Supreme Court upheld the government's ban on the use of four letter words on TV, and radio, here's a question for them: when will they ban torture? Yes, of course, "cruel and unusual punishment" is already prohibited under the Eighth Amendment, yet we've seen how water boarding has been used, in much the same way as on the air obscenity, to circumvent that ban. And here's ...
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April 23, 2009
- These ideas are from The Nation's monthly feature (10 things you can do . . ) The war in Afghanistan is a quagmire bordering on a catastrophe. With a current price tag of $2 billion a month, this drawn-out conflict took the lives of 155 American soldiers and 2,118 Afghan civilians last year--the bloodiest year of the war to date. Western airstrikes alone killed 522 civilians, fueling hostility ...
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April 22, 2009
- Sterling could conveniently cover a half-dozen wars raging in Southeast Asia from his cluttered Bangkok World office on Phra Sumane Rd. The conflicts were just an overnight train ride or a cheap plane hop from Bangkok – bloody Cambodia and Vietnam on Thailand’s eastern border; the CIA’s secret war in Laos just across the northern border; and to the west, the United National Liberation ...
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April 20, 2009
- Megas Alexandros and the Royal "We" (Meros A) How does an empire treat the citizens of conquest during the battle for occupation, the occupation and after the fall of the empire? Isn't it possible to gauge the degree of civilization held by the empire by answering these questions?From media of the U.S.A. and England it's not unusual to hear journalists and military personnel, while ...
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