“Mountain People,” a short story

Sep 23, ’11 4:59 PM

Pub­lished in July, 2011 by The Amer­i­can Scholar as a Web exclu­sive. The piece was edited by the magazine’s fic­tion edi­tor, Sudip Bose, and is avail­able for free on their site.

Comments (0)

“Unrippable,” a short story

Jan 27, ’10 10:26 AM

Pub­lished in the Autumn, 2009 issue of The Amer­i­can Scholar. Avail­able for free on the magazine’s Web site.

I wrote this piece, off and on, through­out 2007. The Amer­i­can Scholar bought it in the sum­mer or fall of 2008. When it came out, I did an online inter­view with edi­to­r­ial assis­tant Vanessa Schipani.

One of the char­ac­ters in this story, Ver­non DeCloud, had appeared a cou­ple of years before in a story called “The Turn­around Is At Hand” in the Sep­tem­ber, 2007, issue of Esquire. DeCloud’s very first appear­ance was long before that, in a story called “Heavy Lift­ing” that appeared in the July 12, 1993 issue of The New Yorker (the full story is avail­able online to mag­a­zine subscribers).

Senior edi­tor of The Amer­i­can Scholar San­dra Cos­tich edited the piece along with edi­tor Robert Wil­son and fic­tion edi­tor Frances Kier­nan. They are com­mit­ted to pub­lish­ing good fic­tion in the mag­a­zine and on their site, and they deserve your sup­port. If you care about the short story in par­tic­u­lar, become a sub­scriber.

Comments (0)

“The Turnaround Is At Hand,” a short story

Feb 26, ’09 8:54 AM

Pub­lished in the Sep­tem­ber, 2007, issue of Esquire (actor Sean Penn on the cover). Available for free on the magazine’s Web site.

The Esquire pub­li­ca­tion of this piece involved some exper­i­ments that I still con­sider wor­thy and not mere gim­micks. Worked into the lay­out of the story itself (both in print and online) are first-person side­bars by sec­ondary char­ac­ters in the story. I wrote that mate­r­ial for this purpose—some of it from whole cloth, some of it adapted from my own out­takes. (And there were plenty of those. The man­u­script was nearly 80 pages at one point. It was sub­mit­ted at the ridicu­lous length of 39 pages and then cut—almost entirely by me, with fic­tion edi­tor Tom Chiarella’s gra­cious deference—to 28 man­u­script pages for publication.)

The first-person side­bars were inter­est­ing to do (the story is in the third-person), but even more fun (poten­tially) are the dead­pan ref­er­ences to the story pub­lished in other sec­tions of the issue. A book allegedly writ­ten by the main char­ac­ter, Ger­hard Hook­erdicker, was given a brief review. The char­ac­ter Ver­non DeCloud had a let­ter to the edi­tor. The Leisure Meter sec­tion sug­gested pre-ordering a DeCloud inven­tion that fig­ures in the story. There may have been a cou­ple of oth­ers. Some of these extra items were accom­pa­nied by Web URLs that redi­rected to the story on the magazine’s site. (The items on Hookerdicker’s book and DeCloud’s inven­tion made it to the online version.)

All of the pro­duc­tion inno­va­tions were (I believe) entirely asso­ciate edi­tor Tyler Cabot’s ideas, in response to editor-in-chief David Granger’s direc­tive to “do some­thing dif­fer­ent” with the piece. (I was offered the chance to invent this dif­fer­en­tial myself, but had no great inspi­ra­tions.) Tyler’s notion of break­ing down the magazine-membrane around the story was bril­liant, I thought, but Granger’s imper­a­tive had come fairly late in the process and there just wasn’t time to imple­ment the idea to the degree it deserved.

Nonethe­less, we all gave it a good bit of extra effort. Then the story came out and no one among the read­ing pub­lic—to my knowl­edge, not a sin­gle soul—noticed the Easter eggs scat­tered around the issue. Would it have been dif­fer­ent had there been fif­teen or twenty rather than only four or five? Maybe. Who knows. But every­body at Esquire threw them­selves into try­ing to do some­thing new, which gets a gold star in my book.

Comments (2)

Rocky Anderson’s case for the impeachment of George W. Bush

Jan 8, ’12 4:23 PM

Dur­ing his two terms as Mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Ander­son repeat­edly called for the impeach­ment of George W. Bush. He was one of the few elected offi­cials in the United States to do so. At some point, prob­a­bly in 2007, Ander­son wrote and nar­rated a mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tion of his case for Bush’s impeach­ment. This is a video of that pre­sen­ta­tion, which Anderson’s orga­ni­za­tion High Road for Human Rights uploaded to YouTube in five segments.

Comments (0)

Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in the Cloud” talk

Jan 2, ’12 12:40 PM

If you want to under­stand how and why we have man­aged to com­pletely cor­rupt the orig­i­nal excel­lent vision and archi­tec­ture of the Inter­net, and why Face­book and Google are man­i­fes­ta­tions of the cat­a­stro­phe that started with Microsoft, watch this talk deliv­ered about a year ago by Eben Moglen to the New York chap­ter of the Inter­net Society.

Eben Moglen is a Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity law pro­fes­sor, a long­time advo­cate of free soft­ware, Richard Stallman’s attor­ney, and the leader of the Free­dom­Box Foun­da­tion.

The Q & A ses­sion after the talk is a sep­a­rate video.

Comments (0)

I met the real Mitt Romney

Jan 1, ’12 1:46 PM

It was back in 1994, when Mitt was run­ning for the U.S. Sen­ate in Mass­a­chu­setts against the incum­bent Ted Kennedy (an elec­tion he did not win). I was out walk­ing on Bea­con Hill in Boston, mind­ing my own busi­ness, when I turned a cor­ner and found the corporate-raiding son of the famous Michi­gan Gov­er­nor on the side­walk in front of me, flash­ing his smile and extend­ing his hand to the pedestrians.

There was no way I was shak­ing this man’s hand. Mitt Rom­ney a Mass­a­chu­setts Sen­a­tor? His Con­gres­sional can­di­dacy was as dis­taste­ful to me then as his Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dacy is today. But, being a nat­u­rally polite per­son, my first instinct was to cross the street rather than be rude to him. (I have since over­come this per­sonal fail­ing, and I am now quite happy to be rude to politi­cians.) Unfor­tu­nately, the parked cars were packed tightly beside me. Avoid­ing Mitt Rom­ney would require climb­ing over auto bumpers and then hop­ping down into oncom­ing traffic—an hon­est phys­i­cal expres­sion of my revul­sion, but also a cow­ardly dis­play. I resigned myself to walk­ing past him.

As luck would have it, I reached him alone. He had just dis­patched a small group of (to my eye) luke­warm vot­ers with hand­shakes and assertive eye con­tact from his out­sized face. (Like tele­vi­sion news anchors, suc­cess­ful politi­cians almost always have large heads.) The next group of cit­i­zens was yards behind me. For six or seven long sec­onds, it was just the two of us, me and Mitt Romney.

He thrust out his hand and gave me the poly­styrene smile. Peo­ple who com­pare Romney’s phys­i­cal pres­ence to an auto-dashboard bobble-head or a department-store man­nikin are not just being cruel. That’s exactly the way he comes across. I wish I could say that I gave him a good tongue-lashing for hav­ing the gall to use his ill-gotten private-equity riches to buy him­self an anti-American run at national polit­i­cal power—in Mass­a­chu­setts, of all states. But I didn’t say that, or any­thing else. I sim­ply refused to shake his hand, and walked widely around him like some­thing bad on the sidewalk.

And that was when I met the real Mitt Rom­ney. He didn’t shrug or smile or just look past me to the next batch of fresh meat com­ing down the pike, as he would no doubt do today. Today, Mitt might even get off a joke at my expense. But he was a polit­i­cal green­horn back then, not adept at con­ceal­ing his true iden­tity. What he did, when I refused to shake his hand, was to lean toward me as I walked past him and give me one of the most vicious dirty looks I’ve ever had in my life. It was a truly remark­able expe­ri­ence, like being hurled back to sev­enth grade. I wish I had a photo of the pure hatred in his big face to share with you, but I don’t need a photo for myself. I can see it as vividly today as the day it happened.

Like the vam­piric bankers and hedge-fund man­agers who gave us the eco­nomic col­lapse of 2008, Romney’s busi­ness career was based upon invent­ing clever ways to game the sys­tem to enrich him­self and his cronies at the expense of lower-level par­tic­i­pants in our “free mar­ket econ­omy.” Now he has a polit­i­cal career devoted to mak­ing the world safe for oli­garchs like him­self. His fun­da­men­tal ori­en­ta­tion is ruling-class and anti-democratic, and it’s now cliché to note that he’s a cyn­i­cal oppor­tunist will­ing to shift posi­tions and say any­thing that might get him more power.

But with Mitt, this old famil­iar bad act comes wrapped in life­long reli­gious devotion—or, at any rate, life­long ser­vice to a spe­cific reli­gion, one that didn’t even exist until the early 1800s and that was plainly an extrem­ist (and widely dis­dained) cult until it cleaned itself up less than a cen­tury ago. Mitt doesn’t see any con­flict between his reli­gious zealotry and polit­i­cal ser­vice, and that works fine in an Amer­ica that started to inscribe “In God We Trust” on its cur­rency back in the commie-hating Joe McCarthy days (which have never left us), a coun­try that still refuses to remove that slo­gan even though our nation is sup­pos­edly based upon sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

In the squir­rely col­lec­tion of Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates for 2012, Mitt Rom­ney looks good to many peo­ple. He’s a seem­ingly san­i­tized suit in a world still eas­ily fooled by expen­sive suits and hair­cuts and big tanned faces, and his life­long reli­gios­ity makes some vot­ers assume that he must be a basi­cally decent guy. But you don’t grab the kind of loot that Mitt has grabbed by being decent. My brief but unfor­get­table encounter with him took place long after he’d been a young Mor­mon mis­sion­ary in France, and after he’d already held var­i­ous lead­er­ship posi­tions in the “LDS” church. And I can tes­tify that some­where deep inside the sanc­ti­fied politi­cian with the mul­ti­ple fancy houses, the fat bank accounts, and the elder sta­tus at the gigan­tic tem­ple on Bel­mont Hill above Boston lurks a nasty man whose main con­vic­tion is about his own entitlement.

Comments (5)

Yulia V. Tymoshenko

Oct 11, ’11 4:29 PM

Look­ing for a real-world hero or hero­ine? Some­one to tell your stu­dents about in Civics class?

Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the lead­ing oppo­si­tion politi­cian in Ukraine, has been sen­tenced to seven years in prison on charges that, accord­ing to The New York Times, “Euro­pean lead­ers have con­demned … as polit­i­cally moti­vated.” Those unnamed Euro­pean lead­ers went on to “hint… that they are unlikely to rat­ify a free trade and asso­ci­a­tion agree­ment with Ukraine, a project four years in the making.”

The Times arti­cle goes on to por­tray this extra­or­di­nary scene.

“Ms. Tymoshenko, an acer­bic pop­ulist who rep­re­sents the European-leaning west of the coun­try, rose to drown out the judge’s voice as he read out the ver­dict, speak­ing directly to a bank of tele­vi­sion cameras.

“ ‘This is an author­i­tar­ian régime,’ she said. …”

Comments (0)

“Secret interpretation” of the Patriot Act

Sep 30, ’11 12:25 PM

Accord­ing to two US Sen­a­tors who are both Demo­c­ra­tic mem­bers of the Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee, the Eric Holder Jus­tice Depart­ment has made mis­lead­ing pub­lic state­ments about its “secret inter­pre­ta­tion” of the Patriot Act that “allows” law enforce­ment to gather any kind of intel­li­gence they want, on any­one inside the U.S., whether or not there’s any evi­dence of con­nec­tion to ter­ror­ism or espi­onage. Appar­ently, no “domes­tic intel­li­gence gath­er­ing” activ­ity is off-limits under this “secret interpretation”…

But the real kicker is… it’s secret. So we don’t even know what we’re deal­ing with.

The two Sen­a­tors, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have writ­ten a let­ter to Eric Holder, ask­ing him for pub­lic clar­i­fi­ca­tion. Here’s a peti­tion you can sign in sup­port of their request.

The Jus­tice Dept. main­tains that the law is pub­lic and denies that it’s doing any­thing in secret… even while acknowl­edg­ing that its “inter­pre­ta­tions” of this pub­lic law are in fact classified.

The inter­pre­ta­tions of the pub­lic law are clas­si­fied. Is that Orwellian enough for you?

Maybe you’re won­der­ing why Obama’s hand-picked Jus­tice chief is run­ning his orga­ni­za­tion this way rather than scal­ing back the Patriot Act as he should be doing. I’m won­der­ing too. Our “friends” in the Obama admin­is­tra­tion are not just con­tin­u­ing Bush poli­cies, they’re inten­si­fy­ing them. We now have an “always and for­ever war against ter­ror” with lit­er­ally no end in sight, ever. The “war on ter­ror” — which, of course, involves U.S. state-sponsored ter­ror — has already given us a soft police state in which we are pay­ing a lit­eral for­tune every year to have our­selves spied on with­out limit. And our nation’s ille­gal over­seas activ­i­ties (includ­ing an offi­cial assas­si­na­tion pol­icy and attacks on the cit­i­zens of sov­er­eign coun­tries with unmanned drone planes flown from mil­i­tary com­puter work­sta­tions) are seri­ously dam­ag­ing our rela­tion­ships with other countries.

We don’t have to run our for­eign pol­icy this way. We have caused our prob­lems in the world. Nobody is “doing” any­thing to the USA. We’re doing it to our­selves. And we (along with Israel) are becom­ing increas­ingly iso­lated and defen­sive, as shown by our recent reac­tion to the Pales­tin­ian UN state­hood bid. You hardly need to wait for the per­spec­tive of his­tory to see that our cred­i­bil­ity and influ­ence in the world are col­laps­ing rapidly, and that we will engage in increas­ingly dan­ger­ous, desta­bi­liz­ing activ­ity. We’re throw­ing good money after bad to prop up mis­guided poli­cies rather than re-think them. That’s the Obama pres­i­dency in a nutshell.

Feel free to post a com­ment explain­ing how I can jus­tify vot­ing for a sec­ond term for Barack Obama. Cred­i­ble recent esti­mates are that the major Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates will spend $1B each to win the White House in the next elec­tion. They’ll get that money from wealthy spe­cial inter­ests, and those inter­ests will expect a worth­while return on their invest­ment. And this is how our gov­ern­ment is being run.

I might vote for Buddy Roe­mer: he’s refus­ing all PAC money and lim­it­ing his cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions to $100. He wants to talk about Con­gres­sional cor­rup­tion but the Repub­li­can party won’t let him par­tic­i­pate in any debates.

Comments (0)

Censorship at Reuters?

Sep 21, ’11 8:35 PM

An arti­cle at Reuters today reports on Pres­i­dent Obama’s remarks at the U.N. regard­ing the Pales­tin­ian U.N. bid for state­hood. But it’s not the arti­cle that Reuters orig­i­nally pub­lished at this URL. The orig­i­nal arti­cle was removed.

I just posted a com­ment there (using the user­name “space­walk”) about the dis­ap­pear­ance of the orig­i­nal arti­cle. My com­ment is repro­duced below because you’ll prob­a­bly never read it in the article’s comment-stream at Reuters. Com­ments on the Reuters site are mod­er­ated (they do not self-publish auto­mat­i­cally; they must be approved, and I have no argu­ment with that prac­tice), and Reuters notes its right to remove com­ments that “do not meet its standards.”

There are plenty of reader com­ments on the arti­cle that are crit­i­cal of Obama and U.S. pol­icy in this region of the world. Inter­est­ingly, as of 9 PM EDT, almost all of them seem to have been writ­ten in response to the orig­i­nal arti­cle, not the cur­rent arti­cle, to judge by both their tone and their timestamps.

Here’s the text of my com­ment, which includes the full text of the orig­i­nal Reuters article.

===============================

The arti­cle at this URL was orig­i­nally enti­tled “Obama tries to derail Pales­tin­ian U.N. state­hood bid” and was filed by Alis­tair Lyon with the date­line: Wed Sep 21, 2011 3:26pm EDT. As you can tell from the head­line alone, the orig­i­nal arti­cle had a tone much more crit­i­cal of Obama and U.S. for­eign pol­icy of the last decades; for exam­ple, it con­tained the fol­low­ing paragraph:

“How­ever, it is the fail­ure of 20 years of U.S.-brokered nego­ti­a­tions that has dri­ven Pales­tin­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Abbas to take his quest for a state to the United Nations — a ploy that could embar­rass the United States by forc­ing it to pro­tect its Israeli ally against the tide of world opinion.”

Less than 4 hours later, that arti­cle was com­pletely replaced by this one, filed by Matt Spetal­nick and Laura MacIn­nis, who were listed as con­tribut­ing reporters on the Lyon arti­cle. (Lyon is now listed as a con­tribut­ing reporter for this article.)

I’d like some­one at Reuters to explain why we should not con­clude that the Lyon arti­cle was sup­pressed. 1) The new arti­cle resides at the same URL as the old one; 2) a search of Reuters for the old head­line comes up empty, and 3) the reader comment-stream for the Lyon arti­cle has been retained for the new arti­cle, which of course causes most of the early com­ments to make no sense.

Here’s the full text of the orig­i­nal article:

Obama tries to derail Pales­tin­ian U.N. state­hood bid

By Alis­tair Lyon
UNITED NATIONS | Wed Sep 21, 2011 3:26pm EDT

(Reuters) – Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, try­ing to avert a clash over Pales­tin­ian state­hood, told the United Nations on Wednes­day there was no sub­sti­tute for Israeli-Palestinian nego­ti­a­tions or any short cut to peace.

With U.S. cred­i­bil­ity and influ­ence in the Mid­dle East at stake, Obama wants to dis­suade the Pales­tini­ans from ask­ing the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil for state­hood in the teeth of Israeli anger and a U.S. threat to use its veto if it came to a vote.

But a senior Pales­tin­ian offi­cial, Nabil Shaath, said, “We will cor­dially and respect­fully tell him ‘no’.”

The Pales­tini­ans, how­ever, would give the Secu­rity Coun­cil “some time” to mull the state­hood claim before they took it to the U.N. Gen­eral Assem­bly, he told a news conference.

Flag-waving Pales­tini­ans filled the squares of West Bank cities to rally behind the ini­tia­tive at the United Nations.

A year after telling the Gen­eral Assem­bly he hoped to see a Pales­tin­ian state born by now, the U.S. pres­i­dent said cre­at­ing such a state along­side Israel remained his goal.

“But the ques­tion isn’t the goal we seek — the ques­tion is how to reach it. And I am con­vinced that there is no short cut to the end of a con­flict that has endured for decades,” he said.

“Peace will not come through state­ments and res­o­lu­tions at the U.N. — if it were that easy, it would have been accom­plished by now,” Obama said.

“Ulti­mately, it is Israelis and Pales­tini­ans who must live side by side. Ulti­mately, it is Israelis and Pales­tini­ans — not us — who must reach agree­ment on the issues that divide them: on bor­ders and secu­rity; on refugees and Jerusalem,” he added.

How­ever, it is the fail­ure of 20 years of U.S.-brokered nego­ti­a­tions that has dri­ven Pales­tin­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Abbas to take his quest for a state to the United Nations — a ploy that could embar­rass the United States by forc­ing it to pro­tect its Israeli ally against the tide of world opinion.

BLEAK PROSPECTS
And although Obama said he had set out a new basis for nego­ti­a­tions in May, chances of reviv­ing peace talks look bleak.

The two sides are far apart. The Pales­tini­ans are divided inter­nally and Obama will not want to risk alien­at­ing Israel’s pow­er­ful U.S. sup­port base by press­ing for Israeli con­ces­sions as he enters a tough bat­tle for re-election next year.

The Pales­tini­ans see state­hood as open­ing the way for nego­ti­a­tions between equals. Israel says the Pales­tin­ian move aims at de-legitimizing the Jew­ish state.

The drama at the United Nations is play­ing out as Arab upris­ings are trans­form­ing the Mid­dle East­ern landscape.

Obama pledged sup­port for Arab demo­c­ra­tic change, called for more U.N. sanc­tions against Syr­ian leader Bashar al-Assad and urged Iran and North Korea to meet their nuclear oblig­a­tions — twin stand­offs that have eluded his efforts at resolution.

“There is a future of greater oppor­tu­nity for the peo­ple of these nations if their gov­ern­ments meet their oblig­a­tions. But if they con­tinue down a path that is out­side inter­na­tional law, they must be met with greater pres­sure and iso­la­tion,” he said.

Iran freed two Amer­i­cans held for spy­ing, a day before Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad addresses the United Nations. The Iran­ian leader has described it as a com­pas­sion­ate release.

Obama later met Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu and assured him of unwa­ver­ing U.S. sup­port. Netanyahu said the Pales­tin­ian action at the United Nations was doomed to fail.

Obama was also due to appeal to Abbas in per­son not to present U.N. Sec­re­tary Gen­eral Ban Ki-moon with an appli­ca­tion for full mem­ber­ship of the world body on Friday.

DIPLOMATIC DISASTER
In one of sev­eral fran­tic efforts to avert a diplo­matic. dis­as­ter, French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy urged the United Nations to grant the Pales­tini­ans the sta­tus of observer state, like the Vat­i­can, while out­lin­ing a one-year roadmap to peace.

“Each of us knows that Pales­tine can­not imme­di­ately obtain full and com­plete recog­ni­tion of the sta­tus of United Nations mem­ber state,” he said, adding that a veto in the Secu­rity Coun­cil could start a new cycle of vio­lence in the Mid­dle East.

The coun­cil could delay action on Abbas’ request, giv­ing the United States, Rus­sia, the Euro­pean Union and the United Nations — the “Quar­tet” of Mid­dle East medi­a­tors — more time to craft a state­ment that could coax both sides back to the table.

Hanan Ashrawi, a senior Pales­tin­ian offi­cial, said Obama’s speech was a real dis­ap­point­ment.
“You would think that the Pales­tini­ans are occu­py­ing Israel,” she said in a con­fer­ence call with reporters, accus­ing Obama of show­ing empa­thy with Israelis, but not Palestinians.

She also com­plained that his approval of prin­ci­ples of free­dom and self-determination appeared to be selective.

“They apply to every Arab indi­vid­ual, but when it comes to Pales­tini­ans suf­fer­ing from an oppres­sive for­eign mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion, some­how … these prin­ci­ples do not apply. They only apply when Arabs rebel against their own oppres­sive régime.”

What­ever hap­pens at the United Nations, Pales­tini­ans will remain under Israeli occu­pa­tion and any nom­i­nal state would lack rec­og­nized bor­ders or real inde­pen­dence and sovereignty.

It is a mea­sure of their des­per­a­tion that they seem deter­mined to press on with an ini­tia­tive that could incur finan­cial ret­ri­bu­tion from Israel and the United States.

In his speech to the annual U.N. Gen­eral Assem­bly, Ban asked gov­ern­ments to show sol­i­dar­ity in meet­ing “extra­or­di­nary chal­lenges” for the world body, rang­ing from devel­op­ment and cli­mate change to peace­keep­ing and human­i­tar­ian relief.

“With­out resources, we can­not deliver. Today, I ask gov­ern­ments that have tra­di­tion­ally borne the lion’s share of the costs to not flag in their gen­eros­ity,” he declared, pledg­ing to stream­line U.N. bud­gets to “do more with less.”

(Addi­tional report­ing by Ali Sawafta, Andrew Quinn, Lou Char­bon­neau, Matt Spetal­nick, Laura MacIn­nis, John Irish, Emmanuel Jarry, Daniel Bases and Patrick Worsnip at United Nations, Tom Perry in Ramal­lah; Edit­ing by Doina Chiacu)

===============================

Comments (4)

Ralph Nader, Tom Paine

Jul 14, ’10 8:14 AM

Sup­pos­edly, polit­i­cally pro­gres­sive Amer­i­cans still need to decide whether or not to “for­give” Ralph Nader for “putting George W. Bush in the White House.” You know the idea: Nader went from being a tire­some and irrel­e­vant pub­lic fig­ure to being an out­right dam­ag­ing one by insist­ing upon run­ning for pub­lic office as a prin­ci­pled can­di­date, thereby split­ting the vote and keep­ing “real” and “viable” can­di­dates, like Al Gore and John Kerry, out of office.

Main­stream media—PBS and NPR included—either refuse to cover Nader or ridicule and vil­ify him—overtly or sub­tly. I’m sorry to say that the con­sis­tently dark propaganda-portrait influ­enced my own per­cep­tion of him over the years. Dis­tracted and lazy, I grad­u­ally bought the bogus propo­si­tion that by demon­strat­ing defin­i­tively that we do not live in a real democ­racy, Ralph Nader had done us wrong.

I’m over it. Ralph Nader isn’t a trai­tor to the left. (He isn’t tire­some or irrel­e­vant, either.) He’s a gen­uine Amer­i­can hero, right up there with Tom Paine. I was reminded of this recently by a May, 2010 address that Nader gave in Seat­tle to pro­mote his lat­est book, a utopian “prac­ti­cal fan­tasy” called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

This speech is an impas­sioned, informed, and inspir­ing piece of com­mon sense. And of course, being a speech by Nader, it’s a cry for orga­nized civic action. Tom Paine would be proud. It’s an hour and a half in length. You have the time. Repeat: you have the time. (One of Nader’s key points: we choose not to find the time to have an actual democ­racy, and our mas­ters couldn’t be more pleased.)

Lis­ten to the speech. At this dis­mal moment in Amer­i­can his­tory, it might change your life. It’s in two mp3 files which you can down­load here, or stream in a Web browser here and here.

Comments (0)