Editor’s note: This originally appeared in the Independent Weekly in November 1994 after the historic midterm election. The Republican landslide of 1994 will bring consequences less enduring than the fall of Rome in 476 or the assassinations of 1968. A gloating Newt Gingrich or George Will is a spectacle that takes me down with stomach […]
Hal Crowther
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The tea party: more for them, less for the rest of us
When I published an unflattering assessment of the tea party movement, I anticipated a spirited response. In every form I’ve encountered, the rhetoric of the far right prizes belligerence and sneers at diplomacy. I never expected an invitation to share a pot of Earl Grey’s best and talk things over. But considering the advanced age […]
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Reflecting on the late Molly Ivins, her new bio and her crusade against corporatized America
“A populist is someone who is for the people and against the powerful, and so a populist is generally the same as a liberalexcept we tend to have more fun.” Molly Ivins (1944-2007) Many states, including my home state of North Carolina, maintain Halls of Fame for journalists. I know Texas has one, because it […]
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Glenn Beck
Last year my brother left me a phone message, recommending a rare visit to the world of television to check out a new face on CNN. Not just another radio right-winger masticating headlines, he said, but a creature from some even lower rung on the ladder of life, working an act so addled and inept […]
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Lessons from the Henry Louis Gates case
I can’t believe I’m doing it again, like a moth to the flame, helpless, antennae shriveling, fragile wings igniting. Someone stop me. Ten times I promised myself I’d never write about race again, and I always break my promise. Because it’s too important, I guess, and because so much that’s written is so patheticfranklyand so […]
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Mexico’s drugs come north. America’s guns go south.
It’s springtime in America, with birds and flowers, when soft breezes blow and mass killers come out of hibernation. This week it was Binghamton, N.Y., not far from where I lived once, where my parents used to teach. On the strength of 98 pistol rounds and 13 deaths, Binghamton stole the media spotlight from Carthage, […]
Posted inElections
The historic 2008 electionwithout John Edwards
The convention went on without him. Had he dared to appear, no doubt there were burly operatives assigned to evict him physically before the news cameras could find him. The Democratic Party, the U.S. Senate, the state of North Carolina, America, the legal profession, everything that ever provided him with an identity is going on […]
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White denial
The late, recently departed George Garrett, a white Southern writer of wide range and liberal sentiment, included this emphatic statement of principle in his memoir Whistling in the Dark: “I, too, must bear my burden of contemporary guilt like a student’s obligatory backpack. But I flatly refuse to add to it one ounce, one feather’s […]
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One nation under guns
I n the London Times, under the headline “The United States of America has gone mad,” the British novelist John le Carré began his modest polemic, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember.” Accepting the Wilfred Owen Prize for antiwar poetry, the Nobel Laureate […]
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The elephants in the room
Four months ago, as the general public was getting its first taste of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, we beheld a rare congruence where the most liberal and least liberal New York Times columnists offered essentially the same impression, during the same 24-hour news cycle: “To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have […]