With America’s slouch toward the virtual at the expense of the real and the human, it is entirely possible that we will become nostalgic for malls as lost relics of interpersonal relations, alongside the courthouse square, the barber shop and the neighborhood bar.
Americana
Altered Space: When the Mall
The Slow-Motion Lynching Of President Barack Obama
If this country will lynch a brilliant, civil, kind, humble, compassionate, moderate, articulate, black intellectual we’re lucky enough to have in the White House, argues Frank Schaeffer, we’ll lynch anyone. What chance does an anonymous black man pulled over in a traffic stop have of fair treatment when the former editor of the Harvard Law Review is being lynched?
Deemed “Grossly Offensive,” Satanic Display Is Barred from Florida Capitol’s Christmas Gallery
The state Department of Management Services on Wednesday denied an attempt by “Satanists” to put up a display in the Florida Capitol, which currently showcases a Nativity scene, a Festivus pole made of beer cans, posters from atheists, and a crudely-made Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Holding a Candle to a Citizenship Oath
Twenty-seven ago today I was one among a few hundred Technicolor-skinned and Babel-tongued immigrants who jammed into an enormous hall in Federal District Court in Brooklyn and recited the oath of citizenship. A candle-lighting has marked the occasion every year since.
Nativity Scene in Florida Capitol Will Share Space With Beer-Can Pole Celebrating Festivus
A nearly 6-foot-tall pole made from emptied Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans, marking the Festivus holiday once parodied on Seinfeld, will be put up in the Florida Capitol this week as a not-so-subtle protest to the recent placement of a Christian nativity scene by the Florida Prayer Network.
Proposed Monument Honoring Union Soldiers at Florida’s Olustee Battlefield Sparks Outrage
The bid to add a Union monument to the Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park near Lake City, site of the Civil War’s largest battle in Florida, turned a public hearing into a three-hour bout of recriminations that re-enacted some of the Civil War’s deepest passions.
Of Thanksgiving Day Parades and Friends in Exile
Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on CBS was a bit like being waterboarded, but matters improved very quickly when the channel changed and the aromas of the day began invading the house, along with just the right spirits: Praise be to Beaujolais Nouveau.
The Trouble With Veterans Day
It’s hard to see how, if a war is unjust, it can be heroic to wage it. So it’s flat-out preposterous to claim that everyone who has ever been in the U.S. military is a hero, argues Arnold Oliver, a Vietnam veteran who finds it troubling that Veterans Day has devolved into a hyper-nationalistic worship service of militarism.
Cowardice as Culture: Richie Incognito’s NFL and the Adulation of Brutality
For years, in college and in the NFL, lineman Richie Incognito behaving loutishly and unaccountably on and off the field in an NFL culture that rewards and protects brutality. Jonathan Martin is the rare whistle-blower who reveals ugly truths the league and its fans would too often prefer not to acknowledge, argues Steve Robinson.
1963’s Familiar Bloodstains: Far Right Politics from JFK to Barack Obama
John F. Kennedy was called treasonous and was the target of a relentless far-right campaign to vilify and demolish his presidency by demagogues and media barons whose ideological descendants have unleashed the same tactics on Barack Obama, writes Steve Robinson.