Running & Stunning & Gunning & Shunning Without Cunning Any Sense of Responsibility for the Carnage Wreaked in Our Names CRIMINAL INJUSTIC IS A SYSTEM---EITHER WE CHANGE IT, OR IT WILL CONTINUE TO EXPLODE IN OUR CHILDREN’S FACES Working as a prison guard has to be some of the most grueling and gruesome work imagineable. This would prove especially true---at least I want desperately to think so---when the normal course of a shift involves killing someone with a stun gun. This has oc...

“The Time Has Come to Take a Stand” THE LIFE OF THE SOUTH ALIVE IN ONE WOMAN’S TALE She was eight years old, forty five years ago, when she dropped the bag of cotton she was picking from her shoulder and declaimed to her mother, “Mama, when I grow up I’m gonna get me an education.” The coterie of her eleven brothers and sisters who were present paused to listen as their middle sister continued, “And I’m gonna learn to make money with my brain.” And as they all laughed in approval, ...

Credits and Debits and Habits, Plumbing the Rabbit Hole of Memory EACH INSTANT AS RECOLLECTION & ACTION COMBINED “Best laid plans of mice and men go aft aglee” is close to Donne’s original quotation. A lithe lass with whom I shared some sweet, hot, wet interactions recently left a red rose and paper containing two words---“THANK YOU!”---on the pillow we shared, my unusual somnolence allowing her quiet escape to Miami. She paid me a marvelous compliment, just before she fled forever in...

A Slug in the Neck and a Slug in the Back for the Crime of Being Frightened While Black GEORGIA IS A ‘RAISIN IN THE SUN’ READY TO POP! THIS IS A FIRST INSTALLMENT. I AM FINDING MY WAY HERE. I INTEND TO GIVE SOME OF THE INCREDIBLE PEOPLE WHO HAVE PRIVILEGED ME, WITH THEIR PRESENCE IN MYLIFE, A SPOT OF SOME SORT IN THE CULTURAL PANTHEON. THESE WILL OCCASIONALLY BE JUST “OCCASIONAL” EXPLORATIONS OF CHARACTER AND EVENT. OTHER TIMES, HOWEVER, AND THIS IS THE FIRST OF MY POSTINGS FO...

Passions and Fashions, as the World Crashes and Thrashes WE ALL PAY ATTENTION, BUT TO DIFFERENT THINGS When my friend Samara called me today, she began by saying, “I called to say you were right.” She laughed. “There, that’s out of the way.” What she really called to discuss---I knew since I had been savoring this chance for “I told you so” since she left me a message last week---was how freaked she had been since her Shiite Iraqi husband had returned to the Fallujah area, to try to ...

LEGAL LYNCHING IS BACK IN STYLE The Marcus Dixon Case HERE IS AN INTERESTING QUESTION. DO WE WANT TO SENTENCE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN TO PRISON FOR HAVING SEX WITH EACH OTHER? A SUBSTANTIAL MAJORITY OF CITIZENS HAVE ANSWERED THAT QUERY WITH A BIG, “I DON’T THINK SO!” IN THE NEXT PERIOD OF TIME, WE WILL FIND OUT IF THE SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA AGREES, WHEN IT ISSUES ITS DECISION IN THE MARCUS DIXON CASE FROM FLOYD COUNTY GEORGIA. AN UPDATE ON THE CASE WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT WEEK OR SO H...

LET’S ABOLISH IMMIGRATION LAWS An Initial Salvo in an Interminable Argument This is my position, and I’m sticking to it until someone can present good reasons for thinking otherwise, as opposed to using bigotry and bad science to support continuation of vicious, universally harmful, and ultimately unenforceable laws. The following tale, basically a modestly expanded anecdote, came to me one evening a year ago, as a neighbor accosted me about helping him with his English. Bottle of T...

Robert Oppenheimer, a leader among the scientists who directed the production of the first nuclear weapons, likened the first test to an experience of Armageddon. He and his fellows actually had a betting pool as to whether the atmosphere would ignite as a result of the detonation. In order to insure the political viability of the infant “Military Industrial Complex,” the U.S. spread the components of the Manhattan Project all over the nation. By the early 1980’s, however, except for...

An Intuition of Fruition in a Blog a Day, Or, Hello, Hello, I Occasionally Bellow About Paying Dues and Tithing Tuition Saying hello to virtual acquaintances is not a lot easier for me, psychically, than bellying up to the bar to flirt and seduce whatever remnants of the cognescenti are present when I wander through whichever den of iniquity I happen to inhabit at any give moment. I admit that, unless a source of something more powerful and poignant happens to be under cover on the sta...

The news filtered in as Rick and I said hello this morning before our weekly update, that, down the street from where we conversed over coffee, a masked gunman had just robbed the local Wachovia. Only a few diehards among us would disagree that the perpetrator of this crime belongs in prison. What about my friend Rick, who two months ago, after ten years “on the wagon,” culminated a three month beer-to-vodka binge by sideswiping a shopper’s car in a suburban Atlanta parking lot and then h...

Vannevar Bush was a cousin of two of the past three Presidents. He was also a gung-ho supporter of all that is establishment in America. He was also, however, a proponent of science, and he recognized that science without democracy inevitably creates a contradiction in terms. He said, when he was in the midst of chairing the first Presidential commission to examine national science policy, that everyone---rich and poor, sophisticated and simple---longs to know how the world works, what the...