For Peace and Freedom

So they dug out this ash heap in Queens and built all these pavilions. They had cars already driving around in 1939. Cars were not yet drudgery and traffic jams and Jiffy Lube– they were leisure and freedom. They had an early television. Television was not yet aesthetic assault and battery everywhere you turn. You could see the Magna Carta. They had a dishwasher, which was about to make everyone’s life better (except for people who insist on living in minimally renovated pre-1935 housing like stupid, stupid me). They had a robot who smoked cigarettes. He was seven feet tall, spoke 700 words from the record player in his belly, and I would definitely go out on a date with him if his reconstruction goes as planned.

Violence

There is my student’s sister, shot to death in a drive by, and then there are dozens of pretend people and people-like creatures killed on screen in “Avatar.” Thursday I read in a journal entry that my student’s sister died this way, and Saturday I was in a theater with elementary school kids drinking in […]

Courting Corporations

There is just no way to fund public education without the help of corporations. Many American voters feel that if you are really, really trying, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps in your chaotic middle school where your math teacher never shows up and work summers at a minimum-wage job and study on […]

Dropping It

In competing with countries who have solid national health care systems, Americans have one hand tied behind their backs. Or maybe I’m wrong.