. (Update) Tomorrow, September 11, 2012, the birthday of Theodor Adorno, and only chronologically coincident with the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attack, Judith Butler is set to receive the triennial Adorno Prize, awarded by the city of Frankfurt. Resonant with the themes addressed in the commentary below, originally posted last week at the Algemeiner, is this […]
The Palestinian Failure
. Some nations are lucky in their leaders. For decades now, academic historians have downplayed the significance of the leader – the “great man” – in the understanding of historical epochs and focused their attention elsewhere. Still, you cannot study the early American republic without renewed appreciation for the role of George Washington. How lucky was the U.S. again […]
Anti-Labor, Anti-Free Press, Anti-Gay, Anti-Israel
. Some people never get the point. Some people once got the point, or claimed to, claimed to see it – there it is, over there – and then they got their hands on the point and stretched the point, to make a point, turned it inside out, inverted and perverted the point, developed a […]
How Fast, So Furious, the Grim-faced Libertarian Falls in the Forest
. Lost amid the attention to the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act was the House vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress – the first sitting cabinet member to be so cited in the history of the United States. Maliciously partisan Republicans went ahead with this vote on […]
“What Must Be Said” Is Nothing
. I have heard it said – better, I have read it in a tweet – that Gunther Grass could hardly have been expected, at 17, to resist recruitment into the Waffen SS. That odd, indirect defense of the sham poetry Grass did not write but typed up to attack Israel delivers an unexpected enlightenment: […]