Category Archive: POLITICS
Chappaquiddick
(Directed by John Curran) (2018) We all know what we know of the story: in July 1969 Edward Kennedy, Senator for Massachusetts, competed in the annual Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta. Most of the Senator’s entourage were staying at a hotel on the mainland. A cottage on Chappaquiddick Island (near to the larger island of Martha’s Vineyard) was hired for a reunion of The Boiler Room Girls, six single women in their twenties who had worked for Robert Kennedy during his fatal presidential campaign. At sometime during the night of Friday July 18, the Senator and a secretary, Mary Jo Kopechne, left the…
Continue Reading →A Plague o’ Both Your Houses!
We are sped, and sick of you both: so bent out of shape with hate and ancient enmities… Israel We know the Jews can claim to be the first in Zion, a 3000 year-old legacy, and that whilst it was under Muslim rule since the 7th century, such others are more or less interlopers (Jerusalem gets 700 odd mentions in the Old Testament, none in the Qur’an), although for centuries the Holy Lands have been recognised as multi-faith. (There’s no particular reason to criticise President Trump’s incendiary move to locate the US Embassy in Jerusalem – being nice, polite and diplomatic doesn’t sizzle any…
Continue Reading →American Pharaoh
The Mayor at the opening of the Lake Front Festival, 1973, showing his sartorial flair
Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (by Adam Cohen & Elizabeth Taylor) (2000) What other book to buy in the south side of Chicago? TVC was only a few blocks from Bridgeport, where Richard J Daley lived and died, with his wife of five or so decades and 7 children, bog Irish and loyal to their neighbourhood to an insane degree, so loyal that they looked down on Irish families that moved to the suburbs, the ones so pretentious that they “had fruit in the house when nobody was sick,” Having selected this and one other book, TVC…
Continue Reading →Socialism as Religion
Be careful who you give awards to...the Reverend Jim Jones, 1977's Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award winner
Born May 13 (1931), the Reverend Jim Jones is famous for his deep Christian-Socialist beliefs, his humanitarian impulses, his Peoples’ Temple in San Francisco where he organised leftist demonstrations, and of course, the workers’ paradise he established at Jonestown in Guyana. His passionate commitment to equality and fairness drew inspiration from thinkers such as Jesus, Buddha, Lenin, Marx, Castro and Mao, and won him kudos from the likes of well-known lib-labs Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter, Jerry Brown, and Harvey Milk (who called the Reverend “a man of the highest character.”) In any case, the socialist paradise shuddered to a halt…
Continue Reading →…And the Winner is…
When the Nobel made some sense...Selma Lagerlof is honoured
…Nobody! Gerald Murnane must be spitting chips. The Nobel Prize for Literature won’t be handed out this year. Not because the prize has become a global joke (recipients of the recent past: Mo Yan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Bob Dylan); not because there’s no-one worthy (now that should be a reason), but because the Committee may be under legal interdict. The criteria for inclusion in the Academy, and its selections, are obscure. Academicians must be blonde, of course. They gather at a secret location, parking their Volvos underground. Then, over herring eaten-off recyclable plates, the sound of “Fernando” tinkling gently in the background,…
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