Jul 04 2018
Dear editor: On September 11, 2012, four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya. Ever since, their fog-of-war deaths have been fodder for a macabre, puppet-theater burlesque of right-wing propaganda. Contrarians may wax poetic with fanciful exaggerations, but the dead did not “come home in wooden boxes.” As it has been for decades, their remains were respectfully …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/07/04/puppet-theater-burlesque/
Jun 20 2018
If By Arkansas Times’ “The Observer” (David Koon), June 14, 2018 If you can, cast your mind back to when you were very young and recall what it felt like to be separated from your mother and father. Not just playing in the yard or another part of the house, but truly, even for …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/06/20/in-your-name/
Jun 17 2018
Dear editor: Ah, dearly beloved, ‘tis no earthly pleasure can compare to the sweet caress of gentle enlightenment! But when ye write, use not vain repetitions, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking (with apologies to Matthew 6:7 and the KJV). Verily, we beseech thee to keep thy blithering …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/06/17/a-funk-of-fundamentalists/
May 28 2018
Selections from a recent Facebook conversation. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, the willfully ignorant, the woefully beguiled, and the morally repugnant (see fundie #5). Due to the branching nature of such conversations on social media, this is stitched together from various, sometimes parallel/simultaneous narratives and is therefore only a linear approximation of …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/05/28/suffering-fools/
May 20 2018
Dear editor: In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously refused to define obscenity. Instead, he responded with these words: “But I know it when I see it…” A few Sundays back, in a front-page story in this newspaper, we all saw it and we all know it. American politics has become an obscenity. Seems …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/05/20/the-epitome-of-obscenity/
May 12 2018
Sometime in the mid-1930s, when my dad was about 12, a Ford Tri-Motor (aka “The Tin Goose”) flew onto a cow pasture just outside of Holdenville, Oklahoma. For the next several days, for the mere price of a bread wrapper and fifty cents, a person could buy a short flight. Bereft of even a half-dollar …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/05/12/a-wrinkle-in-time/
Mar 22 2018
Dear editor: For letter writers beseeching the Almighty to please hurry up and make Mike Nunn pray the sinner’s prayer or walk the Roman Road, or whatever the latest trick is for getting past St. Peter and the Pearly Gates, take a break from your earnest lamentations and look around. Notice all those empty pews? …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/03/22/beseeching-the-almighty-to-please-hurry/
