Category: Culture

Which 9-11?

Dear editor, One final observation, one final broadside against our balmy Benghazi! bellowers…  It is exceedingly curious that they fixate their wrath only upon the 9-11 of 2012, when four white Americans died in the violent anarchy of a civil war that we actively participated in.  No matter that it also killed tens of thousands …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/07/22/which-9-11/

Vinegar will work just fine

Privileged civility By Autumn Tolbert, June 29, 2018   By now, we have all seen take after take from journalists and politicians about the events last Friday night at the Red Hen in Lexington, Va., where White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the restaurant after the owner and the staff …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/07/05/vinegar-will-work-just-fine/

Puppet-theater Burlesque

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 …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/07/04/puppet-theater-burlesque/

In your name

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 …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/06/20/in-your-name/

A funk of fundamentalists

  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 …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/06/17/a-funk-of-fundamentalists/

Suffering Fools

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 …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/05/28/suffering-fools/

The epitome of obscenity

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 …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/05/20/the-epitome-of-obscenity/