Aug 17 2018
Dear editor:
Here’s a make-believe but often real nightmare scenario: You have just received the terrible and terrifying news, “You have cancer.” After biopsying your mass, your surgeon wants to refer you to a medical oncologist (a cancer treatment specialist). Many are available in your area. He then asks you, “Do you want a medical oncologist with a good bedside manner who is barely competent and will probably not successfully treat your cancer? Or do you want … [more]
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/08/17/oh-doctor-an-analogy-scorned/
Aug 12 2018
Dear editor,
Time for another letter of random (or not) non-sequiturs…
Like most Americans, you probably think slavery ended with the Civil War. Fact is, especially here in the South, freed slaves often found themselves subjected to conditions of forced labor little different from slavery. Real emancipation didn’t begin to happen until FDR’s Attorney General announced Circular No. 3591 on December 12, 1941.
Imagine, only five days after Pearl Harbor, an AG was taking care “of the least of … [more]
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/08/12/circular-no-3591/
Jul 22 2018
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 of Libyans. Libyans were neither white nor Christian. To navel-gazing Americans, their deaths were inconsequential.
Curious that the 9-11 of 2001 is barely mentioned any … [more]
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/07/22/which-9-11/
Jul 05 2018
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 decided they did not want to serve her. This came just days after Sanders explained that the Bible supported separating children from their parents … [more]
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/07/05/vinegar-will-work-just-fine/
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 returned to Dover Air Force Base in flag-draped metal containers.
President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton were there when the plane landed. Here is … [more]
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/07/04/puppet-theater-burlesque/
Jun 20 2018
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 a moment, lost. Recall the vice crush of panic in your chest.
If you were ever a parent, remember the feeling of being in a … [more]
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 succinct.
Yea, it doth seem that Donald J. Trump loveth America and God, probably in that order, yet there is one he surely loveth above … [more]
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2018/06/17/a-funk-of-fundamentalists/
