Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

Politics: Observations & Arguments
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Hendrik Hertzberg has been a political observer and writer for nearly 40 years. He wrote for Newsweek for many years. In the 1970s, he took a hiatus from magazine writing in order to scribe speeches for Jimmy Carter. Then, in the 1980s, he was the editor of The New Republic. Since 1992, he has been a senior editor and frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

Hertzberg most often writes analytically about politics du jour: reports from the campaign trails of various candidates, analyses of policies and idiocies (including crimes and misdemeanors) of elected officials, and the (often pernicious) portrayal of the above by the (as Eric Alterman says) so-called liberal media. Though Hertzberg usually works the denotational side of politics, he also frequently covers the connotational side, that is, pop culture. “The personal,” as we know from the Situationist slogan graffitied throughout Paris in 1968, “is political.” In this sense, then, Hertzberg is an ecological writer: we’re all connected in an environment of often-conflicting ideologies. Continue Reading »

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Wal-Mart promotes softcore fascism, the Right buys propaganda, King George the Idiot is on a mission from god and William Bennett is still a racist.

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Luis J. Rodriguez’s novel Music of the Mill is the featured review at Curled Up with a Good Book.

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Mencius
Trans. D.C. Lau
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Meng Ke, whom we know in the West by his Latinized name, Mencius, was a wandering sage who taught widely and advised the rulers of the state of Qi during the Warring States Period (403-221 BC). Mencius himself lived from about 370-290 BC, having been born just a few miles from the only other philosopher know in the West by a latinized name, Confucius, who lived about a century before Mencius. Towards the end of his life Mencius despaired at the possibility of effecting change in government and so retired from public life.

The basis of Mencius’s philosophy is the assertion that all humans are basically good. It is society’s influence that causes good people to do bad things. This immediately raises a question: What is society composed of if not people? The answer is nowhere specific, but the cumulative impression is that the reason society can be a bad influence on individuals is habit. The analogy in Western logic might be the concept of “the slippery slope.” One person slips from his moral obligation toward the good and soon everyone around him is, too. Or, to put this idea another way: One dog barks and they all join in. Continue Reading »

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“‘Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them,’ Mrs. Bush told American Public Media’s ‘Marketplace’ program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home” (The Nation). To which rapper Kayne West replied, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” “West articulated the seething anger that exists within the African-American community not just over the slow response of President Bush and the federal government to the crisis in the Gulf but also the media portrayal of the poor African-Americans trapped in the midst of it…. ‘I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. See a white family, it says they’re looking for food,’ said West. He didn’t stop there. He also linked the ongoing war in Iraq to the shoot-on-sight orders given to the National Guard troops with regard to the looters. ‘We already realized a lot of the people who could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us’” (The Nation).

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Anthony & the Johnsons’ album, I Am a Bird Now (Secretly Canadian: 2005), won Britain’s Mercury Prize. Antony Hegarty, the singer and pianist of the band, writes beautiful, melancholy songs that I can only describe as transgendered –”gender dysmorphia,” says the Times of London. “Sir Elton John has requested Hegarty to perform the bitter-sweet ballad Hope There’s Someone at his forthcoming wedding to David Furnish,” the Times adds. His voice has been described as resembling that of Nina Simone. I Am a Bird Now is a gorgeous, emotional album that has been creating quite a stir in the alternative music scene. I’m amazed and delighted that a queer act would receive such recognition. Sri Lankan grimestar MIA walked out of the ceremony within minutes of the announcement of the prize going to Anthony & the Johnsons: so much for tolerance of difference, ey? Buy I Am a Bird Now and help support this site.

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Iron John: A Book about Men
by Robert Bly
Publisher: De Capo, 2004

Poet Robert Bly has for a number of years now worn another hat: Men’s Movement guru. Iron John was first published in 1990 and was a bestseller, a cultural phenomena. Women read Iron John openly, hoping to glean some insider information while men read the book furtively—at least at first. By the mid-1990s, one could observe men dressed in tatters of leather, middle-aged bellies flapping in the breeze, beating drums in circles in the parks of many major, and a few minor, American metropolises. And those were just the straight men… Continue Reading »

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