Blog / Our America

For the Record

February 13, 2021 - By Jim Hicks

Though we rarely think of them in this light, writers and professors of literature have training and skills with policy implications. They even, at times, feel called upon to weigh in on matters of national and international importance. In this country, however, I would be shocked if they were actually called upon, much less listened to. The one counterexample I can think of comes from abroad, and it has always appeared to me both memorable and laudable. When the Republic of Argentina formed a national commission to investigate, assemble evidence, and publish a public record after years of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering its citizens, they appointed a novelist, Ernesto Sabato, to head that commission. The introduction to its final report remains a model of clarity and...

Wounded in Hatred, Part One

January 21, 2021 - By Joseph Keady

Following Fascism from Charlottesville to the Capitol

(Screenshots of Facebook posts, taken 12 August 2017. William Fears is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for choking his girlfriend. Alex McNabb is co-host of the neo-Nazi podcast The Daily Shoah.)
 

If you’ve never experienced it firsthand, let me assure you: the sight and sound of hundreds of men moving as a unit while loudly chanting the...

Flying Home

January 19, 2021 - By Marya Zilberberg

I remember flying over the Atlantic Ocean in a plane full of Russian speech and tentative hope, with children craning their necks to catch glimpses of the clouds below. I remember landing at JFK International, after winter had already dropped its early drape of darkness. While we waited for our luggage, massive cars crawled by outside, their lights splashing behind the scratched glass of sliding doors. I remember spending the night at some airport hotel, having a forgettable dinner at the hotel restaurant. What I remember most is darkness, oily and dense, and the airport lights twinkling like tiny distant stars.

This happened mid-January 1977, a week before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. Almost a half year earlier, we had left our home in Odessa, Ukraine and then spent five...

So Disgraceful to Our Country

January 9, 2021 - By Benjamin Franklin

(Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, 1778. Joseph Siffred Duplessis. Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Over the last four years or so, events in the United States of America—a country in which, as you know, I myself have no small interest—have made it difficult for those of us who are, shall we say, permanently retired from active duty, to remain so.

The recent controversy regarding a book contract, proffered to a certain notorious abuser of the public good and trust, has made it impossible for me, as a dedicated public servant, to remain silent any longer. On this issue, I long ago made my own sentiments and my own practice, clear, so let me indulge myself here by simply citing from my...

WTF?

January 7, 2021 - By A Friend in Sarajevo

(Photo: A "Sarajevo Rose," turned into an ersatz war memorial.)

I’ve been thinking what to write since last night and I keep drawing a blank. Mostly because I figure you already know whatever I might end up saying. Also, cognitive dissonance, I think. The impossible becomes possible, then it becomes actual, but still somehow remains inconceivable. Also, sensory overload from all the news, the images: the dude in the chewbacca bikini, the dude carrying out the dais, waving to the camera with a picture postcard smile and a ridiculous pom-pom hat like he’s going cross-country skiing, so childish, so lovably American, so out of touch with reality… I think we’ve been taking reality for granted.

And then there’s my own baggage. I can...