General News

Donald Trump: The Picture of the GOP

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In the Oscar Wilde novel – “The Picture of Dorian Gray” – a young handsome man looks upon a portrait of himself and wishes that the picture would grow old instead of himself. Mystery grants his wish, and he never grows old. Not only does his face never reflect the corruption of aging, but the physical effects of his sins show only on the picture. His cruelties, debaucheries, depravities, vulgarities, and even murder turn what once was a representation of youth and beauty into an ugly grotesquery, a witness to his sordid monstrousness. As this much too long presidential campaign comes to an end, I say that Donald Trump, the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, the man elected by Republican voters and half-heartedly supported by the GOP leadership, is not some stranger from a strange land that has kidnapped an innocent political party and turned it into something that it is not.

Culture

South Africa Then, the United States Now, and the Meaning of Politics

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As I watched the YouTube reprise of the encounter, it renewed the moment for me in various ways. There was the history of race and racial politics in South Africa to consider. Because I am Jewish, there was also the issue, both in South Africa and elsewhere, of how Jews have been involved both in and against struggles for freedom. There was the question of Israel, where precisely because of my South African experience, I am deeply critical of the politics of occupation, walls and partition. On this last point Mandela was remarkably clear. He emphasized to Koppel the sympathies of the ANC for the struggle of Jews against persecution; he pointed to the lack of racism in Jewish communities; he spoke of Jewish lawyers who had taken on political trials in South Africa when few others would; of the fact that he had been trained as a lawyer by a Jewish firm when almost no others were prepared to accept blacks; again he observed that Jews held leading positions in the ANC. ‘But that does not mean to say that the enemies of Israel are our enemies. We refuse to take that position. You can call it being political or a moral question, but for anybody who changes his principles depending on whom he is dealing, that is not a man who can lead a nation.’

General News

It's Happening Right Here, Right Now: Review of It Can't Happen Here at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre

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Despite the play’s ultimately hopeful conclusion, these images of totalitarian violence within American borders are haunting. It Can’t Happen Here serves as a chilling reminder of what lies just around the corner when fear overcomes a nation, when power is placed in the hands of those with the flashiest campaigns, and when hate speech and misogyny become normal — and accepted — parts of political discourse. All of these things are already happening here, and we are closer than we think to living out the same plot line. And unless we begin to admit this, we might as well be cheering Trump right into the Oval Office.

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

The Kapp Putsch and Modern Memory

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The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch was a resounding failure ¾ in one respect. Kapp quickly declared himself Reichskanzler (sound familiar), but the Weimar leadership, already partly in exile, called on all Germans to strike. The resulting general strike was so effective that the putschists simply could not rule the country.

General News

Why Those Who Cherish Martin Luther King Must Oppose Donald Trump

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With the full measure of our courage and our convictions, in this fraught and dangerous time we must echo the principled pronouncement of Martin Luther King and declare to every listening ear: “The prospect of Donald Trump being President of the United States so threatens the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that we cannot in good conscience fail to take a stand against who he is and what he represents.” And then we must act.

art

Community Horror? American Artists at Work

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“The Lottery,” an allegorical or non-allegorical short story by Shirley Jackson exquisitely touched the Dread button almost seventy years ago—at the time, the most popular story in New Yorker history—and comes alive today, if “alive” is right word, in a notable graphic novel adaptation.

Environment

I Stand with Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, and Palestine: A Brief Essay on White Privilege

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Within the mountains of conversations that comprise the Babylonian Talmud, I have been drawn to a single practice: strive not to benefit or profit from the fruits of violence. As a white, elderly Jewish woman of mixed Ashkenazi descent and the sixth generation of my family to live on this continent, I am part of the group of European settlers who arrived here and built their houses on land stolen by military force from indigenous people.

General News

Overcoming Bitterness and No Longer Assuming the Worst of Democrats

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For decades, I have been obsessed with exposing the Clintons and like-minded Democratic politicians’ dangerous foreign policies, challenging liberal naiveté that ignores or excuses such hawkish proclivities, and underscoring the need to withhold support until they embrace more responsible positions. What I am belatedly discovering, as this campaign season is drawing to a close, is that while such concerns are not without merit, such efforts have ended up contributing to what may be an even bigger problem: the anger, frustration, cynicism, self-righteousness, isolation and other self-defeating tendencies on the left.

Politics & Society

Are the Republicans Going the Way of the Whigs?

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One often hears commentators argue that the Republican party is in danger of following the Whig party into oblivion. The implication is that the Whig party was as out of place in the modern world as the Stegosaurus, and that the contemporary Republicans resemble them in their quaint archaism. This is of course unfair to the Whigs, who on most cultural, economic, and moral issues were more forward thinking than the Democrats of the Jacksonian era were, and, as the pro-business party of their era, embraced a noblesse oblige public spiritedness very different from the predatory social Darwinism of their immediate successors, the Republicans of the Gilded Age. More than this, however, the analogy betrays an inaccurate understanding of what brought the Whig party down.