What’s wrong with bitterness and self-pity?
In my blog excerpted here Monday, I referred to the fact that Americans themselves – ourselves; I am American and live in America – “will soon be on the receiving end of drone surveillance.” (It turns...
View ArticleThinking the unthinkable
James Howard Kunstler is an American writer who enjoys a large following for his prediction of a looming future in which our technological civilisation based on oil dependence will have failed us, and...
View ArticleWhat are we doing to ourselves?
The latest thing we’re all being forced to try to make sense of and/or pick up the pieces from is the video of four US Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Last Friday I woke up...
View ArticleWhat are we entitled to hope for?
Last week I published an article addressing the retired cricket star Imran Khan’s recent surge in popularity as an alternative to Pakistan’s discredited established politicians. The article elicited...
View ArticleIs Imran Khan the leader Pakistan needs?
I’m not Pakistani, and for me to make pronouncements or pass judgment on Pakistani domestic politics would be presumptuous. But several Pakistani friends have asked me to write about Imran Khan. I do...
View ArticlePreserving humanity in an inhumane time
“Protest that endures, I think,” the American writer Wendell Berry once wrote, “is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own...
View ArticleWhy are we in Afghanistan?
By “we” I mean we Americans, since I am an American and the question of the American presence in Afghanistan is the one that’s most urgent and on people’s minds. In 1967 the American author Norman...
View ArticleWhat does Afghanistan have to do with Vietnam?
Well, the latest news is that a lone US serviceman has gone on a shooting rampage outside Kandahar and killed at least 16 people. The Los Angeles Times reports: “The shooting early Sunday took place in...
View ArticleIs America paying attention?
For purposes of this column, I mean by “America” not the state or the establishment, but the society. It’s important to draw that distinction, especially these days as the domestic conversation in...
View ArticleSeattle bedazzled by “Josh”
Pakistani film Josh’s Seattle screening.–Photo courtesy https://www.facebook.com/thefilmjosh On March 5 in my home city of Seattle, I had the pleasure of being part of the first North American audience...
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