HISTORY

(Above: Hiroshima Peace Memorial) Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. “Trinity” was the code name of the first nuclear weapons test of an atomic bomb. This test was conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945. The small black dots on the horizon are trees. Then, on August 6, 1945…Hiroshima. […]

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” This is our […]

Riot on Sunset Strip is a 1967 low-budget exploitation movie, released by American International Pictures, and filmed and released within six weeks of the actual late-1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots. It’s big promise was to let you meet “the hippies… the teeny-boppers in their too-tight capris… and the pot partygoers” Today the film, widely held […]

Too many American intellectuals today spend their time mocking popular expressions of American exceptionalism and other forms of patriotic thought without working to create and promote a richer vision of the country, a deeper and wiser patriotism that connects with the sentiments of ordinary Americans and raises them to a wider and more magnanimous plane. […]

Behind the closed doors of the famous Disney Studios in Hollywood.

In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. Beneath the snow, after […]

Often cited and promoted solely as the Eisenhower speech that warned against “the military industrial complex,” the speech in it’s more extended version actually contained three distinct warnings to America from the departing President. 1. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the […]

“In their hearts they turned to each other’s hearts for refuge.” – Jackson Browne Before the Deluge   “I wonder if those simple gestures of genetleness and mutual delight did not make all the difference.,,,To (many) sentinments like these sounded zany….(but) where do we find a similar generosity of spirit om the rogue populism that […]

(From LET IT BLEED Ethan Russell recounts getting out of Altamont…. and a few thoughts about what it meant.) Forty years later what I remember, clearly, is running into the pitch blackness, up the side of a hill until suddenly halted by a chain link fence. Behind me a man was dead from knife wounds,though I […]