Homage to Icarus

A rel­a­tive of mine once con­fided that he voted for Ronald Reagan barely more than a decade after he asked that copies of The Daily Worker be mailed to him in Vietnam. I asked him why he did so, and his answer was that he “was tired of feel­ing ashamed of being an American.”
28 years later, […]

Compare:
In the years of its rise, the move­ment lit­tle by lit­tle brought the community’s atti­tude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resent­ment, from trust to fear and sus­pi­cion. […] By 1933 at least five of my ten [Nazi] friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intel­lec­tu­als” as unre­li­able, and among […]

[Disclosure: I dropped a day’s pay on Obama’s cam­paign about a week before the pas­tor thing hap­pened, and hope I never feel com­pelled to write about this elec­tion again.]
Matt Taibbi is (as usual, and in spite of his ridicu­lous hump­ing of Hunter Thompson’s legacy) repeat­edly cor­rect in his assess­ment of American pol­i­tics as a bunch of […]