Thursday, March 12, 2009 Of Paper “Money” and “Paper” Terrorism Proving his antagonist’s point? Socrates insisted that justice was something other than the “advantage of the stronger” — yet he submitted to an unjust death sentence, thereby apparently validating the idea that citizens have a moral responsibility to submit to officially sanctioned injustice. “Justice is […]

Monday, March 16, 2009 Dismantling The Killer Elite Maintaining the pretense of authority: “Nothing to see here! Please disperse!” commands Frank Drebin, Lt. Detective, Police Squad — a special division of the police force. Sometimes the truth is best told through fictional allegory, especially when a dash of comedy is used to make the parables […]

Thursday, March 19, 2009 Remembrance of Recessions Past The greatest man I will ever know: My father, L. Richard Grigg, holding his grandson, Jefferson Leonidas Grigg (age 3 at the time), circa 2004.At some point in each visit we pay to my parents’ home I find myself pondering a curious object found in their washroom […]

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 Liberty and Law, not “Law and Order” (Brief Programming Update, 3/26) With our days as a manufacturing power a wistful memory and the marketing of fraudulent Wall Street “financial products” an infinitely self-replenishing source of national outrage, incarceration may soon become — by default — our leading national industry. The United […]

Monday, March 30, 2009 The Collaborator’s Song (Updated with a brief afterthought, March 31) “Avenge me!” Tom Eckert, bloodied but unbowed, gazes through the wire of a “re-education” camp at his sons Jed and Tom following the totalitarian takeover of America in the 1984 film Red Dawn. While that movie depicted a Soviet occupation of […]

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 DARE and Back Again Not an equal “partnership”: The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) logo illustrates the conceit that the state’s instruments of indoctrination (schools) and coercion (police) are “partners” with the parents in molding the character of young people. Sitting through a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) graduation ceremony is […]

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 The Ballad of John Singer ***A brief, inadequate, and highly tendentious summary of the John Singer case. The Singers, sans John: Vicki Singer is second from the right in the back row; below, right, the Singer farm (or, as the media put it, “compound”) as it appeared in 1988. In the […]

Thursday, April 9, 2009 The Pogrom That Wasn’t [By way of preface: I’m tired, and by that I mean I am weary at the molecular level. I have no fewer than three partially completed essays — and what promises to be a fairly huge investigative piece — in the works, but domestic concerns have made […]