France’s most notorious female con artist, Marthe Hanau, was imprisoned in the 1930s for defrauding naïve French investors of so much money that financial markets, and the government, collapsed. Madame Hanau, who bribed government officials, was a high-wattage charlatan. She was so skilled at deceiving gullible investors, the New Yorker magazine’s Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, […]
Hello?
Baked
We have passed the point of no return in altering the climate, achieving an unprecedented milestone in human history on Earth. We’ve succeeded — as long predicted — in sending enough greenhouse emissions aloft that ever more-extreme wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising seas are “now irretrievably baked in,” a group of climate scientists told the New York Times […]
Betrayed by our textbooks
Lately I’m hearing a lot of laments from white people of a certain age, summed up by one woman in her 70s: “I feel betrayed by my history textbooks.” I share this shame about my own cursory grasp of the unrelenting, race-based cruelty that attends American history. Many whites I know feel duped by the […]
Can we survive self-rule?
Whatever made those Founding Fathers think we could govern ourselves? After the first attempt sputtered out in Greece, no one dared to try democratic self-governance again for 2,000 years. Little wonder. Just look at our failure, as individuals and political leaders, to control this pandemic. We blew it. Bigly. “America drank away its children’s future,” […]
Can America’s ruinous birth defect be cured?
“Our country has a birth defect: Africans and Europeans came to this country together — but one group was in chains.” — Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State. Slavery, our 400-year old birth defect, hasn’t troubled the sleep of white Americans for some time. It was abolished in 1865. We forget — actually, we whites barely were taught — that slavery was […]
What wants fixing
We’re a short five months away from replacing our president. Time to drag ourselves out of the Slough of Despond. But let’s not “return to normal.” Let’s do better. Fix what needs fixing. How about protecting the lives of “essential” workers in Washington’s orchards and packing plants and safeguarding the elderly — and those attending them — in our […]
Careless capitalism meets Coronavirus
Pandemics, it turns out, expose national weakness and strength. Strength? How about those unprotected front line health care workers, some draped in garbage bags — here in the world’s sole superpower — sacrificing their lives to save ours? Weakness? This virus has unmasked the deeply embedded economic dysfunction and disparity that bedevils our society. Yes, our president’s […]
The buck no longer stops at the Oval Office
“I don’t take responsibility at all …” — Donald Trump’s answer to a reporter asking if he feels any responsibility for his administration’s failure to provide COVID-19 tests. Well, then, people. Here we are. As long promised by scientists, a pandemic has arrived, triggered by a new virus humans have no immunity against. There is no […]
A brief personal history: the price of petroleum
“We don’t need Mideast oil.” — Donald Trump, after his Jan. 8 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Quassim Suleimani When I first started driving as a teenager, a gallon of gas cost 29 cents — $2.73 in today’s money. That was in 1953, the year the United States and Britain saw fit to overthrow a democratically elected Iranian prime […]
A lump of coal for Christmas
“Our Founders … suspected that there could be a rogue president. I don’t think they suspected that we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.” — Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi […]
