Photo credit: Caricature of a Fat Cat, Wikipedia It’s All Greek to Me The cemetery on the island of Mykonos in the Mediterranean Sea is a kind of oasis amidst the largely barren landscape of the island’s hills and white homes. The sea is everywhere, as is the warmth. It was 37 years ago. The cemetery seemed to have lots of some kind of coniferous trees that lent uncommon green to the otherwise bleached, but…
Photo credit: Statue of W.E.B. Du Bois, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Howard Lisnoff Author’s note: Apologies, as I often return to the French pronunciation of “Du Bois” in this audio file. A Native Son Returns Home I lost touch with the movement to erect a statue in honor of W.E.B. Du Bois in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I worked on a committee that was primarily focused on plans for the celebration of the 150th…
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons Photo credit: Library of Congress Now and Then: What We Focus On There’s a market and a following of salacious behavior in the US. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but we especially like or love to follow salacious behavior on the part of our leaders and so-called leaders. This fact has to be seen in the face of the mass murder going on daily in the Gaza…
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons Bottoms Up It seems that toilet habits, yes toilet habits in the US, and perhaps elsewhere, although you could never convince me of that, are not what they should be. They’re not up to snuff, so to speak. As a result, and in answer to this national, maybe international emergency, the fabled free market has stepped in and offered all the latest innovation and technological prowess in personal care products. If…
Photo credit: SUV that followed on my bumper on the Mass Pike… license plate edited out. Howard Lisnoff The Enraged Society Aggressive driving on US roads is a given. Drive anywhere and at any time, and drive at the speed limit, whatever that is— 45 mph or 65 mph— and like with our foreign and domestic policy, some level of intimidation and violence will happen. Yesterday, July 11, 2025, our car was trailed by someone…
Photo credit: Wikipedia One Man Got it Wrong No, this is not about Donald Trump, who gets everything wrong in his move to put the US back into the medieval historical epoch. This is about a one-man play for which I ushered last night. The play was generally about one person’s struggle to fit in living in the US with an incredibly varied heritage of Middle Eastern origin. The play, in my opinion, was great,…
Photo credit: Surfers at Narragansett Town Beach Howard Lisnoff The Scent of Tanning Oil I hadn’t been to a beach in quite a long time. I’m not enamored by freshwater beaches, having been somewhat raised near the ocean in Rhode Island and part of the surfing craze of the 1960s. The surfboard I had was a locally produced “pop out,” which meant that the foam core that gave the board buoyancy was processed with oil…
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, ICE arrest Old Glory Club It’s not so much that the Old Glory Club is unusual, which has “26 chapters in 20 US states”(“Revealed: the far-right, antisemitic men’s club network spreading across US,” Guardian, July 5, 2025), as the fact that the kind of violent male bonding and hate which it represents is so endemic in the US. But there is a frightening piece of this not-so-atypical hate group, and that…
Photo credit: Library of Congress The Fourth It was July 4, 1981, and I drove around a rotary in Narragansett, Rhode Island. On the car radio, the DJ almost seemed to plead in her delivery about the country still being ours, that we had to act, and that saving the nation from Reaganism was foremost in her mind. The antiwar movement from the Vietnam War was not quite in the rearview mirror of history. Now,…
Cruelty, Inc. Photo credit: PublicDomainPictures.net A little late for the Enlightenment, and more like a scene from Dickens’ Industrial Revolution, US capitalism continues to cannibalize its most vulnerable. There is nothing out of the ordinary for capitalism to be a predatory system, just as there was nothing too extraordinary for communism to produce dictatorships. There was always the gloss and public face of capitalism in the US, up until the movement of globalization. Once, during…