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War
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Demagogue Days
This is the story of my descent into a modern sort of inferno, so I’m going to start the way Dante did back in the day. As our saga opens, I’m pushing forty, about halfway through my life’s journey. I’m not lost in a dark wood; I’m in Oregon, schlepping my suitcase through the Portland airport, where travelers are granted the foolish pleasure of free Internet access.
January 2008
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Before She Sends It
I dreamt that I was in London, offering my business card to English women in exchange for a hug. They seemed pleased to hug an American; I was satisfied with the arrangement, too. Then I met a woman who was visiting from North Carolina. I didn’t come all this way to hug someone from North Carolina, I thought. But I gave her my card, too.
December 2007
Fiction
The Swing
Catch lit a joint and smoked it as he drove past the Gulf Coast Pak & Ship, which still had its sun-faded WE SHIP FOR THE HOLIDAYS sign up from last year. It was Friday, Christmas Eve, and he was going to fetch his holiday bonus from Mr. Zimmer in the big yellow house, his last paycheck for the week.
December 2007Sy Safransky’s Notebook
November 2007
My father’s parents, who lived with us throughout my childhood, fled Russia in 1905 to escape poverty and the state-sponsored massacres of Jews, called pogroms. They told me about the elation they’d felt when, after an arduous three-week ocean journey, they’d glimpsed the majestic statue in New York Harbor for the first time.
November 2007Quotations
Sunbeams
July 2007We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
July 2007
No, I don’t like demonstrations. But, to my mind, showing up for a march like this is the civic equivalent of doing the dishes or emptying the trash: the dirty, unglamorous work of living in a democracy.
July 2007The Sun Interview
Be Not Silent
Sister Joan Chittister Speaks Out On War, Feminism, And The Catholic Church
I am opposed to abortion as a birth-control method. At the same time, I ask myself how it is that the Catholic Church can hold that all abortions are equally, gravely sinful at all times, but that death may be inflicted in other circumstances without always being equally, gravely sinful. The Church teaches that you may kill to punish, to defend yourself, or to defend the state, and you are not committing a sin. In areas where men are most often in charge of life — as they are in the justice system or the military — they may kill by the thousands, and the Church won’t say a word about it. But when a woman is in charge of that decision, as she is when it comes to abortion, the Church pronounces that it is always, under all circumstances, gravely immoral and deeply sinful.
June 2007
Quotations
Sunbeams
May 2007What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.
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