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Sunbeams

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.

Bill Vaughan

Rise Like Lions: The Role Of Artists In A Time Of War

An Interview With Howard Zinn

We’re fooling ourselves if we think that, because we don’t have a totalitarian system or a military dictatorship, we have a real democracy with free elections. How hypocritical it is of the United States to demand that other countries have free elections, when we ourselves have elections that are not free.

Stories Hollywood Never Tells

However hateful they may be sometimes, I have always loved the movies. When I began reading and studying history, I kept coming across incidents and events that led me to think, Wow, what a movie this would make. I would look to see if a movie had been made about it, but I’d never find one. It took me a while to realize that Hollywood isn’t going to make movies like the ones I imagined. Hollywood isn’t going to make movies that are class-conscious, or antiwar, or conscious of the need for racial equality or gender equality.

The Sons Of Billy The Kid

When the discussion simply stalled out, I would dismiss the students early, leaving Frida waiting for her attendant to pick her up while I rewound the film and gathered my papers. On one such night, after a movie about the life of Billy the Kid, she said, “I met him once, you know.”

In A Dangerous Time

Bruce Cockburn On His Rage, His Music, And His Hunger For The Divine

What the occupation of Iraq, and the public perception of it in the U.S., reminds me of is the German occupation of Holland during the Second World War. The Germans thought that the Dutch would welcome them with open arms, but of course the Dutch hated them. And the German people were offended. That’s what we’re seeing in the United States. People were told before the war that the Iraqis were going to welcome Americans with open arms, because the U.S. was saving them from this horrible dictator. But they haven’t.

The Wind Isn’t Depressed

Robert Bly Talks With Michael Ventura About Art, Madness, And The Joy Of Loss

Isn’t there a word for something like “the joy of disappearing”? Some people say that’s what a water drop feels when it disappears into the ocean or evaporates on the sidewalk in the sun. I’ve always been interested in joy, but the joy of disappearing . . . [His voice trails off.] There’s a joy in winning the race, and there’s a great joy in losing the race.

God In The Smoke Room

There is a remnant of cool left to him. It’s in the way he combs his gray hair back with a little wave at the top. It’s in his gold neck-chains and the way he lights his Camel straights: one-handed, with an ornate Zippo lighter.

Sunbeams

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

Philip Roth

Resurrecting The Revolutionary Heart Of Judaism

An Interview With Michael Lerner

Jews jumped from the burning buildings of Europe and landed, unintentionally, on the backs of the Palestinians. Because our pain was so great from the Holocaust, we didn’t notice the pain we caused them.