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Sunbeams

If Rosa Parks had moved to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Ramsey Clark

Standing At The Wall

On its surface death meets life, the past meets the present. What was, doesn’t accuse; what is, doesn’t apologize. But this is the one place in America where they face each other, like it or not, beyond cant, revision, and lies.

Krome

“Krome was set up on an abandoned missile base in the middle of a swamp. It’s big enough to hold about a thousand people, but they’ve got to have twice that many there now. All kinds of human rights violations. Not enough toilets, not enough water. These people haven’t done anything, but they’re being treated worse than convicted criminals. They even put hormones in the food to keep the men from rioting. It’s a concentration camp. You’ll see,” he promises me.

Conjuring Tibet

Turning youths loose on actual or possible dissidents was probably the shrewdest and cruelest of Maoist strategies. Here were True Believers, lacking life experience to complicate their thoughts, still endowed with the primal cruelty of children. Having internalized the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, they were empowered to indulge in any form of torture, from breast amputation to castration, secure in the righteousness of their cause.

The Revolution

The Secret

Driving back to Arlington across Key Bridge, I leaned my face against the cold glass window while my father bit off sentences like stalks of celery. I’m deeply, bitterly disappointed in you. Crunch. Do you know the risk you put me in? Crunch. What if you’d been kidnapped? Crunch. Who did you talk to? Crunch.

Hero With A Thousand Faces

One of Bill Clinton’s favorite movies, according to the newspaper, is High Noon. It’s one of my favorites, too, a classic Western about a lone man standing up against evil. I watched it again the weekend before the inauguration.

Confederacy Of Dunces

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

The new dumbness — the non-thought of received ideas — is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it’s really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a “cleansing” so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult.

My Campaign Diary

I run for president the same way. Every few weeks, I go to St. Mark’s Church (a half block from my house), mimeograph leaflets, and stick some in my attache case. Whenever it comes up in a conversation that I’m running for president, I take one out.

Fool’s Gold

Why should someone like me worry about the recession as much as I do? I didn’t have any money before it, and I won’t have any money after it. The housing it is now killing me to buy will cost less the next time I have to buy. I have more to gain than to lose.