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Civil Liberties
Sunbeams
September 1980When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.
And That’s The Way It Is?
For a while, several years ago, I stopped watching the TV news. This was no small thing. I was in the habit of watching all three networks, often at the same time, spinning the dial with the finesse of an accomplished musician running scales on his favorite instrument.
May 1980Chapel Hill
An Elegy For Jesse Stroud
There is no precipitating event for this elegy. No anniversary. No birthday. No cause whatever, other than personal need. Jesse Stroud lived, struggled, and died. I do not purposefully vilify nor vindicate. Neither do I celebrate. Certainly not regret.
April 1980True Stories
As soon as we were seated at the Su-En, the couple left for the restroom. While they were away, an Oriental woman walked in, sitting next to me. Yoko Ono! Seconds later, in came John Lennon!
February 1980People’s Park: Ten Years Later
Before it was over, there were nearly 1000 police and 2300 National Guard troops called in to augment local police. There were nearly a thousand arrests, more than 100 people shot, one killed, one blinded, and a million dollars in property damage in one of the longest-running civil disturbances in the nation’s history.
September 1979Means Of Survival
Book Review
Though Sophie’s Choice handles larger themes — the nature of evil itself, for instance, which Styron examines through the literature of the holocaust — it is really a book about guilt, in particular, the guilt of survivors.
August 1979All That Glitters
Book Review
American Gold is a book full of poetry, a book of history, the story of a place as it changes through fifty-eight years, the history of the shaping of a sensibility. It is not quite a novel. But it is a book worth having.
August 1978March 1978
An American Dream
Nothing shocks us anymore. The line between social truth and social fiction has been erased (from the Warren Commission to Watergate we have been asked to disbelieve our eyes and ears) and we are in the curious no-man’s-land of the artist, the madman and the saint. There is no consensus reality; there never was.
March 1978