Upcoming Events:
Wednesday, 6 May 9 am
Radio Interview with Phil Nee, on “Jim Otis and Smalltown Crime, WRCO Radio, Richland Center, Wis.
Friday, 29 May, 7 pm
Book Talk, Signing and Sale, on “Upstairs and the Jim Otis Series,” Belleville Books, 20 East Main St., Belleville, Ill.
Saturday, 30 May,1-3 pm
Meet & Greet, Signing & Sale of Last Kid Books, at Belleville Books, 20 East Main St., Belleville, Ill.
The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin “Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins.” — Cheyenne proverb MADISON, Wis. — A funny thing happened on Capitol Hill this week, when Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst apparently teamed up with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, from New York, on a proposal that would tighten the screws on…
by David Benjamin “In the colonial countries… the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force.”…
by David Benjamin “Call it peace or call it treason/ Call it love or call it reason/ But I ain’t marchin’ any more.” — Phil Ochs MADISON, Wis. — At my age, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “movement” is Metamucil. However, as I’ve watched the crowds in the…
by David Benjamin “Be not the slave of words.” — Thomas Carlyle MADISON, Wis. — In my Boston days I frequented a cozy and artful movie house on Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Square and Central Square, called the Orson Welles Cinema. One of the best flicks I saw there was a Russian romance, A Slave…
by David Benjamin “There is a poor, blind Samson in this land “Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel, “Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, “And shake the pillars of this Commonweal, “Till the vast Temple of our liberties “A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.” — Henry…
by David Benjamin “This… ‘mutant swarm,’ this ‘quasi species,’ had always held within it the potential to kill, and it had killed. Now, all over the world, the virus had gone through roughly the same number of passages through humans. All over the world, the virus was adapting to humans, achieving maximum efficiency. And all…
by David Benjamin “There are tons of guns floating around Georgia, and not much harder to procure than a bowl of goldfish.” — Gail Collins MADISON, Wis. — Ironically, a pathologically horny gunman in Atlanta has pointed a way out of the voting rights crisis that has shaken once reliably Republican strongholds like Georgia, Arizona,…
by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — Essayist Margaret Renkl recently recalled a question she posed to her great-grandmother about her great-grandfather, who had died some thirty years before. To Renkl’s surprise, great-grandmother barely remembered the man to whom she’d been married for three decades. She told Renkl, “It’s almost like it happened in a dream.”…
by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — One of America’s most familiar figures, Rush Limbaugh, projected a persona that offered barely a smidgeon of nuance. Rush, who died last month, was a two-dimensional construction whom you either loved or hated, No middle ground between. This is how he chose to be esteemed. When interviewed about his…
by David Benjamin “The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold…” — Robert Service MADISON, Wis. — Although systematically hushed up by the mainstream media, there are signs that the Wisconsin tradition of setting surplus children out in the snow in the dead of winter to be eaten by…