Arts & Culture

• These are dark times for our nation. Our democracy is splintering.
• Related: Dylan, the American Left, and What We Have Lost

Katy Farber, Huffington Post

Image by Brittney Bush Bollay on Flickr 

11/04/2016 | So, America. Here’s where we are. It’s 2016.

We have a major party candidate bragging about sexually assaulting women on tape. We have African American boys and men frequently killed by police, and police being the victims of violence themselves. We have American citizens starting up militias to be prepared if their party candidate doesn’t win. We have people claiming that everything that is wrong with America was caused by President Barack Obama (9/11, ISIS, you name it). We have citizens showing a candidate for president’s face with a bullseye and the word “Killary.” These are dark times for our nation. Our democracy is splintering.

Katy Farber: Educator, Author, Speaker

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Dylan, the American Left, and What We Have Lost, Juan Cole, Truthdig 

• I know the below is too on the nose, and you shouldn’t mess with a classic, but just hear me out and maybe weep a little for how far backward we went from Dylan’s youthful vision of a better future.
• Related: Are We Living in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’?

I know the below is too on the nose, and you shouldn’t mess with a classic, but just hear me out and maybe weep a little for how far backward we went from Dylan’s youthful vision of a better future.

Juan Cole, Truthdig

Oct 14, 2016 | Bob Dylan would no doubt be as distressed as the American corporate media to see an ideological interpretation of his 1960s anthems that helped win him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Especially after his 1966 motorcycle accident and retreat to Woodstock and domesticity, Dylan turned inward, exploring an internal life of ethical values and love and rejection of political cynicism (as with “All Along the Watchtower“). But the early ’60s were a different matter.

Since the mass media won’t tell you Dylan was in his youth a leftist or that some of his greatest work came out of a critique of our corporation-dominated, unequal, militaristic and racist society, it is important to underline it lest the celebration of his masterpieces become merely maudlin (and he would hate that outcome, too).

Juan Cole, Contributor,  is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War.

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Are We Living in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’? Joseph Pearce, Intellectual Takeout

The poem presents a panoply of characters, all as vain as they are vacuous. Empty heads and empty hearts leading empty lives.

In contemporary society—especially modern society—we can see the signs of morbidity around us, in our boundless use of harmful fossil fuels, in much sought-after expansion beyond the capacity to sustain ourselves, and in the physical decay of the environment and in the places we inhabit.

Depth Psychology Alliance / Dandelion Salad with Chris Hedges

Image by r2hox via Flickr

September 15, 2016 | In this depth psychology oriented discussion powered by Pacifica Graduate Institute, Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Chris Hedges speaks with Depth Psychologist, Bonnie Bright, Ph.D, about how, as both individuals and civilizations, we encounter cycles of growth, maturation, decadence, and decay, and death.

In contemporary society—especially modern society—we can see the signs of morbidity around us, in our boundless use of harmful fossil fuels, in much sought-after expansion beyond the capacity to sustain ourselves, and in the physical decay of the environment and in the places we inhabit.

Chris Hedges, a weekly columnist for Truthdig, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported from more than 50 countries, specializing in American politics and society. 

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America, We Are Better Than This, David A. Miller, Huffington Post

This is not the time to give in, it is the time to find what has always called us to be just a little bit better, rise above what serves to drag us down and soar above our basest of instincts. We can do this America, please, don’t give up and don’t give in.

• The Smithsonian’s new memorial of African American history and culture is at once triumphant and crushing.

• Related: Black Lives Don’t Matter to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

Vann R. Newkirk II, the Atlantic

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A woman passes a display depicting the Mexico Olympic protest at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Sep 23, 2016 | I should not be here.

By the cold universal logic of statistics, none of us should; each of the near-7-billion lives on Earth is a mathematical fluke. But as an American black person, albeit as a free person with a fairly full complement of civil rights, I’ve always been aware of the especially immense unlikelihood of my own existence. For four centuries, most people who look like me and the vast majority of the people who gave rise to my own flesh and blood have been killed, crushed, or disenfranchised under the torture rack of white supremacy and racial injustice. As police violence, voting rights, and Donald Trump’s promises of Big Racism dominate our political conversations, and as protests and riots roil the streets of my birthplace of Charlotte, I’m reminded that I may be thanking my lucky stars a bit too soon.

Vann R. Newkirk II is a staff writer at the Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy.

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Black Lives Don’t Matter to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Bill Blum, Truthdig

A Black Lives Matter protest in New York City. (The All-Nite Images / CC BY-SA 2.0)

• One thing the (Black Lives Matter) BLM analyses don’t do, however, is endorse a presidential candidate. And that’s for an eminently good reason: The candidates of both major parties, in their quests for power, have chosen to snub and malign the movement and the cause it represents.
• Related: The Normalization of Evil in American Politics