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Posts published by “Clancy Sigal”

The Politics Of Nostalgia

For a long time I lived among educated middle class English who had a passion, verging on sickness, for Panhellenism, a nostalgic look back to classical Greece (without the slaves and bad drainage) as a “second home”.

It’s The Pits: The Miner’s Blues

I’ve never been down an American coal mine, among the least safest in the world, though have plunged thousands of feet into the dark bowels of British pits in Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland, the world’s safest until they were closed by politicians and bean counters.

Why The Dems Lost

Trip Gabriel, the New York Times reporter, found many Trump signs in the front yards of loyal union members who had been Democrats. Don’t waste your time worrying about Russian hacks or FBI sabotage or…

Do We Want To Win Or Just Feel Good?

Meryl Streep makes a beautiful, heartfelt (“sank hooks in my heart”) speech at the Golden Globes eviscerating Trump for mocking the disabled who lack “the power and capacity to fight back.” Whoa there, Meryl. You’re…

We Forget

Bad regimes are in the business of making us forget. More than anything they want to cancel our feeling for the impossible that twists some of us into impractical romantics. Teenagers tend to pass through…

(Political) Climate

Faced with a crummy time in the McCarthyite and Cold War 1950s here’s what some of us did. The American mood was apocalyptic. LA was ringed with nuclear tipped Nike missiles. We more or less…

How Would Hemingway’s ‘Robert Jordan’ Vote?

Written 76 years ago, For Whom The Bell Tolls is Senator John McCain’s favorite novel, also an “inspiration” to Obama. Toward the end of the Spanish civil war, up in the mountains looking over a…

Trump’s Rasputin

Not even a demented Hollywood casting director high on meth could have dreamed up a lowlife creep beast from 20,000 fathoms like Roy Cohn who was Donald Trump’s long time Rasputin. Trump was a mere…

Penn & El Chapo

I love Hollywood – the film industry. I really do. In rain or shine, good or bad times, it’s given me a living off and on. I’ve been a movie-set gofer, a bit actor (as…

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