They did not come to the Civic Center in San Francisco on April 5, 2025 to speak truth to power. They know that power doesn’t listen to people, not the powerful but vulnerable demigods in…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
Paul McCartney heard rumors of the wild goings-on in the Haight and visited on April 4, 1967. At the Fillmore Auditorium, he listened to a rehearsal by the Jefferson Airplane. At Marty Balin’s and Jack…
“The hospital,” George Orwell wrote, “is the antechamber to the tomb.” Orwell knew whereof he spoke. For much of his life he was in and out of hospitals because of serious health issues. For decades,…
The old men and women in Stacy Torres’s new book, At Home in the Big City: Growing Old in Urban America, (UC Press; $29.95), are not like the original members of the Grey Panthers, the…
Almost all novels, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to One Hundred Years of Solitude and today’s mass market best sellers, are political whether the author intends them to be political…
It wasn’t Abbie Hoffman’s finest moment. But it was one of them. It was a critical moment in 1987 when he and the daughter of a president protested against the presence of the CIA and…
Dictators – whether in Spain, South Africa, Romania or Syria — retain power for decades. They can seem impregnable and invulnerable. But they always fall, and when they do fall the world acts surprised. It…