The N-word appears sparingly in James, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel that reinvents the escaped slave narrative while it recycles Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a classic set in the antebellum American South where…
Posts published in “Essays”
If you read the Daily Journal you are old, wealthy and beginning to wonder what to do with all the money, houses, sets of China, bitcoins, Krugerrands, bongo drums and National Geographic magazines you’ve accumulated.…
TIME: Mid-afternoon, mid-May, 2025 LOCATION: Long-abandoned jail cell in former county jail (top floor, Mendocino County Courthouse.) PRESENT: A high-ranking, unnamed Mendocino County Deputy District Attorney, an unnamed Superior Court Judge, an unnamed court reporter.…
OK, here’s your civics quiz for the week. Who said the following? “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing…
I’m glad to see Paul Modic sign his name. Paul Modic said: “What if even Ernie Branscomb decides to go troll for a minute, is that so bad?” Like in what’s so bad about writing…
Monday, April 12, 2004, was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claud Cockburn, father of other Cockburns — the brothers Alexander, Andrew and Patrick — familiar to readers of the AVA and the CounterPunch…
Imperialism was a loaded word, a most unsavory word, in academia in the U.S. in the 1960s when I wrote a Ph.D. thesis about Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad titled “The Mythology of Imperialism.” I…
There’s much hand-wringing these days about the political polarization of our country. This angst is real and empirically provable in evolving individual state and community laws and regulations and, of course, in the very existence…
That's what freethinkers say when asked to swear to God, as I was asked in a Chicago courtroom in December 1969. I testified that Tom Hayden told me one night during the 1968 Democratic Convention…