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Posts tagged as “essays”

Our Times: Fascism Isn’t Looming

Either Mussolini or my high school civics teacher defined fascism as “government, business and labor working together in the interests of business.” By this definition fascism isn’t looming in the US, fascism is here, having…

The Queen Is Rotting in Her Grave

While vacationing on the East Coast in September, I watched TV and couldn't help noticing that Queen Elizabeth died, her scoundrel son, Charles, was the king and that there had been a changing of the…

Our Founding Realtor

We celebrated President’s Day in February, so it seemed like a good time to look beneath the blizzard of conventional admiration for George Washington, the nation’s founding realtor.  America’s founders were eloquent in their speeches…

Against The Orthodoxies

It is not only a “case,” but a man and a book. Salman Rushdie has suffered unconscionably as a human being. In hiding for four years, he has lost his personal life and all personal…

Million Roses For A Queen

A journey of 3000 miles begins with a flight delay as someone probably once said, along with the Death of Her Majesty, as Agatha Christie probably once wrote. There are worse place to be marooned…

Ruth Gottstein

Ruth Gottstein died in late August at the age of 100. She was the founder of Volcano Press, a small publisher in the Sierra foothills that brought out Dell Martin’s “Battered Wives” and more than…

Pear Brandy

Back in the late seventies I went down to Hopland with a couple guys to load up a truck with fallen fruit to make pear brandy. Don Fi knew the orchard manager and made the…

Hymns & Her: The Queen’s Funeral

It was all about the Queen until it wasn’t. And it was precisely at that point that Charles didn’t sing along. When it came time for “God Save the King” at the end of his…

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