Ronald Reagan. Grover Norquist. Newt Gingrich. Wayne LaPierre. Rupert Murdoch. Without those five gentlemen — and I use the term loosely — Donald Trump and the other MAGAts would never have made it through the doorway. Reagan was the one who said government was the problem, not the solution, and that the scariest sentence in …
FIVESOME OF VILLAINS GAVE US A VERY DIFFERENT AMERICA Read More »
This is an idea I explored a few years back. It drew some ridicule then, but as time passes and the problem looks more and more insoluble, it might be worth examining again. If there’s one thing that always bothers me, it’s banging my head against the wall again and again looking for a solution …
The first time I heard country music and actually liked it was 1971. It was a movie I had been looking forward to seeing — Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” — and the very first thing on the soundtrack was Tammy Wynette singing “Stand By Your Man.” It wasn’t like anything I had ever …
WYNETTE ONE OF THE OVERLOOKED GREAT COUNTRY STARS Read More »
“We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is …
CAN AN ENTIRE PARTY THRIVE ON HATE AND RESENTMENT? Read More »
I originally wrote this for another blogsite seven years ago, but with the right wing getting more and more worked up about anyone who doesn’t fit into the masculine man or feminine woman categories, I thought it was worth mentioning again. I also love the opportunity to remind everyone what an amazing person my daughter …
It was a Saturday night in September 1973 — the last one, in fact — and I was in the Crazy Horse in Georgetown. It had been the bar of choice for my friends and me since the summer of 1969, but on this particular evening I was alone and getting nowhere. I had two …
‘AMERICAN GRAFFITI’ REMEMBERED, BOTH HAPPY AND SAD Read More »
Fairfax County, Va., is renaming my high school. As news goes, it ranks somewhere below war in the Middle East, Republican antics in the House of Representatives and Big Don Trump’s latest meltdown. As renamings go, it’s sort of a “meh.” Most of us didn’t know who Wilbert Tucker Woodson was even when we were …
It’s amazing how some dreams can come true nearly a lifetime after you dream them and decades after you’ve all but given up on them. I was a voracious reader from an early age — I was reading books before my third birthday — and I made hundreds of friends in those books. So much …
“Think of all the hate there is in Red China, then take a look around to Selma, Alabama …” Barry McGuire might have been wrong. We weren’t really on the “Eve of Destruction” in 1965, but we sure were on the even of an era and which more and more people were hating more and …
I have been reading a couple of Bob Woodward’s books about Watergate recently, one I read many years ago and one I wasn’t all that familiar with. I became aware of “The Last of the President’s Men,” Woodward’s book about the man who revealed President Nixon’s taping system, Alexander Butterfield, while reading Cassidy Hutchinson’s “Enough.” …
