Culture

Book Review: John Ross, Rebel with a Cause

“A good rebel reporter incites rebellion, makes people angry, encourages organization, offers them hope that another world is possible.”

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Oscar Winner Haskell Wexler, Hollywood’s Perennial Progressive

  • Ed Rampell
Photo by Ed Rampell

An amazing life has ended but his lifelong commitment to fight the good fight, for peace, for all humanity, will carry on.

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David Bowie, an Elegant Enigma Not Afraid to Ask WTF

  • Fred McKissack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1n0ElIYjVo&feature=youtu.be

“I’m always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.”

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A Digital Age That Serves People, Not Profits

  • John Nichols
Art by Richard Borge

All that is new are the gadgets we are sold—and the prospect that those gadgets might put many of us out of work.

Chi-Raq Attack - Cinema Provocateur Spike Lee’s Latest

  • Ed Rampell
http://www.officialchiraqthemovie.com/#!gallery/zoom/nqleo/dataItem-ih6ldjzm1

Chi-Raq’s cast is superb...

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He’s Baaaaack! Michael Moore’s Radical New Road Movie

  • Ed Rampell

Voila les beignet!

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Dalton Trumbo, the Screenwriter Who Broke Hollywood’s Blacklist

  • Ed Rampell

Trumbo” is a rarity: A Hollywood movie with a heroic lead identified as a Communist. Dalton Trumbo was reputedly postwar Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter, with such scripts under his belt as 1940’s class conscious “Kitty Foyle,” for which Ginger Rogers won a Best Actress Oscar, and World War II morale boosters like “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” starring Spencer Tracy. But to keep this prestigious, well-paying job, as Dalton is warned by MGM’s mogul Louis B. Mayer (Richard Portnow), he best avoid politics.  

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Political Pictures Star at the Zurich Film Festival

  • Ed Rampell
Cate Blanchett in

Progressives will find a lot to love among the 161 movies from 33 countries shown at the 11th annual Zürich Film Festival.

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Plutonians of Color

With more brutal killings and mysterious deaths while in police custody, it seems hardly a day goes by without a new dashboard camera video or protest calling out for justice. As these tragedies keep happening, I thought it might be helpful to look at our predicament from a few billion miles away.

The Confederacy Is Alive and Well in Texas

  • Jack Craver

Photo by Kevin Dooley

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBkWShXFcZ4

It was fascinating to watch Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders duke it out in the New...

Donald Trump, even before the early caucuses, had profoundly disrupted the Republicans. But how, exactly?

https://pixabay.com/en/guns-revolver-two-weapon-pistols-307948/
Obama’s Executive Action on Guns Targets the Disabled

Research shows that people with psychiatric disabilities are no more likely than anyone else to commit acts of...

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By Wendell Berry

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery 
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card 
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something 
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know. 
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord. 
Love the world. Work for nothing. 
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it. 
Denounce the government and embrace 
the flag. Hope to live in that free 
republic for which it stands. 
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man 
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers. 
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested 
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus 
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come. 
Expect the end of the world. Laugh. 
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts. 
So long as women do not go cheap 
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy 
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep 
of a woman near to giving birth? 
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head 
in her lap. Swear allegiance 
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos 
can predict the motions of your mind, 
lose it. Leave it as a sign 
to mark the false trail, the way 
you didn’t go. Be like the fox 
who makes more tracks than necessary, 
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, and environmentalist in Kentucky. This poem, first published in 1973, is reprinted by permission of the author and appears in his “New Collected Poems” (Counterpoint).


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