Authors Electric

Working like dogs, w/Nibblick, & MJain Liars want to eat my neighborhood again. Their threat is clearer and more immediate this time. With deadlocked polls putting him in short-fingered reach of the U.S. Presidency again, Hair Hitler vows to round up tens of millions of people - immigrants and anyone opposing him he can "denaturalize" - and put them in concentration camps. Even Demagogue Don admits his political pogrom - involving the military, and local police - would be a blood-soaked affair. But, like the purges of Stalin and other genocidal strongmen Trump adulates - purges would aim at terrorizing the populace and consolidating dictatorial power for him and his cronies. Chicago does El Grito (Sun Times) It's not politics. It's personal. Tumpistas have put my blended family and my mixed neighborhood in their  orange crosshairs, just as they did during Trump's first White House term, There can only be one response. Nope! We're not going back! In the wee...

" The more things change, the more they stay the same," French journalist  Alphonse Karr wrote in an 1849 column.  Change is a constant of life, usually by increments in culture and politics, occasionally accelerated. This is one of those times. Like most Americans, this past week my inamorata, the noted artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris , and I watched seemingly earthshaking events unfold daily. July 2024 shifted .  It feels like 1968, a year of assassinations and upheaval that shaped our personal lives along with politics. Inspired by Don Delill o's masterful novel  Underworld  mingling characters' inner lives with the Cold War, I made the first six months of 1968 a protagonist in my memoirist novella, " Our Own Kind , " featured in my 2018 collection: " Sometimes Ridiculous ."     Eleanor and I are old enough to remember moments when we experienced political change as personal, not just as a spectator sport in Washington.  Karr's cynical quote...

Brahe's lost star tracker Happy new year! Time to reckon, to reflect and to resolve, or so they say. Not my strong points. My mind roils with riptides. I have to swim criss-cross if I'm to make it ashore. Don't expect any consistency here. Besides, as Emerson pointed out, it's overrated. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he wrote, "adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Now we march into the third decade of the twenty-first century, too many out there goosestepping to the deadly drums of tyrannies past. You can't call this mess millennial anymore. No more excuses. With a precious few notable exceptions, this brave new century has been a big disappointment. Those of us who came of age in the last century expected so much more.  We see no magic-bullet cures for major diseases, only Big Pharma raking in obscene profits for incremental palliatives with terrifying side effects that announcers list i...