Tag: powers
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Soldiering for Obama
Today my dear friend Jake and I set out early from our politically-taken-for-granted New York City for Philadelphia, two hours away (well, three with our incompetent Greyhound driver). By late morning we arrived at a canvass-a-thon in south Philly hosted by Terry McAuliffe, a Democratic operative who ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The idea was to…
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Rampage in Minneapolis
A dear friend of mine, Nicole Salazar, was peacefully filming protests at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis when police in riot gear assaulted her, cornered her, and dragged her on the ground before arresting her and charging her with a felony. Here is the horrifying video she recorded during the assault: The next day…
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A Compassionate Consensus
As an alternative to the knee-jerk policy dogmas that give liberalism a bad name, an attitude of compassion was seemingly given the Democratic imprimatur the other night in Barack Obama’s stunning nomination acceptance speech. That’s the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as…
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History Marches On
Out of a kind of knee-jerk duty, I have always taken exception to Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “end of history” thesis—the idea that democratic capitalism is the final step of human political development and that all we are waiting for is the world to catch up (even Fukuyama has distanced himself from it). But a recent…
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Critics, Critique, and LAWMAKERS
I’d like to invite you, if you’ll be in New York this weekend, to see the final performance of WE ARE THE LAWMAKERS, a daring play of political chaos directed by my dear friend, Marc Andreottola. It is part of this year’s New York International Film Festival and will be playing Saturday, August 23 at…
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Back on the Safety Net
Here’s to healthcare—yesterday, apparently, marks the beginning of my health insurance coverage through the Freelancers’ Union, a fine internet-based organization that helps out the growing ranks of independent workers. It comes six months, just about to the day, from when my graduate school insurance cut off and I joined the 48 million uninsured Americans. My…
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The Local Neighborhood Conspiracy
Religion Dispatches has just put up my review of Jeff Sharlet’s book, The Family, about a secret Christian political organization headquartered in my hometown of Arlington, Virginia. Like the emperor’s new clothes, power is invisible to those who don’t happen to know about it. One could, as I did, spend eighteen years growing up less…
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Early Morning Raid
I’ve got a new video up now to join the rest of them, a music video of the previously unheard-by-anyone-except-me song “Afghanistan.” The song is set to some video I got of a wild thunderstorm in New York the other night, which looked so much like a bombing raid that I had to juxtapose it…
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Hello World!
The Row Boat has been redesigned! Though only powers above mine can know if it was really necessary, I’ve spent the last two days obsessing over migrating from Little Logger to WordPress. All the old Row Boat material is still available on the Archives page, as well as through the search field on the sidebar.…