fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
Radical left politics went haywire in the 1970s. By that point the big names, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, were long gone. The FBI had decimated the Black Panthers. Anti-Vietnam War protests – and indeed the war itself – had grown nastier, with events like the killing of students at Kent State. The dizzying parade…
Torture has no justification. There is not, nor ever will be, a reason to torture someone. All the rationalizations are hogwash. Torture has one, singular motivator: revenge. Revenge is a part of our mythos. Cultures throughout the ages have envisioned angry gods exacting revenge upon indolent citizens, or even each other. We follow in their footsteps. Theater…
My husband and I went to dinner last night at one of our favorite restaurants in Berkeley. On the way, we saw a group of about 8 or more motorcycle cops gathered at a corner gas station just down the block from where we were going. As we waited for the light to change so…
Our band will never sound the same again. – Duke Ellington, after the passing of Johnny Hodges Not a minute of this Thanksgiving will go by without my thoughts turning time and again on my brother Robert. This will be the first Thanksgiving since his passing. To be sure, we did not gather last year,…
During the Trayvon Martin tragedy, one question lingered in the back of the head: what if his killer, George Zimmerman, had been a police officer? Now we know. There have been exceptions to the narrative, where an officer had to go to trial over a killing committed under shady circumstances. There was Johannes Mehserle, the…
Minstrels of various stripes have graced college campuses for decades. At 1980s UCLA, all we got were preachers. Some were local, some visited from afar. But they all had the same message: you are evil and are going to hell. One of my favorites was Brother Jed. He came with an entourage that included his…
When Scotland held their independence referendum vote, they achieved a voter turnout rate of an astounding 84.5%. I said then that the US would never achieve so high a level of participation in an election, least of all in a midterm election. I was right. The national turnout was about 36%. Pitiful. A democracy cannot…
US midterm elections are tomorrow (Tuesday, November 4). Midterms, so say the Pundits, lack the sex appeal of presidential elections, but that doesn’t make them any less important. Look at what happened in 2010. In a wave of indignation, Republicans took over the House of Representatives and a great many of the state houses across the country. The…
Another hiatus for the gar spot was not in the plans. But the fates dictated otherwise. A week and a half ago, a medical emergency rushed me to hospital and kept me there for about 5 days. I then had a subsequent trip to the emergency room, where they kept me overnight. Nasty infections, in…
We all hide from monsters sometimes. Part of the Doctor Who legacy continues to be its penchant for sending its younger fans hiding behind the relative safety of the sofa, terrified of the monster of the week. We all hide from monsters, but sometimes for different reasons. I haven’t written a word about Ferguson or…
