Cocaine, Marijuana, and Heroin
What would actually happen if drugs were legalized in America? For the last decade advocates of such a course, though politically weak, have dominated the intellectual debate for the simple reason that their criticism of existing policy holds a great deal of truth. The most conspicuous harms associated with drugs nowadays — violent crime, public…
Our Posthuman Future
As many astute observers have pointed out, controversial new ideas are assimilated in three stages. First they’re false and pernicious, then they’re true but trivial, and finally they’re what everyone claims to have believed all along. I see nothing to disprove this time-tested formula in the case of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of…
Democratic Delusions
Richard Ellis always votes no. Since moving to Oregon in 1990 to teach political science at Willamette University, Ellis has been asked to pass judgment on 74 statewide initiatives, an average of more than 12 per election. Initiatives are proposed laws or constitutional amendments placed on a state’s ballot by citizen petition (that’s how they…
Guerillas in our Midst
The headquarters of the Government of Free Vietnam (GFVN) would fit right into the guerilla campaigns of 1930s China or modern-day Colombia. Along the building’s walls, reams of photos show Free Vietnam troops training at secret Southeast Asian bases code-named “KC 702.” On the top floor, a shortwave radio transmitter broadcasts the GFVN’s anti-regime programs…
The Ideological Impostor
Run left, govern right: the fraudulence of the Bush presidency
States Blow Off Bush
While politicians in Washington have been falling over themselves toprovide huge new tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, the story in thestates is quite different and quite heartening. Take, for starters, states’ response to the big corporate tax cut thatCongress passed in March at President Bush’s insistence. By law or by custom,almost all states…
Drugs, Terror, and Evictions
Thanks partly to its association with 1960s counterculture, marijuana use has long been considered vaguely un-American. Never mind that millions of Americans have indulged in it. The pot-smoking pinkos of yesterday are — according to the Bush administration — the aiders and abettors of terrorists today. A new series of antidrug ads aimed at teenagers,…
Hidden Injuries of Class
Take a good dose of free-market ideology, mix in political debts to your business backers and an overriding concern with re-election, and voila: You have the recipe for George W. Bush’s domestic policies. The imperative of re-election has taken precedence over Bush’s conservative convictions on some occasions, leading him to adopt policies like the tariffs…
Fortress Denmark?
Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the world on April 21 when he eliminated socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of France’s presidential election. But Le Pen’s triumph was merely the latest in a string of right-wing electoral victories that have embarrassed established social democratic regimes throughout Europe. From Italy and Austria to Belgium…
Civilization and its Discontents
Cultural novelties are many, but genuinely new art forms don’t come along very often. The computer game may be to our time what film was to the early twentieth century. There’s a cultural divide about this — literate young people in their twenties routinely spend leisure hours hunting aliens on their PCs; gaffers like me…
The Politics of Dog
The line dividing acceptable from unacceptable meat is sometimes a fine one. While vegetarians naturally reject meat of all kinds, the rest of America maintains some form of double standard — chicken but not crow, beef but not horse, venison but not reindeer, lamb but not mutton, legs and wings and rumps but not hearts…
George Bush’s Texas Trouble:
When Karen Hughes announced her decision to leave the White House and return to Texas, the only thing Washington could agree on was that it was a loss for George W. Bush. It was Hughes who helped Bush find his voice during the 2000 elections, who signed off on speeches, who helped loosen him up.…
You Say You Want a Revolution
Eric Rohmer’s films are notoriously talky. In his Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons cycles, the restlessly sexy, searching characters spend most of their time lounging on lawn chairs and engaging one another in meandering, often faltering, philosophical exchanges on topics from temptation and renunciation to the charms of…
The Democrats and the Euro-Left
In Europe, the year 1968 has always meant only half of what it’s meant here in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, 1968 was the year of the great youth uprising, of the emergence of a distinct New Left. The protesters who took to the streets from Chicago to Paris weren’t simply…
A Dollar Short
The Web site of Democratic Congressman George Miller of California features a touching photo of the signing of the education reform bill at an Ohio school on January 8. Flanked by beaming African-American children, Miller, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Republican Congressman John Boehner of Ohio — three of the bill’s four authors…
