Author Archive

I can’t stand it. I’m going to have a nurse set me up an IV Padre Kino machine. You’ve heard of a morphine drip? Cheap Mexican wine is a better deal. The supply is more dependable. DEA is trying to eradicate poppies, but hasn’t gotten to grapes. Yet. I’ll stay sozzled for the rest of... »

In re Afghanistan, why, you might ask, is the world’s hugest, expensivest, most begadgeted military unable to defeat a few thousand angry tribesmen armed with AKs and RPGs? Easy: Character. The men running the war are mentally the wrong ones to do it. Think about this for a moment. Suppose that your boss at the lab... »

The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense furiously... »

After hearing account after account from friends and acquaintances of rude and sometimes abusive behavior by federal officials in Immigrations, TSA, and others, I spoke by telephone to a fellow at TSA in Washington. He was agreeable and helpful, which is not a response one always gets in the capital. Anyway, I subseqquently wrote... »

I have concocted a theory that does wonders to explain American politics: We are ruled by history’s most boring people. This is a seminal political idea, up there with Plato’s invention of Stalinism in The Republic. I refer of course to those thunderously bland people, the white middle-class Protestants, or Hagvacas (House and garden variety... »

Last night Vi and I watched for the first time a documentary, shot by my friend Jim Coyne, on Joan Baez and the movement against a war no one any longer remembers, far away, on another planet. It was... »

I’ve been reading the news again. It’s great fun, like watching an EEG trace as it…slowly…flat-lines. Reading a newspaper increasingly reminds me of watching a leper to see which finger falls off next. You can make bets. In the news I find more on torture. I’m so proud. Home of the brave, land of the... »

I’m going to take poison. Every time I read the headlines, I want to take poison. Always they are a concentrated tale of avarice, wretched judgment, murderousness, and lugubrious taste. I’m thinking potassium cyanide. To sleep, perchance to dream…. Headlines: “Chrysler Heads Back to Bankruptcy Court Friday”; “Crash Diet: GM Getting in Shape for Chapter... »

OK, yesterday on final into Guadalajara, at the height of the flu epidemic, indeed pandemic, predicted to be even more cleansing than the killer flu of 1918, perhaps the beginning of the long-expected plague that would eliminate mankind from the earth, no doubt to the earth’s relief, I was ready for the worst. I... »

I strain for words to describe adequately Washington’s policy toward Latin America. Candidates come to mind: Imbecilic, moronic, catatonic, Pollyannaish, blind, incurious. No, these are poor creatures and frail, not equal to the task. Retarded? Anencephalic? Those too lack descriptive power. The EEG has flat-lined. The patient is dead. I recently found the following from... »

All things must end, and Fred on Everything just has. This will be the last regular column, although the site will stay up and I’ll add things from time to time as the mood urges. The reasons for this disappearance are several. One is that writing the thing is a lot of work for no... »

AJIJIC, MEXICO—on the north shore of Lake Chapala, in the depths of a Mexican winter. It is cold, hellishly cold. Sometimes a tee-shirt isn’t enough. We may have to eat the neighbors if the temperature drops ninety degrees. It could be the Donner party all over. When life hangs on a thread—I sense that this... »

I am trying to understand conservatives. The word has got to mean something, unless of course it doesn’t. For years I thought it meant someone like my grandfather, a professor of mathematics at a small college in the South. He embodied courtesy, respect for learning, personal responsibility, compassion for those in the town who... »

Oh god. It’s getting worse. Everything. I knew it would. Death and taxes are long shots by comparison. So I’m in Washington, a federal enclave, as someone said, surrounded on all four sides by reality. This was supposed to be a medical trip to have vital internal organs pawed, sliced, and injected with strange fluids.... »

OK, today I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about air power. You will never need to read anything else. These revelations will provide blinding insight into our current wars. Here we go. Hold on. The key: Air power is really good for things it is really good for, but works lousily... »

I’m going to slit my wrists. I’ve been reading the news again. I always want to slit my wrists when I do that. I know, I know: I’ll get encouragement from readers. OK, then, I won’t, just to spite them. ... »

The Pentagon, methinks, is out of control. We no longer have a military in service to the state, but a state in service to the military. Few notice (I suspect) because of two ingrained habits of mind. First, we think of the President as just that, the President, the country’s civilian governor who, oh yeah,... »

Damn. The longer I live in Mexico, the more I realize that I know less about it than people who don’t. Apparently it is a far simpler country than the one I live in, being summed up by pat assertions, neat statistics, and confident descriptions often bearing little resemblance to anything I see. Curious:... »

When I ponder our curiously unbalanced civilization, able to put golf carts on Mars but unable to equal the verse of muddy Elizabethan London, I wonder why we are as we are. In all things technological the United States is magnificent, the Athens of solid-state physics. Yet the great orchestras die unlistened to, we... »

All night it rained in Jocotepec, my small town in Mexico. Rain isn’t unusual, but this was different. It was heavy. It didn’t stop. Come morning, my wife and I looked out the window and saw inches of brown water ... »