The Alleged Editor

This One Sees What He Wants To See

To the Editor: The end of the world is near, death, death, pandemic, pandemic, we are all in this together, we all in this together…yes, we are, because millions have had Covid-19 and no more are dying than other high flu seasons. Yet all we hear every night are [sic] not calm and reflective reporting—just fear stories. It is sad that we lemmings are so terribly manipulated. … They push the leaders and snip and bark and sensationalize and only report ignorant anecdotal stories with no real background but to blind you from the truth. A pandemic means worldwide, like heart disease, drug overdoses, cancer …

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Mini-Trump Spins the Dials

In 1878, the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan was an unpreposessing, two-story wooden building topped by a tin cupola. It was replaced the next year by a colonnaded stone structure, the dome of which soars to an imposing 267 feet. It’s a good thing, too. Otherwise the dozens of gun-toting, camo-wearing protestors who mobbed the place last week would have looked pretty silly, cramming into that run-down old barn, acting like they were about to liberate Venezuela. Their stated intent was to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, which they call tyrannical. In addition to semi-automatic weapons, some carried Confederate flags, nooses, and swastikas as …

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Never Say It Couldn’t Be Worse

According to a chart made public Tuesday by the White House Council of Economic Advisors—certainly an assemblage of experts in their field, and what field could be more relevant than economics?—the U.S. daily death rate from Covid-19 should be dropping to zero in about a week. How fortunate we are to have Donald Trump as our President—as he explained to the nation at length on Sunday from the Lincoln Memorial. The former owner of the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant clearly feels a special affinity for that stately structure. Before he was even inaugurated he used its steps—from which Martin Luther King once delivered a speech …

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Welcome to Our New State of Being

May 1, 2020—Here it is—another glorious First of May. Workers the world around are standing up for their rights—generally at a safe distance. Here in the U.S., of course, it’s traditional to ignore International Workers Day; and by traditional, of course, we mean perverse. The day, after all, was chosen to mark an American massacre of workers, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, on May 4th, 1886. The selection of that particular event could be seen as almost arbitrary. That entire stretch of American history, from the Civil War to Armistice Day, could accurately be described as a slow-motion massacre of American workers. The winners …

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War, Irony and The New Normal

by Robert C. Koehler The uber-irony about the deadly coronavirus is that, as it claims lives, endangers millions and interrupts the social normal, threatening unprecedented global chaos, it is also quietly informing us what we must do to create a better world — and, indeed, creating it, in certain ways, as we look on in stunned wonder. The “what we must do” part is obvious to many: “After all,” writes Lawrence Wittner, “why not work cooperatively to save humanity from massive global death and economic collapse rather than continue to devote $1.8 trillion a year to waging wars and engaging in vast military buildups with …

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“Clean Drinking Water is a Human Right”

To the Editor: “Clean drinking water is a human right,” says the N.H. Palestine Education Network (N.H. PEN). N.H. PEN has supported the “Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine,” a Massachusetts based organization (waterjusticeinpalestine.org) that has sponsored walks to raise funds to assist Palestinians who live in either Gaza or in the West Bank to gain access to water. Another Massachusetts group linked to the “Alliance” is 1for3.org, which works closely with Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, Palestine, to promote water security. According to the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, “95 percent of the Gaza Strip’s two million residents, including 991,400 children, are without …

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