by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2022 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America On the fourth day of this month of July, the United States will mark the 246th anniversary of our revolutionary break from the monarchy of Great Britain—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, among the world’s most eloquent documents of political courage. This holiday, my personal favorite, will be celebrated with the usual backyard barbecues and picnics in the parks and softball games and razzle-dazzle fireworks and streets full of joyful parades with marching bands and
Read More NORTH CHATHAM, New York—U.S.A. A powerful clique of black-robed jurists given lifetime appointments to the United States Supreme Court—that august institution reputed by fools to be an impartial branch of the federal government—has brought America to the cusp of adopting a principal tenet in the misogynist creed of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan: Abortion is an abomination to God and therefore must be outlawed. …But wait, there’s more! The same clique looks beyond attacking the feminine half of the country to giving the greenlight to all Americans old enough for booze and serious
Read More NEW YORK CITY, near America An unholy gaggle of my journalistic confrères in corporate media sing daily from the hymnal of conventional wisdom of how the wily Donald J. Trump is bound to survive the perils facing him at this moment, of how his devoted flock remains a mighty rock of support, of how he shall rise yet again from the ashes of self-destruction. I beg to disagree. My fellow Americans are a forgiving lot of suckers for devilish entertainments such as The Donald provides. Among his anti-heroic charms, Mr.
Read More by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2022 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America As we absorb media accounts of Moscow’s ongoing crimes against humanity, targeted on neighboring Ukraine, this much has grown clear: Truth is the first casualty of war, the Russian military slaughters children, the ruble is rubble, and Vladimir Putin is a dead man walking. Once more the shortest of all war stories: He lied, they died. They are the usual victims: ordinary people, Ukrainians fleeing for their lives as Russia’s hypersonic missiles slam into their homes,
Read More NORTH CHATHAM, New York Most nights in America nowadays—more properly nowadaze—the so-called political analysts employed by television news networks lament the self-immolation of a formerly presentable Republican Party. Founded in 1854 as a vehicle for abolishing the evil of slavery, the party evolved over the next two centuries as a coalition of family farmers, dutiful church folk, Main Street bourgeoisie, and Wall Street conservatives. One could disagree with Republicans philosophically, but respect that they came to their views based on honest reasoning and lived experience. In recent years, however, the
Read More America Gone Mad The Crime of Defeating Truth Amusing ourselves to death by Thomas AdcockCopyright © 2022 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Here in New York—and in Moscow, among KGB and GRU operatives collecting gossip about foreign visitors that could be useful in the cause of kompromat—everyone knew what he was, years before the rest of the world caught on to the con man: Fake tycoon, unapologetic deadbeat, credibly accused rapist, tabloid buffoon, eleven-time supplicant in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, pathological liar, adjudicated fraudster, white supremacist, badly tailored
Read More NEW YORK CITY, near America FOREWARD: I am aware of numerous horrors haunting the headlines here. Among these: destructive weather patterns courtesy of the climate crisis, year three of the The Plague, cruelty shown to immigrants and refugees, fascism creeping ever closer, the aftermath of last January’s treasonous insurrection in Washington, the extant specter of Donald Trump. But the stuff of my bedtime terrors of late is America’s reverence for guns, and our seeming toleration of schoolhouse massacre after massacre after massacre, ad infinitum. Thus shall I write of nightmares.
Read More EAST GREENWICH, Rhode Island—U.S.A. The statistics are dryly listed, the prose cautiously academic. Nevertheless, a study of worldwide trends in despotism released last month is as alarming as a house afire—for Americans who read the report, or care about its findings. Which explains a dearth of concern among Washington’s ruling class over the study’s bottom-line conclusion: For the very first time, the United States of America joins a list of “backsliding democracies” compiled annually by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. According to the Stockholm-based institute, the U.S.
Read More Crackpots, Cretins & Crooks The New American Élite ‘Principiis obsta’ … ‘Finem respice’ by Thomas AdcockCopyright © 2021 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Mine is not the only country where huge chunks of the population are irreversibly obtuse. But in the bleakest hours of life in the United States, on days when the proudly witless say and do things more witless than usual, it seems that way, causing me to ask: How on Earth must the rest of the world regard America as anything more than a
Read More Bang!….Whimper….sigh American Rage Machine Kaput Build Back Brighter? by Thomas AdcockCopyright © 2021 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Dare I disagree with the esteemed Robert Kagan, Ph.D.—alumnus of Harvard and Yale universities, senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the lofty Brookings Institution, co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century? Whoa! An Ivy League think tanker versus little old me? Credentialed pessimism versus my own fitful pursuit of the positive? In a September 23 essay for the Washington Post, Mr.
Read More NEW YORK CITY, near America Nine months ago, Donald J. Trump incited a fascist insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington, citadel of the world’s oldest continuing democracy. Over these months, we began the awful process of absorbing what has happened to us: the physical, psychic, and political horrors launched against the United States by Mr. Trump and his mob. Mr. Trump is a free man, for the moment, and will be for some time to go before that blessed day when history books not yet written release us from
Read More By Thomas AdcockCopyright © 2021 – Thomas Adcock NORTH CHATHAM, New York—U.S.A. Meet Michael James Lindell of Mankato, Minnesota—pillow factory magnate, blustery messenger of anti-vaccine lunacy, and mustachioed mouthpiece for the entire menu of Republican Party screwball theory. His qualifications for this work include years of experience as a crack addict and Las Vegas card sharp who will tell you, at the drop of a hat, how he trod the road to Damascus and found salvation in Jesus Christ and Donald Trump. Born again, so it is said by the
Read More By Thomas AdcockCopyright © 2021 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Democracy has a way of smiting those who flout its tenets, especially those who seek its destruction. Thus is the famous fabulist and mobster of Mar-a-Lago finally “woke,” as it is said by the young, to what for him is an unpalatable new reality: The United States of America is not a nation of The Donald, by The Donald, and for The Donald. I speak here, of course, of Donald John Trump, whose recently failed presidency
Read More NEW YORK CITY, near America On a recent evening news broadcast, television journalist Joy Reid opened her program with unsettling questions about contemporary life in these dis-United States of America—where gun massacres occur almost daily; where partisan debate has devolved to obstructive tribalism, with half the political duopoly shirking responsibility for governance; where lunatics and unembarrassed racists occupy high public office and prominent media platforms; where falsehoods are considered facts by millions, and bloody violence as patriotism. Where the coda to Donald Trump’s unnerving Republican Party regime of scandal, ineptitude,
Read More By Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2021 – Thomas Adcock NORTH CHATHAM, New York — U.S.A. Finally, spring has eclipsed the long winter of our discontent. Normally at this time, our mood lightens with the sunshine of a warming season, with bright blue skies and sweet-smelling rain and greening trees. Normally. But even as the coronavirus plague is a fading fear, even as the Muttering Malodor of Mar-a-Lagois largely gone from center stage—Alas, I understate my contempt horribly—our days here are not wholly uplifting. In fact, we seesaw between hope and
Read More By Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2021 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Tyrants worthy of the name understand that truth does not matter; what matters is what is believed. Tyrants know that so long as the mighty force of stupidity lives, many will not respect the evidence of their own experience. Tyrants, being cynics worthy of the name, rely on these underpinnings of the human tragicomedy, as those with willing eyes have seen in the modern history of fascism—from Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler back in the day,
Read More By Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2021 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Had the events of three consecutive Wednesdays occurred elsewhere in the world, we Americans would voice serious doubts about a viable future for such a chaotic nation. Here in the United States, let us consider the highlights of last month’s Washington calendar: • January 6 — Inspired by two months of hate-soaked lies, several thousand of Donald Trump’s storm troopers mount a putsch at the Capitol building, two miles east along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White
Read More NORTH CHATHAM, New York — U.S.A. On Christmas morning, something up the road from my creaky old weekend getaway house caught my heathen eye as I walked by: an invitation of a sort, posted outside the North Chatham United Methodist Church, a religious establishment for those amenable to the radical social agenda of a famous Nazarene carpenter—especially that part of the agenda about giving succor to The Stranger, so it seemed. For lo, there appeared a banner alongside the church entryway, declaring: “Immigrants & Refugees Welcome.” The banner still waves
Read More NEW YORK CITY, near America Four years of ridiculing a malevolent Donald J. Trump—last month’s Election Day loser—has been therapeutic for those of us Americans appalled, pained, embarrassed, nauseated, and shamed by the demonstrably worst president in our country’s two hundred and forty-four years of national history. Mockery has saved our sanity. It is easy to laugh at Mr. Trump, yet deeply satisfying. Therein lies the solace of knowing that his presence in the world is a sour joke, at best. As his execrable tenure in Washington dwindles, let us
Read More NORTH CHATHAM, New York — U.S.A. October 24 was a Saturday of dramatically mixed weather here in upstate New York, as mixed and moody as months of speculation by political scientists and amateurs alike over the prospects for the survival of America as we know it. This day was our first in a week of early voting in the lead-up to November 3—Election Day throughout the United States. So, there was I on that cool grey misty morning, near the front of a sidewalk line-up outside my polling station in
Read More NORTH CHATHAM, New York – U.S.A. Red-faced and sweaty, Donald Trump was greatly worried on the night of September 29. His chances for reelection as president were slim and growing slimmer, thanks to a cascade of scandals. Yet there he was in the city of Cleveland for the first of three scheduled televised debates with his opponent, Joe Biden. Mr. Trump conducted himself accordingly: One commentator compared his behavior to that of an agitated, feces-flinging chimpanzee in the primates section of a zoo. Viewers expected no less a performance from the
Read More NEW YORK CITY, near America A decade ago, the opening fusillades of bigotry were fired at Barack Obama, first African American president of the United States, prompting a professor at Northwestern University in Illinois to issue prescient warning of the worst to come. In an essay for a Manhattan weekly newspaper, under the headline WHITE AMERICA HAS LOST ITS MIND, Steven Thrasher wrote in the now defunct Village Voice— “About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel. It had been a pretty
Read More NORTH CHATHAM, New York – U.S.A. by Thomas Adcock The death of a great man or woman of near saintly stature brings forth a time of mourning for society’s loss and a related determination to shape and improve society’s future in the spirit of the deceased. So now is that time with the passing of John Robert Lewis, a personal hero of mine. As with many others during his eighty years of life, I had the honor of meeting Mr. Lewis and shaking his hand, knowing I shook the hand of
Read More Woke America Screams ‘Enough!’ Police savagery, racism, poverty, environmental destruction, fascism by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2020 — Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Thirty days that shook the world began on the first day of June when hundreds of thousands of outraged Americans—of all colors, creeds, and ages—overwhelmed the streets in cities and towns throughout the United States, all of us pumping the air with fists demanding justice for a dead African American man named George Floyd. We Americans touched off allied demonstrations of support in countries as
Read More by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2020 — Thomas Adcock NORTH CHATHAM, New York – U.S.A. In January of next year, the world will surely breathe a collective sigh of relief as Donald J. Trump exits the White House, voluntarily or else frog-marched out of the Oval Office under military escort upon refusing to accept his landslide defeat in November’s election. (In the interest of high drama, my preference would be for the latter.) Mr. Trump will then spend the rest of his time on Earth toiling at the sole occupation
Read More North Chatham, New York — U.S.A. Should you ask of us here in the hills of rural New York State, a region of apple orchards and dairy farms and green mountains and our hamlet of five hundred and three souls, my wife Kim and I are faring well enough since fleeing the big city three weeks ago. More than two hundred kilometers to the south lies New York City, population nine million—epicenter of the coronavirus global pandemic, and hometown of a dangerous buffoon in down in Washington whose name I
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