The Writing Life Too

Early here with clouds still blanketing the dawn and a single bird squawking, not singing. I've refrained from writing about politics here for awhile, not because I've stopped caring, but because the same people are up to same crazy actions. Dick Cheney and his family appearing non-stop on every media outlet that will have them --it's all about tainting the jury (the crow bar hotel would loom in his future if the administration and Senate had the stones to prosecute him for war crimes), burnishing his legacy, and because he genuinely dislikes Obama. Then Sarah Palin is as usual vindictive and crazed--her latest dust up with David Letterman proves it. It also proves Letterman suffers from poor taste at times, but I'm sure if he was the governor of say, Alaska, that he wouldn't spout pro-women feminist nonsense while charging rape victims for their rape kits. I've been especially pissed off by the latest wave of domestic violence, exemplified by the murder of Dr. Tiller in Kansas and the nutroll who starting shooting in the Holocaust Museum.

Here's the opening on the subject from Joe Conason's Salon column: "Acts of madness like the killing of George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns can be too easily dismissed as the work of disturbed individuals and then subsumed in the usual rumble of recrimination between left and right. But if we are to understand the deeper implications of those acts of murder, what must be examined is their origin in the shadow world of white nationalism.

Nobody knows more about the movements that spawned the alleged gunmen than Leonard Zeskind, who has spent most of a lifetime observing, analyzing and opposing racism and anti-Semitism in America and abroad. Now he has distilled those hard and dangerous decades of work into "Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream," a magisterial new book that explains how and why racial hatred became and remains a significant political force in American society."

In the column and in the book Zeskind describes how this movement was actually more active during the Reagan era than it is today and the steps that were taken to stop it. Interesting reading since domestic terrorism, including those aimed at women's health clinics and abortion providers is as big a threat as foreign terrorism.

Back to the writing life--hang on to your dreams.