Fawaz Gerges is a Professor and Director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics. Nominally a Christian commentator on the Arab world, more importantly he is widely sought and respected for his balanced view and assessment of the American Middle Eastern dominant presence and the view thereof of hundreds of millions of people from Morocco to Tehran.
One of the most meaningful Christmas stories that I have ever heard came from my Vancouver, Canada friend, Reverend Kevin Annett. His story is titled “Nativity” and is printed further below.
Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez was killed by sheriff’s deputy Erick Gelhaus on October 22, as the boy walked home in his Latino neighborhood in Santa Rosa, California. The Iraq War veteran claims he mistook the eighth-grader’s toy rifle for a real one.
“Welcome to Indian Museum, where villains, Viral Deviants (VD’S) and Terrorists of the past are preserved for your enlightenment,” said The Guide.
The Guide, tall, serious, had silver hair; his gray eyes gleamed like sun-lit steel. He wore the deep blue uniform of Indian Museum, fashioned after the uniforms worn by soldiers of The Nation more than a century ago, when The West was won.
Wherefore, as becomes Catholic kings and princes, after earnest consideration of all matters, especially of the rise and spread of the Catholic faith, as was the fashion of your ancestors, kings of renowned memory, you have purposed with the favor of divine clemency to bring under your sway the said mainlands and islands with their residents and inhabitants and to bring them to the Catholic faith.
– Inter Caetera Papal Bull issued by pope Alexander VI on 4 May 1493, granting Spain dominion over the western hemisphere
Plantman took a brief but necessary vacation, or personal day — as if the rest of his days were property of Topiary Techniques — to visit the world-famous City Museum Complex.
The plaque outside The Hall of Hoaxes read, “Everything The City promised you, but never delivered. Everything The Nation promised you, but never delivered.”
Hyperbole, true, but what can one expect from The Hall of Hoaxes?
I was born without teeth — and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him.
– Mark Twain1
Fire Bush. Dark, but no Indian. Surely. Obvious. Called himself Indian, claimed “The Assistants” were Indians too.
The Assistants: Chicken Killer, elderly in denim; floppy hat pierced with an old, dusty feather; weathered skin; faded illegible tattoos.
White Buffalo Woman, or “Buffalo Gal,” almost young and almost beautiful; white suede dress and moccasins; hip-length black hair; weary eyes.
The two (Missing?) Young; seventeen and sixteen; male and female; Smashed Deer and Fidelity Desire.
Both the words “environment” and “violence” have so many meanings, that they require some definition of how they can be of use in the context of a struggle for social justice. Regarding the word violence, according to Merriam Webster, one definition is “the use of brute strength to cause harm to a person or property”; a definition that doesn’t seem to have an immediately obvious connection to ecological issues associated with climate change, loss of biodiversity and various forms of pollution.
The Mexican Revolution by Adolfo Gilly is an exhaustive analysis of the Mexican Revolution from a Marxist perspective. Gilly, himself a revolutionary, was introduced to this history while incarcerated at Mexico’s infamous Lecumberri prison in the 1960s. Friedrich Katz describes the radical milieu in the foreword:
