By David Walsh | 31 March 2011
Taylor: Studio publicity shot, the early days.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR, one of the most prominent postwar American film stars, died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles March 23 at the age of 79 in the company of her four children. She had been admitted to hospital in February for treatment of congestive heart failure.
Guilty as charged?
One thing I’ve noticed about “progressive” or left-wing analyses of American politics is an absence of any critique of the people who inhabit this great nation of ours. The government is always fair game, but there is some sort of mystique about The American People (TAP). Uttering this phrase, writes Fareed Zakaria, is tantamount to announcing a divine visitation; anything has the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical, all-knowing entity. Thus Noam Chomsky, for example, believes that there is a “democracy gap” between this (potentially) enlightened population and its evil masters; that popular consent has been “manufactured”; and that if we (= who, exactly?) could only remove the wool that is covering their eyes, they would reject the government and institute some form of democratic socialism. In a more generally populist vein, Michael Moore seems to believe something similar: Americans are inherently decent and rational, they’ve just been led astray.
Republican Tom Corbett, Governor of Pennsylvania, to the utter detriment of that state.
THIS WEEK, Teddy Borawski, the chief oil and gas geologist for the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) and a member of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett’s administration, serving in an official capacity, and on the record, compared my Sundance award-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary film GASLAND to Nazi propaganda stating “Goebbels would be proud.” The slander was the latest in a series of smears and misinformation about the film and character attacks on me.
By Gaither Stewart
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a Bushite figure, with his former model wife and renowned salopette, Carla Bruni. Always glad to play useful foil to America’s designs, but harboring ambitions of his own.
(Rome) Last Saturday night I saw the Supermoon. The same March 19 night that Operation “Odyssey Dawn” was launched against the Libya of Muammar Gadaffi, the earth’s star in all its glory passed its nearest point to planet Earth as it does every 19 years. This time it was a full moon. It hovered over my house. At midnight the yellow Supermoon illuminated my front yard almost as a winter sun does at midday. That same night the same moon shone also over Tripoli, 600 miles the south, illuminating all of Libya as it did my front yard.
By Terry Eagleton, Tikkun
Posted on March 18, 2011
Crosspost with http://www.alternet.org/story/150261/
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Palin is just one of the many rightwing women who hide hideous views behind beautiful packages.
THE DEVIL, SO THEY SAY, has all the best tunes, and this seems to be the case when it comes to literature as well. Nobody would take a guided tour of Dante’s Paradiso if they could have one of the Inferno instead. Milton’s God sounds like a bureaucratic bore or constipated civil servant, while his Satan shimmers with mutinous life. Nobody would have an orange juice with Oliver Twist if they could have a beer with Fagin instead. So why is evil so sexy, and so profoundly glamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring? Why is it that when I told my thirteen-year-old son I was writing a book on evil, he replied “Wicked!”?