Journalist.
Jazz in Czechoslovakia was inspired, experimental, and popular. It was also subversive. The Nazis attempted to regulate jazz, and the communists suppressed it. Jazz threatened basic principles of the totalitarian powers: it was hyper-individualistic, improvisational, and innovative. Josef Skvorecky detailed this in "Red Music," from Talkin' Moscow Blues: When the lives of individuals and communities are …
Continue reading "Talkin’ Praha Blues: Czechoslovak Jazz Under Communism"
Good travel writing doesn’t come from exotic locations. Any place can spark insight, nuance, or inspiration. Appalachia provides as good material as England, Ukraine, or Thailand. To write well requires a mix of entrepreneurial spirit to act as historian, journalist, tourist, guide, and sociologist. It leads to historical quirks or overlooked towns for subject material. …
Kalida, Ohio is the sort of place you notice because the train crossing makes you wait five minutes. And then you wait again, 10 minutes down the road. That section of northwest Ohio — between the Indiana state line and I-75 through Lima, Findlay, and Bowling Green — doesn’t attract crowds. Dull green signs mark …
Continue reading "Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches: The German-Catholic Counties of Ohio"
Why do smart people support dictators? Usually, they don't defend a murderer, and probably oppose wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or drone strikes in Pakistan. Yet, when a foreign leader opposes "American imperialism" or upholds a socialist vision, all is forgiven. Who needs freedom of speech, a bourgeois virtue that protects capitalists? What's horrifying in …
Continue reading "Useful Idiots and the Defense of Totalitarians"
Everyone talks about how much they'd love to travel. Ignoring the 90 percent of people who lie when they say it, the remaining 10 percent who want to probably won't leave the country. So I want to help that 1 or 2 percent of the 10 who might commit to the cliché and see the …
As we descend into the cave of reality and search for truth, ideology guides our action. Yet, as the mystery in the cave deepens, the ideology we use as a flashlight catches our eyes and blinds us instead of lighting the path. Though I'm skeptical that we can escape the cave, we can avoid blinding …
I used to envy my friends with cultural connections to the country their families immigrated from. The traditions, cultural ties, and general identification for a way of life left behind but still valued enticed me. It continued a rare brand of conservatism that reflected Burke's definition of society as a pact among the past, the …
Continue reading "Appalachia Is a Place, Not Just a Backwater"
From "Repression By Any Other Name" by Ariel Dorfman in Guernica: Of course, the U.S. government will continue to spy, no matter what limited and cosmetic restrictions may henceforth be enacted, and of course the criminalization of journalists who question or inform about these activities and methods is bound to increase as leaks and whistleblowers proliferate. …
Does the NSA spy on Congress? "Probably." Is there a more American way to admit it? The surveillance apparatus has become so sprawling, so all-encompassing, that we can't get a "yes," but a "we collect so much data, it's hard to believe we don't." The affirmation might cause the first substantive change in the dragnet-style …
Continue reading "An American Surveillance Story: Congressional Edition"
Western tradition gets upheld as a lone bastion of freedom, the shining city on a hill. To make that story plausible, we can argue that, among other things, Western countries uphold conceptions of nationalism that center around individual rights and intermediate institutions which preserved freedom and community. That story falters, however, when we treat the …
Continue reading "Lazy Thinking: Problems of Exceptionalism and the Threat of Nationalism"
