This is the season when silence is most pronounced. From Thanksgivings until New Year’s Days now almost a decade has passed since familiar cacophony last accompanied holiday life. Continue reading Lost Laughter
Tag Archives: heritage
Disunion
The American public would’ve disappointed Joseph Goebbels. Unlike Germans crushed by the Depression’s economic vise as well confounded by massive societal upheavals after the Great War, Americans of the last four years did not swallow the big lies. Continue reading Disunion
White Panic!
Whoever stuck the “Meinpage” or “Mein Space” handle on the right-wing social media refuge/platform Parler is a genius. As for “Parler” itself, what? Pout was taken?
The France Jenkins ultimately fought in, no, for, was unlike anywhere else he’d been in life. Loud as moving trains were, the clamor of war deafened. No. When the Germans unleashed sufficient concentrated and sustained fire sound numbed. Continue reading Soldiers of the Great War (Part Two) Jenkins was a stranger to Lancer. He only recalled ever seeing him once. On a sunny spring day inside a coffin at his funeral. Continue reading Soldiers of the Great War (Part One) Did it please to devote every February Slow Boat Media Facebook vignette to Black History Month topics? Sure did! Might some readers regard them as affronts to the mosaic into which America has developed? Are you kidding!? Of course! Continue reading Echt Americans Who knew reactionary Anglo-America was so afraid? From where did that segment of our population derive its fright? What scares them so? Continue reading Tidying Ancestry Heard the sharpest retort to one of the vilest insults recently. Of greater interest, though, was the woman who launched it. Nasrin identified herself as “Persian.” Yeah. She’s Persian, all right. As Persian as I’m African. She’s a 20-something Cali girl through and through. What gained my favor was her having enough pride in self to supplant Persian for Iranian. The former carries nobility stretching back into antiquity. A Persian background is replete with culture and atavistic figures. Xerxes? Cyrus? Esther? Their respective histories are as current today as their living importance in the past. Iranians, their inheritors, are poor cousins. Compared against their classic progenitors, they lack stature. Who esteems them? Continue reading Her Persian Voice Must the sensibilities of the fragile transform American English into an insipid language? Our plummet through political correctness threatens rendering how we speak into mamby-pamby. Several weeks ago, a very conscientious article ran decrying colloquialisms whose origins the author deemed racially-charged. Why, yes. Some were. What of them? If the writing behind the subject had been any more earnest, the page would’ve wept. Since publication date sat so close to April 1st, I made sure the piece wasn’t a seasonal gag, a la some Borowitz satire. Were that it was. Such would’ve elevated the article into clever entertainment rather than leave it low at honest persuasion. But since it was so doggone sincere, the views expressed so achingly put, that made this righteous tripe ripe for scorn. Continue reading Let’s Cut the Rebop A vintage sportswear retailer issued a baseball catalogue a short time ago. Its cover featured a forlorn boy amid the ruins of what had been the quirky splendor of Ebbets Field, one-time home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. They had abandoned the ballpark and borough for Los Angeles. Their old address was being razed for low-income housing. The dejected boy toted a bat and glove. By his demeanor both destruction and departure confused him. Doubtlessly he had been a true-blue Dodgers fan. Can’t imagine such devotion today. Sports franchises routinely extort municipalities for taxpayer funded improvements and fresh facilities. Free agency has broken once solid binds between players and fans. Even our old baseball cathedrals are no longer sacrosanct. There should’ve been an outcry and defense for old Yankee Stadium similar to that which spared Grand Central Terminal sharing the fate of McKim and White’s Penn Station. Instead, wrecking balls demolished the House That Ruth Built. And while the team simply moved across 161st Street, the old edifice’s aura remained put. Monumental as the new structure is, the Yankees’ glorious continuity is broken. Ghosts do not travel. Not even in the Bronx. Continue reading Who Was Oisk? Soldiers of the Great War (Part Two)
Soldiers of the Great War (Part One)
Echt Americans
Tidying Ancestry
Her Persian Voice
Let’s Cut the Rebop
Who Was Oisk?