Why don't we have more sex?

Why isn't it our primary pastime? You could blame it on modern Capitalism, as Wordsworth put it, "lays waste our powers" by hypnotizing us into endless "getting and spending."

Then there's that Foucaultian thing called the Rationalization of Sex.

This puts sex under the disciplinary pressures of modern science, reason and morality and squeezes the juice right out of it. In a nutshell, we're still a bunch of repressed Christians.

It would probably take an army of psychiatrists and historians to pinpoint all the reasons why Western religion developed such antagonism toward human sexuality.   more »

"Harry Potter" functions something like a Rorschach Blot

In countries around the world, it captures various national anxieties about contemporary culture and international affairs.

French intellectuals, for example, debate whether or not "Harry Potter" indoctrinates youngsters into the orthodoxy of unfettered market capitalism.

On the face of it, the world of Harry Potter has nothing in common with our own. Nothing at all, except one detail: like ours, the fantastic universe of Harry Potter is a capitalist universe.

Some Swedish commentators decry what they perceive as "Harry Potter's" Anglo-American vision of bourgeoisie conformity and its affirmation of class and gender inequality.   more »

The Bush team still has 18 months to fashion another foreign policy disaster, this time over Iran.

All along Cheney has pushed harder for military action - how, mutter his acolytes, can we possibly leave the next president facing a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran?

And now, just as with Iraq five years ago, leaks that point to war are multiplying. Iran, we are told, is in league with al-Qa'ida. It is arming insurgents in Iraq so that these latter can kill more Americans.

Not long ago, Bush seemed to have accepted that America was in no shape for another military adventure. But who can be sure that however wretched Dick Cheney's track record, he will not prevail again?   more »

In conversations with at least twenty College Republicans about the war in Iraq, I listened as they lip-synched discredited cant about "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

Many of the young GOP cadres I met described the so-called "war on terror" as nothing less than the cause of their time.

Yet when I asked these College Republicans why they were not participating in this historic cause, they immediately went into contortions.

Asthma. Bad knees from playing catcher in high school. "Medical reasons." "It's not for me." These were some of the excuses College Republicans offered for why they could not fight them "over there."   more »

Just a Few Things that Might Just Show Up on Bush’s Colonoscopy...

The section of the Constitution that clearly defines the wording “Do as you damn well please. Washington was supposed to be a King!”

The secret location that Dick Cheney has been hiding in every time the rest of the nation has been in peril.

All of those old signs that used to be in the back window of cars that said “Baby on Board” that were replaced with "My Son is a Marine".

Dick Cheney’s gold watch from Haliburton along with fifteen other solid gold watches from Haliburton engraved with "We love Dick" since he took office.   more »

Looking backwards from 2050, historians may well conclude

that the Iraq fiasco was the terminal war of the Modern Era

- a nihilistic war that concluded

the near 500-year-long hegemony of the West

The signs of this reversal were actually rather ominous

even without a war-policy built upon a foundation of

fabrications and now the impending defeat

of the "new imperialism" in Iraq

It may well be remembered as the shame

(and the shaming) of a decadent West

of an arrogant and hypocritical era

in the twilight and senescence of its glory

   more »

Keywords: fall, empire, imperialism, western, domination, vietnam, catastrophe, decline, iraq