Today's Stories

May 22-24, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Swine Flu Fallout

May 21, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
The Politics of Bait-and-Switch: Obama and the Environment

Paul Craig Roberts
Morphing Dick Cheney

Chris Floyd
In Defense of George W. Bush

Gerald Paoli
Inside Iraqi Kurdistan: Life and Death in the Qandil Mountains

Zach Mason
Something's Gotta Give: Obama and the Hustler

Uri Avnery
A Quarrel on the Titanic

Andy Worthington
Out of Guantánamo

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
India: Two Funerals and a Wedding

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Escalation

Dave Lindorff
A Corporate Crime Wave of Labor Law Violations

Website of the Day
Swine Flu: The Panic That Wasn't

May 20, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Toll Booth Economy

Gary Leupp
Courting Hekmatyar: Obama and the Warlord

Michael D. Yates
Work is Hell

Jonathan Cook
Netanyahu Adviser Steps Out of the Shadows

Peter Lee
The World Doesn't Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem ... It Has a David Albright Problem

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Tamil Tigers?

Peter Zinn
Eulogizing Lawyers

William Loren Katz
Tortured Reasoning; Tortured Results

Gary Lapon
Why Women Need Single Payer

Trudy Bond
Torture, Shrinks and a Groundhog's Day Moment

Website of the Day
Meet the Climate Change Lobby

May 19, 2009

Kristoffer Rehder
Check Point Iraq: a Soldier's Tale

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of the Financial Crisis

Ray McGovern
How Colin Powell Got Duped by the CIA

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam
Intimidation and Interrogation in Tel Aviv

Mustafa Barghouthi
Is Obama Up to the Challenge of Dealing with Netanyahu?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo: A Prison Built on Lies

Binoy Kampmark
Britain's Speaker Crisis

John Walsh
John Kerry vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Alcohol as Metaphor: Zero Tolerance in the Workplace

Website of the Day
So You Think That Veggie Burger is Organic...

May 18, 2009

Dave Lindorff
The US is Using White Phosporous in Afghanistan

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Thirty Years of Tragedy in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
How Many Secret Prisons Does Israel Have?

Ben Rosenfeld
Police Violence: How Many Kicks to the Head Does It Take?

Patrick Cockburn
These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban

Ralph Nader
They Want It All: New Tricks From the Old Energy Lobby

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Bryce Lefever Clarifies Defense of Torture

Eugenia Tsao
On the Devaluation of Labor

Walter Brasch
Cheney's Magical Mystery Media Tour

Roberto Rodriguez
War and Torture

Charlotte Laws
Politics and American Idol

Website of the Day
Disbar the Torture Lawyers

May 15-17, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
King of the Hate Business

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

David Rosen
Sexual Torture: What is Acknowledged and What Remains Unknown

Mike Whitney
From My Lai to Bala Baluk: Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off

Bruce Page
A Real History of Rupert Murdoch

Jeremy Scahill
The Black Shirts of Guantánamo

Fred Gardner
Tortured Reasoning: Judge Bybee Rules Against Brian Epis

Tom Barry
Fighting the Drug War at Homeland Security

Mats Svensson
On the Beach in Tel Aviv

Ramzy Baroud
The Drones Are Coming

Mark Engler
Science Fiction From Below

Mark Weisbrot
Stealth Move by IMF to Get $100 Billion Without Congressional Debate

Farzana Versey
Of Scapegoats and Separatists

Ron Jacobs
It's Up to You to Save Troy Davis

Hannah Wolfe
What to Tell the Children

Cal Winslow
Fresno, the New Ground Zero in the Battle Between the SEIU and NUHW

David Macaray
Labor Needs a Southern Strategy

Christopher Brauchli
Involuntary Baptism

Mark Seth Lender
The Lion Tamer's Story

Robert Fantina
Lapel Pins, Arugula and Mustard

David Ker Thomson
Last Man Walking

Stephen Martin
Lipstick Nightmare for Spin Merchant

Charles R. Larson
Double Exile

Chase Madar
"Angels & Demons" and the Extraordinary Power of Imaginary Heretics

Kim Nicolini
Vaginas From Outer Space! Boldly Sitting Through Star Trek

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost

Lorenzo Wolff
Killer Virtues

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Jordan and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Catch F-22

May 14, 2009

Michael Hudson
Where Russia Went Wrong

Andy Worthington
The Poisoned Mosaic: Judge Condemns Guantánamo Evidence

Paul Craig Roberts
The Impotent President

Jonathan Cook
The Pope's Pilgrimage: Legitimizing Netanyahu?

Ray McGovern
See No Evil: Ugly Questions for General Myers

Lance Selfa
The Limits of Liberalism

David Green
The Deportation of Demjanjuk

Dave Lindorff
Obama Channels Cheney

Frida Berrigan
Nuclear Options

Sue Udry
The Bybee Question

Website of the Day
Our Bombs: Tracking US Air Strikes

May 13, 2009

Brian M. Downing
The Road Out of Iraq

Gareth Porter
Gen. McChrystal and Afghanistan

Robert Sandels
Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel

Ricardo Alarcón
Cuba: Measure of a Revolution

Eric Walberg
NATO in Georgia: Fun and Games

Dave Lindorff
The Sinking of GM: When Captains of Industry Don't Go Down with the Ship

Deepak Tripathi
A Culture of Abuse

William S. Lind
Back to the Balkans: Hillary and the Sleeping Dragon

Kevin Zeese
A Populist Health Care Rebellion

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon: From Perdition to Redemption?

Website of the Day
Beth McIntosh: The Wild Ride

May 12, 2009

Gary Leupp
The Bomb Iran Faction

Richard Neville
The AfPak Blues: Corpses of the Kids by the Truckload

Wajahat Ali
Obama Chooses a Reliable Dictatorship

Dean Baker
The Banker Boys Are Alright! Time to End the Bailouts

Franklin Lamb
What Palestinian Refugees Need From Lebanon's Elections

Norman Solomon
A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman

Paul Craig Roberts
Beware the Hate Crimes Bill

Lisa M. Hamilton
Let's Grow a New Crop of Farmers

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman:
Why Isn't Obama Turning to Credit Unions?

David Macaray
Wading Through the Grassroots

Website of the Day
Electronic Police States

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

Michael Hudson
Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF

Patrick Cockburn
Who Killed 120 Civilians?

Ralph Nader
The Single-Payer Taboo

John Kelly
Pseudoscience and Wrongful Convictions in the War on Drugs

Saul Landau
Cuba's Biggest "Crime"

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Dead Victims

David Michael Green
Get Obama

Anthony Papa
Gov. David Paterson Does the Right Thing

Paul Krassner
Jon Stewart and Truman, the War Criminal

Website of the Day
Generational Homelessness

May 8-10, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Souls

Jeffrey St. Clair
Echoes of Amchitka: 40 Years After America's Biggest Nuclear Blast, the Damage Continues

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Steve Niva
Iraq: The Return of the Suicide Bombers

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

Mike Whitney
Has Bernanke Pulled the Economy Back From the Brink?

Warren Hinckle
DiFi vs. Marilyn Chambers

Serge Halimi
In Praise of Revolutions

Gareth Porter
The Pakistan Conundrum

Sharon Smith
Something Stinks at Whole Foods

Andy Worthington
Obama's New Gitmo Policy: Back to the Bush Era?

Mark Weisbrot
Hillary and Latin America

Rosa Miriam Elizalde Cyber Command and Cyber Dissident: More of the Same?

David Macaray
Recessions and Labor Unions

Missy Beattie
The Real Housewives of War

Ron Jacobs
Mothers and War

Diane Farsetta
About Face on Pentagon Pundits?

Ramzy Baroud
War Without Context

Phelie Maguire
Living Next to Settlers

Robert Fantina
Party of Rush

Kevin Zeese
A Break From the Past in the Drug War?

Margaret Flowers, MD
The Baucus 8: Why We Risked Arrest for Single-Payer

Dave Lindorff
The Joke's on Us

Richard Rhames
Revenge of the Tundra

Ben Sonnenberg
Let the Right One In: A Vampire Visits a Welfare State

Kim Nicolini
Sin Nombre: Giving Faces to People Who Don't Have Names

Stephen Martin
The Riotous Action of the Complete Banker

Charles R. Larson
The Commencement Address You'll Never Hear

David Yearsley
Jean Ferrard, Organist Extraordinary

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Cab for Cutie: Surprisingly Familiar

Poets' Basement
G.S. Heiligschreib and David Farrelly

Website of the Weekend
Zombie Bank

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 22-24, 2009

Hope, the Thing With Feathers, Gets Plucked

Joy

By DAVID KER THOMSON

We’d been passing the time as pleasantly as one does when one is holding up posters revealing assorted facts about the squish rate. That’d be how often Canadian cars run over schoolchildren. Beats chatting about the weather, which in these parts is apt to disappoint.

We’d been practicing this bit of public-service semiotics (the science of signs) outside Liam’s school for several days before one of the drivers offered us a negative assessment. When I say “we” I don’t mean the royal or familial we. I guess I mean just me. Liam was having no part of this.

A green burb-box pulling west on Dewson tether-jerked to a halt with such abrupt rectitude that cars feeding in from the north on Concord and from east on Dewson nearly took out both quarter panels simultaneously. “I’m environmentally responsible,” the driver mommy shouted, an assertion apparently not belied by the half-dozen empty seats in the van. Her vehicle and the vehicles kissing her vehicle’s flanks were arrayed across the asphalt in the arms-akimbo shape of a peace sign. “I’m environmentally responsible,” the driver shouted, and then completed the syllogism with, “so why don’t you just shove your…”

I turned to Liam for clarification as the woman shot off like a green rocket through the throngs of scurrying pedestrian children.

“Did that woman in the green van just…”

“Yes, Daddy,” Liam said, clearly flirting with the notion of sympathizing with the enemy, “she told you to shove your sign up your ass.” As if by way of illustration, the CN Tower chose that moment to thrust its sly prong into a passing cumulo-nimbus.

“When I was a kid…” I began.

“We know,” said Liam, venturing an appeal to the royal we that I would not myself have hazarded.

My buttocks have been otherwise engaged for a long time, though I believe it is customary in these situations to thank the woman for her interest. I used to be a philosophy teacher, and any reference to one’s ass, that seat of higher education and ontological essence, can hardly fail to stir me in a Socratic sort of way. And my own merely physical instantiation of the universal ass also has its tale to tell. I have been afflicted with the family curse on my mother’s side, various forms of buttock and leg dysfunction that include weakness and sciatica and twisting and tingling and so on.

Old lady Addie Self channeled this Selfish Gene and in each generation there have been some of us who take a number of months or years away from walking. It hit my brother and me at the same age. I took two years out from the biped world, an experience that has given me a permanent sense of astonishment at how badly served people in wheelchairs are, even where we were living then in Illinois, America’s second flattest state.

I pulled through with Iyengar, a form of difficult, unglamorous medical yoga, after thirty-five other forms of treatment had failed. Every step—some days, a limp—that I take now is a sort of ritual of glory and thanksgiving, and of course my debt to distant Mr. Iyengar is incalculable.

It’s no accident that here at City Without Cars or whatever part of nowtopia we are at any particular moment, when we begin talking politics we don’t end up drifting off to the cute young new boss in some distant city selected to escalate the latest war in yet more distant cities. We talk about our asses. A is for asses. Begin here. Later, we can talk about America.

What with the sciatica and all, I tend to store things emotionally in my buttocks. It’s an odd arrangement, and makes it hard to keep track of things.

“Honey, have you seen the housekeys?” my wife’ll say.

“Huh?”

“Just think for a moment,” she says, staring not at my brain cavity but at my buttocks, then slapping them, like they’re cheeks. “Just checking your pockets,” she says.

“We—” Liam will undoubtedly say if he reads this, “we get the idea.”

In nowtopia our relationship to cars and the empire is very different from the Western leftist—leftern—conventional wisdom, which is an economy of discrete virtuous acts. In leftern wisdom, youth is the rambunctious phase, and the youthful political subject has an ill-considered enthusiasm for overt resistance. As the subject ages, he or she matures and becomes more adept at negotiating the structures of power. Thus in a talk at the University of Toronto the critic Imre Szeman, an articulate leftern globalization expert and former PetroCanada Young Innovator, can lament what he perceives to be our collective fatigue with chiding ourselves for carbon faults, as if we are so many Catholics concerned with sins of emission and commission (if I might adapt the old theological distinction between the bad things you let happen and the bad things you do).

In nowtopia, by contrast, we are against the empire but it is an ‘against’ of closeness and vulnerability, the way an Iyengar teacher’s hand is against a wayward limb or against the chest of a student with heart trouble: proximate and sensitive but without indulgence. The teacher’s hand is there both by way of reproof but also to own up to a common humanity. There’s just opposition but more importantly there’s juxtaposition.

We—the nowtopian we—are not only talking about cars here, though that’s a good place to start. Suburbs were designed for cars, for example, but cities were here long before cars. Cities should exclude cars and car culture, for which wars are fought, and turn the streets over to wheelchairs, over which there are few, if any, large-scale wars of aggression or acquisition. In fact, it is precisely this phenomenon—wheelchairs and no access ramps—that wars have a tendency to overproduce.

At City Without Cars we believe that the wise person understands the sad fact of cars in cities less as an occasion to chide than to mourn. We ask not merely for a withdrawal of this or that carbon event, but for the broader honesty the situation calls for: gentle melancholy touched with compassion. Omissions tend towards premature absolution in any case, and corporate power has always been green in this sense of being able to incorporate green intention and thrive on it. Global capital flow can eat your omission—your not using a Styrofoam cup, say—for breakfast.

At City Without Cars we feel the powerlessness of that jerk in the Tahoe or the hard-pressed green-van’d mother and acknowledge it as our own. We hope we remain funny and sarcastic enough to get the occasional Tahoe guy chasing us down the street, and the kind of maturity we value looks for all the world like immaturity, but the whole sad spectacle is a love-in because the underlying feeling here is of mutual abandonment. If we aren’t understanding this first letter in the primer of self-awareness in the American mode, the A that stands for abandonment, the firstfruit of self-knowledge, the apple of our collective carnal knowledge, then we are left with virtues and vices and the whole program of doing and not doing, which never touches our heart. Thirty children are run over and killed each year in Canada, twenty-four hundred are maimed, most of them after three o’clock, when school gets out, and these figures say nothing of the far greater number killed inside their alloy-and-plastic pods, nor of how many are cancered up, nor of the foreign children struck down to protect our states’ “interests” and to keep our states “strong.”

Chiding is fine as far as it goes, but the killers are lovers, too, and mothers and fathers (the green-van’d lady will turn out to be a bike activist in the Canadian mode, say), regular people who drove and were driven, who podded themselves up with a set of compulsions so complex they could hardly reckon with all the loose ends of the story. In podville all the other pods were out, they were thinking, so how crazy could it be? Pods make sense the way the lash made sense two hundred years ago because everyone appears to be doing it.

This is a situation not for reason, but for weeping. And in our daily practice, a quiet melancholy, and a heart opening, opening, opening. Can we do this? These are my cars, my neighborhood, my ass.

Joy isn’t happiness. It’s that other feeling that comes out from the midst of melancholy. It’s the thing with feathers, after it’s been plucked. For me, it comes from walking, and short flights.

Ten years ago I was tying Sebastian’s shoe and a green van, for all the world the very van I saw just the other day, lifted me up neatly on its back bumper and flung me deeper into the schoolyard. I got up and I was fine. That kind of shocked feeling that runs through anger and then finds itself as a kind of relief in gratitude and vulnerability, that’s joy. I’ve been struck by a car thrice that I can remember. Of the times I can’t remember, no visible head wounds.

Joy is beyond hope. Akin to hopelessness, though it doesn’t feel like it. I suppose it’s a sort of lack of expectation. At City Without Cars, for example, we do not expect governments to change or to give us a new deal. New deals can usually be found on closer inspection to be the same old deal, in any case, and where they aren’t, they’re prelude or punctuation to the same old. When Canada’s best-selling newspaper, stationed here in Toronto, cites the new transportation plan calling for an increase in the average number of people in cars from its current 1.15 to 1.32 in twenty years, and calls this change “BIG,” we can’t help but feel that sometimes the press is called free because it provides free puff pieces for government (Star, 24 Sept., year 8). We look not to government to help us, as if we were so many children with proxy parents, but to ourselves. We made this mess. I made it—certainly much of the damage done by Dodge Darts has the look of my handiwork. And you might as well know that I’m the one who did donuts on Mark Wilhelm’s neighbor’s lawn back in ’75 using my dad’s Chrysler Imperial. Sorry about that. Hell of a car, though, just for the record.

At City Without Cars, or whichever of the thousand nowtopian whichevers we are, we maintain that even “holding our leaders to account” is just one more version of putting our own baggage on to other people. Creating expectations is a form of aggression subtle enough that we often can’t see it. But it is aggressive nevertheless. In Argentina, the left acclaimed that lush-wifed Obama-like wackjob Perón, and look where it got them. Should have left the poor guy alone.

For reasons we’ve been careful to delineate elsewhere, we suspect that there is no such thing as a leader. We have yet to see one, in any case. Governments print bucks for passing, but really there’s no one to whom we can pass responsibility. At City Without Cars—which is not an organization but a disorganization, not a node or site in the empire but a tendency of the heart—we petition no one. Indeed, whom would we petition? The belief that we can be free while having leaders is a chimera, a way of avoiding the hard work of being here, now, attending to our own asses, our own shit. Not sending it off to the empire. Spiritually speaking, we are composters, not pipers. For free speech, we talk to our neighbors, not some “leader.”

So my brief flight without feathers courtesy of a green van all those years ago gave me an excellent view of the city. And all references to our asses shouted from vans in that overdetermined color green should be received with gratitude.

In one tradition of Buddhism, cakes are offered to demons, who are depicted as monsters, fantastic and fantastical. The demons are actually part of one’s own karma—I guess we’d call it baggage—and they serve to remind one of all the work one still has to do on one’s self. So a person is grateful for his demons, and encourages, with oblations of cake, their scary work, rather in the way we might pay a psychoanalyst in the Lacanian tradition and be grateful if he isn’t particularly nice to us (refuses, in other words, to put up with our shit).

Cars are my demons. My nephew was crowned by a Crown Victoria and it took him two and a half years to die. Cars have headlight eyeballs and bumper mouths, and I occasionally offer them pieces of cake. The trick is to be grateful to them. To this end, I am particularly thankful for the blue Volvo 850 typically parked near Dewson and Dovercourt, the very image of the family car we were driving when we heard about our nephew and cousin’s crowning (as if it were a birth, and he was emerging into a higher stage). Further gratitude to occasional sightings of old Dodge Darts, Cherokees, Suburbans and of the dozen other types of gas-nozzle do-me’s I used to drive, race, jump, and so on, not to mention the occasional weightlifter who emerges from one of these demons or their modern counterparts and chases me down the street because I have called out something into his open window that seemed funny at the time.

When being chased down the street, one feels a remarkable sense of satisfaction in the fact of having a working set of legs. Hope would be about one’s ambition to get away. Joy is the pure pleasure of the run, with a tinge of gratitude to one’s demons.

It’s a good day for a run, said the rabbit to the fox.

I suppose that somewhere in the rearview of the Camaro of life, there’s a sign warning that objects in mirror are closer than they appear, and if there’s someone still chasing me, they might be getting nearer. But today I run for the joy of it. I put my heart into it, and never look back.

David Ker Thomson lives in the urban forest of Oz, a part of Toronto. This article is best read to the sounds of “All My Little Words,” by Stephin Merrit of Magnetic Fields. Thomson can be reached at dave.thomson@utoronto.ca

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