politics

How We Tell the Story Together

Notes on the Story of the Golden Country
~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Rebecca Solnit writes comfortably in multiple veins as geographer, historian, environmentalist, memoirist, feminist, humanist, journalist, activist, even novelist. It’s pretty clear to me that she is one of our finest writers. In particular, her consistent artistic and poetic approach to essays and long-form narrarative is always surprisingly insightful and enlightening. And the way she writes, melding deeply personal perspective with a constant drive to pull back the curtain on the special ironies and contortions of American life, is the rarist form of reporting and commentary I know of – especially here in the 21st century (which, may I remind you, is now 25% in the can and still foaming).

Lately, Solnit’s been up on the battlements pushing hard to turn the tide in this current attempted

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Which Way We Going Now?

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

On being an artist in this strange new world

I’ve been wondering about two things ever since the spring of 2016 when Donald Trump began winning primaries and getting all sorts of weird media attention. First off, were the Republican Party and its voters really willing to accept responsibility for the direction that guy wanted to push them? And, secondly, how much would the art world step up as a reaction to what Trump and his ilk seemed to want to do to our country? 

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Preening, Bullying, and Lying in America: Do We Have a Leader Yet?

FAKE NEWS!
~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments

FAKE NEWS!
FAKE NEWS from Washington Free Beacon, dated August 17, 2015

Note: The image to the right is not real. It is fake. It is not a dead parrot, but it is not a real parrot either.

Reading and listening to the mainstream media, it has been suggested that this new president is willing to distort reality openly and brazenly with essentially no subtlety or grace mostly for his own self-aggrandizement and to protect his brand. The Trump brand has been his bread and butter for over forty years. Should we be surprised? We’ve known this guy since at least 1973. But is brand protection really an excuse for a president?

When I started writing this essay we’d just witnessed the pissing match between Trump and the media over how many people had attended his inauguration. During a very weird scene at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, Trump said in the middle of a harangue about crowd numbers: “I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”

He had also sent out his two main mouthpieces, Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway to stir things up. Spicer, in his first ever White House lectern performance with the media, berated them for concocting lies and misinformation. The next day Kellyanne Conway introduced the idea of “alternative facts” to an incredulous Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Everything’s been going downhill since that first weekend in the communication department for this administration. Continue reading →

When I Noticed We Stopped Thinking: Over Sangria and Marinated Meat

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

2300 Jackson Street

It was a warm weekend evening in September of 1985. We sat in our small urban backyard, pink clouds over-head, starting on a second pitcher of Sangria after a shish-ka-bob and salad dinner. I was more or less happy. I’d become aware of the need to marinate meat the week before and the beef and lamb skewered between red onion, green peppers, and fresh cut pineapple was as tasty as anything you’d get at the Shiska-Wu truck downtown. It was a beautiful evening. Our friends, I’ll call them Gary and Monica, were happy, too. We were all happy — satiated, a bit tipsy, present in the beautiful evening together, young, fit, beautiful, on our way. Gary and Monica were just hitting 30. We — my wife at the time, and I — were just edging that way at 27.

And then I brought up the earthquake that had just happened in Mexico. Michoacan Continue reading →