Republicans

Who’s In Command Here, Soldier?

~ David Biddle ~ 1 Comment

As we approach another November voting date to possibly re-define who we are as a country, this commentary – first published in July 2025 – is more relevant than ever. If it speaks to you, please share. I wrote it for your friends and family as well as you.

One of my favorite scenes in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie, Apocalypse Now, is when Martin Sheen’s character, Captain Willard, has landed on a river bank in the dead of night during a major fire fight between US troops and their hidden North Vietnamese opponents. With young Lance (who is tripping on acid) in tow, he is trying to locate a commanding officer in the midst of all the chaos and violence and fear. Willard asks two guys hunkered down in a trench who their commanding officer is. One turns and says, “Ain’t you?”

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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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Everyone Gets a Scarlet Letter: Love in the Time of Implosions

~ David Biddle ~ 3 Comments

Photo: Warren Harold – http://www.thatwasmyfoot.com/

We’ve been through more than a decade of struggle now, haven’t we? There’s that economy thing that’s been eating at all of us this past three years. But there’s also the insanity of extremist violence and murderous intent directed randomly at those of us who are innocent.

All of this seems to have at least temporarily altered the core sense that most of us have of what counts in life. What seems to have happened is not that we’ve changed our values or our definition of the meaning of life, so much as we’ve forgotten the importance of those issues and their bedrock necessity.

This stuff ain’t going away. It’s no ones fault. Economic and social chaos have always been with us. These days, though, this chaos is amplified because of the reach of media, the density of world population, and the fact that peace and happiness in Continue reading →