Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/23/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
In truth, the gun issue is an easy chimera that allows us to avoid looking in the mirror. It is much easier for us to imagine that this is an unfortunate political or regulatory issue than it is to ask what our own complicity in this ongoing, slow motion slaughter of innocents might be.
The older I get, the more I interrogate my own critique of the new-new thing. Even the quickest retrospective glance reveals cultural history as a kind of ping-pong: the oldsters are appalled by the youngers, and when the youngers grow old, they are briefly surprised at finding their parents’ words emerging from their own mouths. Then they get used to it, and the generations roll on. So take this with a pinch of trepidation, or at least a grain of salt, but I’m feeling more and more fed up with what seems to me to be a wildly misguided and rapidly emergent impulse in art and commerce, which is to hold nothing sacred, to mount an imitation of realness in which both art and authenticity are left lying on the studio floor. Take the case of the canned parrots of Telegraph Hill.
Editor’s Note: This article appeared first in the wonderful daily website Truth Out and can be read there also. Perhaps the most drastic element of the war on youth in the U.S. is the willingness of the powerful to continue to squander the resources of the planet earth and destroy the life-support system of the planet. Having abandoned hope in any real transformation of the world, the powerful are willing to continue to amass wealth and power and to ignore all the scientific data that shows that if we continue in the path that we’ve been on for the past several hundred years, the youth of today will be suffering an environmental catastrophe brought on by the selfishness, materialism, chauvinistic nationalism that together are the consequences of global capitalism. Yet the war on youth today has the consequence of making many of them less willing to embrace the kind of seemingly utopian transformations of our society without which the logic of the capitalist order will continue and may yet yield a fascistic outcome to protect the powerful from the righteous indignation of those who will be suffering through the decline of the earth in the next fifty years. That’s why the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment is at once so important (read it please at www.tikkun.org/esra) and so frequently dismissed as “too visionary to be realistic.”
When we have urges to do things that we know are not in our best interest, how can we engage within ourselves to find the freedom to attend to what IS in our best interest? When we have an idea about what we should do, and yet act differently, what meaning can we make of it?
I believe that the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of the drug companies, the power of the corporate media is so great that the only way we really transform America and do the things that the middle class and working class desperately need is through a political revolution when millions of people begin to come together and stand up and say: Our government is going to work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires. These words were spoken by Senator Bernie Sanders during the first Democratic Party debate among presidential candidates who hope to win the party’s nomination. The Washington Post has made a full transcript available online. In it, the word “billionaire” appears 13 times, all of them voiced by Sanders. Here’s another sample:
I am the only candidate running for president who is not a billionaire, who has raised substantial sums of money, and I do not have a super PAC.
It seems that the new bizarre form of American individualism for some has become mass murder; it’s the only way to go from being no one to becoming someone or more accurately, ‘the one’.
Last Sunday, at the United Nations, world leaders marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Beijing accord on women’s rights. They celebrated women’s progress—especially in education, health, and labor—and underscored ongoing gender inequalities.
Stephen Colbert is good for American Catholicism and he is good for America. For many secular Americans, many of whom are former Catholics, the face of the American Church has too often been the unsmiling visage of Bill Donahue of the Catholic League.
“Do we have to involve everyone in every decision for it to be collaborative? … Because if we do, I’m quitting my job.” I hear different versions of this question all the time.
We present to you our online-access features from the print magazine, like Peter Gabel’s plan for transforming the justice system, as well as web-only exclusives from Marc Gopin, Candace Mittel, and Michael Lerner and Cat Zavis—plus poetry and book reviews!