Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Sometime in 2004 I plan to write an essay but I haven't yet
"The north of Iraq was threatened by ethnic conflict yesterday as crisis talks between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk failed to prevent continuing bloodshed in the divided city," Harry de Quetteville writes in today's Telegraph "At least one man was killed after a demonstration by ethnic Arabs and Turkmen culminated in an exchange of gunfire with Kirkuk's mostly Kurdish police. The march followed a similar clash on Wednesday when five people died."
n a noncommercial radio station about 30 years ago, while the war was still raging, I used to air an obscure record that featured some of Bruce’s final performance. He did a bit he’d presented many times before, reciting (with a thick German accent) a poem by the radically humanistic Trappist monk Thomas Merton -- a meditation on the high-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann.
Here are words I’ve often remembered over the course of three decades:
“My defense: I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day’s effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap. Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had done to them?”
Such questions are still too hot for mainstream media to handle. We may congratulate ourselves on how risque the words and images are now, in mass media, but the lasting power of Lenny Bruce’s caustic humor has nothing to do with four-letter words. Today, naughty language and sexual images are big media sellers. The tacit taboos are in other realms of expression.