test blog 5

In anticipation of an upcoming trip to Spain, I'm re-reading For Whom The Bell Tolls , Ernest Hemingway's novel based on his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. I haven't read Hemingway since the 1980s, and I'm enjoying it much more than I expected to. I had mis-remembered Hemingway as a harsher, more macho voice. Maybe it was his love of bullfighting and hunting, or his personal image as a tough guy, but I was expecting bellicosity and possibly sexism. I didn't find it. The voice is warm and generous, and he writes with great sensitivity and respect, and keen insight into human motivations. The Spanish Civil War itself is about resistance to fascism, more a story of rebellion and revolution than armies and battlefields. (I imagine the anti-fascists are more properly called counter-revolutionaries, because Franco's military takeover was a revolution.) Hemingway was part of the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigades, Americans who fought for the Spanish Republic, to tr...

Revolutionary thought of the day: Across the road at the sawmill smoke was coming out of the chimney and Anselmo could smell it blown toward him through the snow. The fascists are warm, he thought, and they are comfortable, and tomorrow night we will kill them. It is a strange thing and I do not like to think of it. I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travellers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing. Ernest Hemingway from For Whom the Bell Tolls

One thousand days. Think of where you were one thousand days ago, and all you have done since then. In all that time, Bradley Manning has been in prison. For 62 days, he was held in a cage in Kuwait. For 265 days, he was held in solitary confinement. For 1,000 days, he has been imprisoned. And when Manning does receive a hearing, it will not be a trial. It will be a court martial: his accusers will be the only judge and jury. Manning's "crime" is exposing the truth about the murder of civilians by US forces in Iraq. While the real criminals go unpunished - indeed, while they lead lives of wealth and privilege - a courageous whistleblower is persecuted. This weekend, people in more than 70 cities around the world will stand in solidarity with Manning and mark his 1,000th day in jail without trial. To find an event near you, go here . To remember why Bradley Manning is being persecuted, go here , and watch the video . Good reading: Nobel Laureates Salute Bradley Mannin...

Wladyslaw Lizon, Member of Parliament for Mississauga Cooksville East (my own riding), is back in the news. The Conservative MP has teamed up with two of his fellow backbenchers in an attack on Canadian women's reproductive rights. The last time Lizon surfaced , he had "alerted" Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney that a Mississauga woman had worn a niqab during a citizenship ceremony. Thanks to Lizon and Kenney, face veils are now banned from those ceremonies. This man is anti-choice in more ways than one. More recently, Lizon, Maurice Vellacott (Saskatoon—Wanuskewin), and Leon Benoit (Vegreville—Wainwright) demanded that the RCMP investigate all later-term abortions performed in Canada over the last decade. According to these MPs , the doctors who performed these procedures should be charged with homicide. The three MPs claim that there were 490 later-term terminations performed in Canada between the years 2000 and 2009. Where did the men get this 490 numb...

After finally getting Jill Lepore's "Lie Factory" posted on this blog , I will go back even further, to something I've wanted to post for nearly two years. No matter the date, this piece is timeless, and more relevant with every passing day. This lengthy essay by Nicholson Baker ran in Harper's in May of 2011: "Why I’m a pacifist: The dangerous myth of the Good War" . It's available by pdf download with a Harper's subscription, or (I hope) at your local library, or from me by request. (Artwork from the Swarthmore College Peace Collection , Swarthmore, PA.) Baker charts his evolution from moderately antiwar to complete pacifist, in part from learning about the "surprisingly vocal group of World War II pacifists". They weren’t, all of them, against personal or familial self-defense, or against law enforcement. But they did hold that war was, in the words of the British pacifist and parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby, “a monster born of hyp...

The current New Yorker stories by Joseph Mitchell  has given me an opportunity to post something I've been meaning to share for ages. Last September, Jill Lepore unearthed an incredible bit of history, a piece of the American past that is  alive with us today, and more dangerous than ever. (I am generally interested in anything Lepore writes; last year I gushed over her reviews of books about Clarence Darrow , one of my abiding heroes.) In this piece, Lepore writes about the roots of political advertising - the falsehoods and trickery, the lies and slander, the deception and distortion, the swiftboating and smearing that make us grit our teeth in frustration. The advertising firms that design and disseminate those orchestrated lies can be traced back to one company, an operation called Campaigns Inc. Its first victim was Upton Sinclair, the writer and socialist and one-time candidate for Governor of California. He called it The Lie Factory. In 1934, Sinclair explained what d...

The New Yorker has given us a singularly rare gift: new writing by Joseph Mitchell. Joseph Mitchell wrote about New York City and the multiplicity of people who inhabit it. Mitchell wrote nonfiction portraits of quirky people, overlooked trades, unknown professions, obsessive collectors. His warm, meticulous prose brought people to life before your eyes. He wrote beautifully, and with great respect for the endless diversity of humanity, long before diversity was a buzzword. First edition, found here . Mitchell wrote from 1929 to 1964. Then he stopped writing - stopped completely, as far as we know. In one of the most famous writer's blocks known in this corner of the world, Mitchell continued to show up at The New Yorker magazine, sitting in his office every day, not writing. After Mitchell died in 1996, New Yorker colleague Roger Angell described it like this. Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the...