In a new essay for CNN, I examine one of the reasons for Biden’s abysmal approval rating, and more important, the troubled state of the country – the insidious influence of what I call the “fan fiction left.” The fan fiction left is withdrawn from reality, and in the words of George Orwell, lost in political thought that is nothing more than “masturbation fantasy.”
Read my diagnosis of the fan fiction left’s delusions, and my survey of the damage that they cause at CNN.
I’ve written an essay on the last completed work of the brilliant and masterful writer, David Foster Wallace. The novella is not only a great read, but has much to teach a nation that has become one big “wastoid.” Read at CounterPunch!
I’ve written a new essay for The Progressive Magazine. I ridicule the hypocritical and foolish obsession with gas prices, calling on American political culture to give more attention to the costs that actually transform everyday life into a financial struggle – housing, health care, education, and debt (major increases in these burdens receive almost no coverage from the press).
Relentlessly focusing on gas prices also acts as a propaganda victory for the oil industry by distracting the public from the impending catastrophe of global warming.
Read it at the Progressive.
I’ve written an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books about two insightful and important new books about Donald Trump, and the dangers of the fascist American right: historian Paul Street’s, It Happened Here, and political scientist Anthony DiMaggio’s, Rising Fascism.
These books provide masterful analyses and urgent warnings regarding the extreme threat facing the American people, and our beleaguered democracy. Read at LARB.
I have a new essay at the Daily Beast on the terrorist plot to kidnap and kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and how it is emblematic of the escalating violence and danger from the American right.
“More than any story other than the attempted right-wing coup d’état of Jan. 6, the conspiracy to assassinate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer illustrates the escalating threat of political violence, the diminution of America’s civil society and the growing menace of a Republican Party willing to excuse, diminish, and at times, even encourage extralegal extremism as a means to achieve its political ends…”
Read the rest at the Beast.
I’ve interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former high level Republican Senate aide who denounced his old party in 2010 and has since become an acerbic and insightful analyst, about Russia’s war crime in Ukraine, and the bizarre and troubling sympathy for Putin on the American right.
The interview is short, but offers tremendous clarity on many vital issues related to the war in Ukraine, and politics in the US. Read at The Progressive Magazine.
I recently had the immense pleasure of interviewing recent National Book Award winner, Martín Espada. We discussed his life and work, including poetry and radical politics, and right wing book bans, which have twice eliminated his work.
My lengthy profile of Espada is available to CounterPunch subscribers: “‘Put the Blood Back In’: Martín Espada on Poetry, Book Banning, and Radical Politics”
I have a new story at the Progressive on Neil Young’s “righteous crusade” against Spotify. In my analysis, it represents a much larger fight against the corporate capture of the arts, and the dominance of greed as a decision-making calculus, no matter how destructive to public health or the common good. As Neil himself sings, “Have to shut the whole system down!”
Last week, I attended a press conference that Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition hosted in the Martin Luther King Legacy Apartments in Chicago. Jackson, and other speakers, condemned the “moral disgrace” of widespread poverty, housing injustice, and homelessness in the world’s wealthiest country.
I’ve written a story on the press conference, the history of King and Jackson’s anti-poverty and anti-racism work in Chicago, and the related issues of oppression and exploitation in the present. Read at CounterPunch.
I have a new essay at Salon about the political writing of the recently deceased Joan Didion. It is obvious that Didion was one of the greatest literary artists in the US, but most people do not realize that she was also one the country’s most astute political analysts. Like few others, she sliced through the layers of lies in our public discourse, exposing how racism, middle class fear and complacency, and oligarchic oppression sabotage genuine democracy.
Read the essay at Salon.
David Masciotra 