Where does this journal take us, this literary journal, this review of the literary essay, in some places cached as The Essay Review and in others boxed as The Falling Leaf Review, formerly The Essay Review? Where then does this review go, arrive, take us . . . clearly into the world of thinking as it has been developed by traditions in the west since antiquity. Yes, I do not ever know what I think until I write, unless I write–writing most closely mirrors thinking?
Writing is also salvation as it is sanitation, sanitizing–my sanity is contained herein. Do I have an axe to grind with power and monied elites? Of course I do, but I also have observations and critiques as well as explications and expositions in defense of democracy and the People. These are other than simple diatribes against power; the latter more easily dismissed by power than genuine critique. Moreover, the quality of the writing, even among the Jeremiads, is what carries the critique, giving it the power it has as a rebuttal for elites and elitist politics. Again, I am not herein at this time going to defend the western tradition of thought, nor the inheritance from our Greco-Roman heritage. I know that here in America this heritage needs defending and exposition more so than it does in Europe, or even societies and cultures ancillary to Greco-Roman civilization, themselves civilizations informed by Greco-Roman civilization as we see in Turkey or in the Franco-Phone world of Berber North Africa, or in an ancillary effect promoted in the former French colonial influence in the Arab Muslim world.
The Falling Leaf Review 