for Hamlet, My Brother, My Likeness; and for my special friend Oscar A man would certainly have to have a heart of stone, as Oscar had said, not to laugh at the Devil Himself in Hell. The fault of my fate--our fate? What fate? Whose? This fate, socially and politically, of course, is not in … Continue reading The Question? [Short Story]

[A text is one that speaks to us, we have said. A text has something to say and all we have to do is listen. I also imagine that this is naive. This is a kind of passivity in the manner of interpreting? What is it that we hear when we listen to a text; … Continue reading A Short Neck Among Giraffes [A Short-short Story]

for James Baldwin   I cannot fathom the depth of character, of mind, or of soul that is necessary for compassion. I have mastered the art of appearing to be compassionate, when in turn of fact, I am anything but understanding in a degree that qualifies as compassionate. A society bred on the idea that … Continue reading Nativity [a Short Story]

Polemic is a mask to wear, as is critique of any kind, as is diatribe, tirade, letter to posterity, essay, personal, literary, critical . . . every essay is a work of fiction, one kind or another;things made, we understand, but also in the way all theories are in themselves fictional in more than one … Continue reading Faith and Belief [Essayistic Fiction]

History, like time, is an ocean, not a river, it never goes from point A to point B. We do imagine we are more compassionate today than in the past because like most ages, we believe ours to be the best of times, even with as many problems as we envision for our age. If … Continue reading Circus Bread, a Polemic [Flash Fiction]

I wear many masks. I have worn many. I will wear many, many more; I will have worn and re-worn uncountable many by the time I die. Who I am not as important as who I will have been? Remember Solon, my friends, if not, reexamine your Herodotus; it's early on. I It does not … Continue reading Waiting for Myself (A Non-Utilitarian Reckoning by an Anonymous Reader Alone?) [Short Fiction]

Love of country cannot be equal to love of state; that is, no more than the public can ever entirely be the people. In the America I had been raised to love, the government was never your friend, and that was something I was taught by an ex-Marine father who was yet always faithful. He … Continue reading My Brother, My LIkeness [Flash Fiction]

A letter from one friend to another several years ago. Dear Alice, Do you remember when John Lennon had said that woman is the nigger of he world? I remember this clearly, I think; at least I can imagine myself recollecting this one or more times in the about this further ago past from whenever … Continue reading Minstrel Show [Flash Fiction]

All black and white photography is the world in shades of gray . . . I won't be able to wait for the film to go away, to fade out--I am not able to talk the truth of monochrome without one or another allusion or reference to the film made--how many shades of gray are … Continue reading Monochrome 4 [Flash Fiction]

To tell or not to tell, what is this telling or this tolling, sum-totaling all our words we speak in creeping phrases until the last syllable of recording our story, our story is history, the history becomes other than dead in the telling, all tales told, all is tolled, herein now, the form of a … Continue reading Barnum and Obama [A Short-short Story ]

Of course, sex is natural. Of course, it is normal. Of course, I have said this before, many times before, word following word on how we can raise sex and sexuality to where they belong in our minds, or debase them the way we do, representing them as we do, dis-understaanding them as we have. … Continue reading Constitutionality; A Polemical Short Story

Love in a country where more than 50% of all marriages end in divorce, where a philosophy of individualism persists in degrading a person's self-awareness to the point where his only philosophical choice is solipsism, and where this remains our most fervent mysticism, love of anything, including freedom, but also humanity, could not help but … Continue reading Licenses to Gratify [Flash Fiction]

What is a Literary Journal, anyway? I might ask, I should ask? I ask. How is this literary journal set to manage what it is supposed to be doing? Critically responding to the contemporary world we live in? What does that mean to say these pretentious things about how I should be considering what I … Continue reading The Journal is the Journey [Flash Fiction]

To Ask or Not to Ask To ask or not to ask--we have learned to ask questions as a means of not receiving an answer; we have learned to respond at times as a means to avoid answering. What is it we do when we ask? Is it the question to question? Asking and questioning … Continue reading How You Have Learned to Ask Questions as a Way of Avoiding Answers

Let's not forget this Thanksgiving that the Pilgrims were political radicals, and the Mayflower Compact is one of the great liberal documents in history.

The 'we' you find anywhere in my essays is the conventional editorial we, the we of most social commentary, the we that sets before it, as a rhetorical strategy, you and I, not solely the collective plural. I am not separate from you, another form of the I and thou we all need to understand … Continue reading We, Another Mask [Flash Fiction]

  The Delights of My Autopsy [A Short Story] Considering what it is I write and perhaps why it is I write what I do when I do; considering context for the writing, the where, the when, the to-whom I write--what? What should come next? To write or not to write has been my be … Continue reading THE DELIGHTS OF MY AUTOPSY [a short story]

It is not antisemitic to be anti-zionist, any more than it was anti-German to be anti-Nazis. Zionism does not have to be a right-wing politique, but it has become one. Zionism is not in itself Jewish; there are plenty of Christians, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox who are also Zionists; there are also plenty of Muslims … Continue reading Imperialism, Colonialism, Nationalism, Zionism [A Short-short Story]

Progress is not an inference drawn from chronology alone. We can move through chronology, pass through the years from one to another without inferring anything like progress has happened. Do you think history is progressive, whatever history is? Do you believe in progress happening correlative to chronology passing? What is this thing time? Do we … Continue reading Inference Drawn [Flash Fiction]

Can is able to, can is allowed to, can is know how to, and this has everything to do with what gets recorded. The history of DNA, for instance is not what was initially recorded or acknowledged by the Nobel committee, or passed down in other historiography, finding its way into textbooks and then taught … Continue reading Hypocrite Reader [Flash Fiction]

A three page essay on Israel's place in the continuum of European colonialism and the fateful fall into imperialist politics, written by a political science student as part of the preface he is writing for his thesis. The essay was written independent of the thesis which has been completed. The Preface is currently being composed … Continue reading Part of a Preface [Flash Fiction]

Is Islam in itself an impediment to democracy or is it the village mind of hundreds of millions of muslims living in third world poverty around the world, barely literate enough to read even Holy Qu'ran, let alone anything that would foster democratic thinking? We have to be better educated about history and more honest … Continue reading Islam and Illiteracy? The Questions of a Polemicist [Short-short Fiction]

Spleen. I vent my spleen in these books, the notebooks and journals I keep, have kept to a number of them in excess of twelve thousand pages of entries. Yes, listen my hypocrite readers, I could say, in the garden of my vanity, flowers of evil thrive . . . it’s not enough to say … Continue reading New York, Spleen [Short-short Fiction]

[Fiction] Who am I? I ask. I do, regularly? How often? How many times I have I could not count. A familiar refrain of mine, the inability to count how many times I have done something, read something, seen something heard . . . I do ask this question, how should I say? Now and … Continue reading Longing for Actuality; Looking for Selfhood; a Dialectic

A Trial of Ideas by a Man Who Writes a Blog for a Website Dedicated to Political Commentary   He says for himself what he says for himself when says what he says for himself, I have heard him say similarly, in words almost like these. He writes a blog for a Political Commentary Website. … Continue reading Beginning or End [Flash Fiction]

A man and his friend are at the bar in a restaurant in SOHO. They are having a beer, pints. It is lunch time. They are talking as men talk at bars over beers all across the western world--no? Did you have a look at Muslim protests against the ISIS bombings in Paris--where were the … Continue reading Men Only Protest? [Flash Fiction]

I had been reminded one night by a Hasidic student of mine that stoning is still part of Jewish law, but that they cannot stone anyone in America. Perhaps this is the progressiveness we should be most proud of; however, we have always preferred ropes to rocks. Yes, rocks and ropes will harm me, but … Continue reading Correctly Political [Flash Fiction]

I heard a man in a coffee shop in Brooklyn where I was having breakfast. I was at my table with my journal, as usual, going everywhere I go with pen and paper. He was a man not so unlike any other man; he was unlike every man. Do you need to know more about … Continue reading A Man in a Coffee Shop Said [Flash Fiction]

The French were never freer than during the Nazis occupation, you said; or so you said this hypothesis had been presented by Jean Paul Sartre in his short essay, "The Republic of Silence,"which you read, you said, when you were taking a seminar in existentialism, I think it was, I think I remember, and it … Continue reading French Heideggerean Existentialist Philosophers [A Short-short Story]

The Centers Will Not Hold. The kind of critique or commentary or exposition one needs to engage in a democratic society can only be accomplished effectively when literacy is raised above the levels we have come to accept as good enough, which I know are far from the mark. We are talking missing the target, … Continue reading Political Entropy [Short Story]

I do not know what Joe Monte thinks or would think if he were still alive. It is not likely that he is alive. I have no words for Joe now, nor did I then when I was a boy in his grocery buying Boar's Head ham sliced on the non-kosher slicer. I have no … Continue reading Yet Sympathy Demands Nonetheless [Flash Fiction]

Why did it take the horror of Paris for Obama and other western leaders to raise the intensity of their military responses to ISIS? Do we not have the will? I see there has been no way, not really, for too long. You do see that the responses have ben raised in their intensity. I'm … Continue reading The Polemicist Speaks Again of the Media President and Politicking over Politics [Flash Fiction]

Dear Reader, I have come to bury the idea that we should live in a society that cannot respect a woman's basic human right of choice. I have come to bury the notion that men have an appropriate bearing through legislation in curtailing a woman's right to choose, and not just abortion, but her sexuality … Continue reading Letter from the Editor; or, Pro Choice is a Two Way Street [Flash Fiction]

All media sell sets of values, they control perceptions by controlling the stream of images, by manipulating the ideas that are received through their organs. Control the organs of information and control the stream of images and the received ideas of the culture--anyone in control of the Media can control information and manipulate public opinion, … Continue reading All of a Piece; the American Media and Reactionary Politics from the Middle East; Part Two

Dear Chiara, I know you remember when you and I discussed at length just what a woman's position in this world is--and missionary position was culturally enforced only so women could be kept under men. But we must always remember that there was something Edgar Poe about abortion, something downright gothic horror, before Roe versus … Continue reading Second Sex Still? (A Letter from Jane) [Flash Fiction]

An angry young college student speaks of the American Media and Reactionary Politics in the Middle East. You will always know the names of the Israeli Soldiers who are killed while in Lebanon, but you will never know the names of the Palestinian children murdered by State sponsored terrorism at the hands of the Israeli … Continue reading All of a Piece [A Short Story]

http://bit.ly/1PHduuG The title says everything.

"Sharia Law is the Enemy of Freedom and an Affront to the Holy Wisdom Herself" ---an imagined man speaks as he would speak in the minds of those who would imagine what this imaginary man would say when confronted with the imagined reality of Sharia Law On Holy Wisdom A diatribe set up against positions … Continue reading Religious Freedom Does not Trump the Constitution [A Short Story]

What I am socially, politically, could help you to understand more about me? It could help you to know something about what I think about my place in politics? in the political continuum that I understand American Democracy to be? Should there be more is not the issue; will there be more is also not … Continue reading I Am We the People [Flash Fiction]

There is a transformation of the Freudian Es or Id as we like to say in English, preferring in this instance, Latin to either Freud's German or our own Anglo-Saxon. The Freudian Id is that It-monster that resides within me, yet apart from any of the mediating forces of my humanity. This monster breeder, the … Continue reading Laughing at the Devil [Flash Fiction]

Everything from one end of the monochromatic scale of black to that of white I am able to imagine when taking photos. I see color arrangement in monochrome. The black and white film I buy at B & H on 9th Avenue across from the Cheyenne Diner I have used for decades now--is it that … Continue reading A Chinese Box of Closets [Flash Fiction]

Lifeboats; lifejackets; parachutes–how is anti-abortion not letting steerage drown in the icy North Atlantic? The Titanic did not have enough lifeboats; this was understandable given British received ideas on liberty, individuality, human and civil rights; just how and when a man, a woman or a child of another class or ethnicity or religion deserved consideration; … Continue reading Iceberg, Dead Ahead

We cannot hope to have normal relationships between men and women, between any partner and another he or she chooses mutually and reciprocally, if we still want to criminalize sex out-of-wedlock, which is what we would be doing if we were to criminalize abortion. This is also what the opposition to Gay Marriage fears; legitimacy … Continue reading The Anti-Criminalization of Sex

Let me say as I have said before, and will likely say again--will likely need to say again (irrespective of discernible gain): We must be ever watchful, be ever on guard, where human rights are the matter. It is necessary for us, for everyone everywhere-- as it has been true for all time: human rights … Continue reading Human Rights; Another Look

We have a professional military in America of a nearly incomparable size, that is, greater than almost all nations with the exceptions perhaps of China and India. This professional military, even when many are career soldiers and might presumably retire from active service without entering the job market, is a feeder trainer of many bureaucrats … Continue reading We Have All Enlisted; or, Some Ideas on the Nature of State Control by the Editor of a Political Commentary Review Published on-line by Himself [Fiction]

II Capitalism is Obscene Without being a Marxist, I can say that virtually everything about Capitalism is obscene. I can say this without concluding that Capitalism is in itself evil. I am not going to venture an analysis of socio-economic systems. I do not assent to Capitalism being an evil, nor do I agree that … Continue reading Capitalism is Obscene [Flash Fiction]

I All the World is a Stage The pornographic, which is a prime connotation of obscenity, if not the most widespread synonym, permeates all commodities, all communication, all interactions. Public space shrinks and becomes oppressive, almost as if everything and everyone were in extreme close-up, as are sex acts in a porno film. At the … Continue reading OBSCENITY [Flash Fiction]

Would I prefer snow to the drizzle that seems terminally expressed by the color of the weather these last several days, a mood evoked by the grayness of today and yesterday and the day before that? Perhaps I would--what would I? Another question to beget other questions about weather and mood. My soul is romantic, … Continue reading Monochrome [Flash Fiction]

According to the United Nations, China has the highest incidence of sexual slavery in the world. Wait a second! China also has the highest incidence of humans in the world too. We could take the percentage of incidence of anything and probably find the highest number of occurrences in China, no? Maybe not for everything, … Continue reading Populations and Percentages; Facts, Figures and Indications Gone Awry

II How can I hope to understand what individuality can mean when true political and social individuality is so countermanded by one kind of pluralism after another, contradicted by one determinism or another in assault against any or all notions of free-will. This assault on free-will is backed up by these aforementioned pluralisms. It is … Continue reading Individuality Divisible

We are faced with a crisis in civilization, as they have been repeated around the world across time (is that then history?). There is no need to ask me if I think history is progressive; you might as well ask me if I think the ocean is progressive. Neither is. The Review is managed as … Continue reading I Miss the Moon Sometimes When I don’t See Her in the Sky [Flash Fiction]

We do moo and baa together in one or another social or public forum and call it our Ode to Freedom. Can we, though, articulate any sense of freedom other than entries by figures and calculations in the ledger books of state? Have we so relativized meaning that we can no longer say anything about … Continue reading Politeness and the New Politique

People versus the State--what then must we do--what then can we? Louis Quatorze said, L'etat, c'est moi, when asked his opinion about the Political State; the state, it is I, he said. Today, the modern state has no such illusions of absolute singularity, at least not since Mao or Stalin, maybe Pinochet or Pol Pot. … Continue reading People versus the State

What passes for remedial instruction in many community colleges is often not intended to be better than what we still sponsor in our high schools. I have taught in some of our community and four year colleges for more than a decade and a half. If democracy is slipping--and it is--it is because we who … Continue reading Everyone’s a Genius for Fifteen Seconds

[. . .] Monday the 16th of May [. . .]. Morning. Let me say again something I have said before, that no government, no administration, no man, no other women, no Law can take a woman's rights away. These intermediaries in her life may stand as impediments to her choices or her choosing; they may … Continue reading From the Notebook of Chiara Finestra [Flash Fiction]

Bureaucrats do perform a sleight of hand more expertly than any dealer in a game of three-card-monty, or with a face that any magician would pay to perform with. No state can do without their bureaucrats; they conform to any state anywhere at any time. Do you imagine the Nazis or the Fascists in Italy … Continue reading Pseudo Live Motion Saints [Flash Fiction]

You must know by now that public and people are not synonyms, and not solely in the connotations I am providing for us ini this paper; I cannot count how many times I have had to defend this statement no matter how often I use it in discussions of politics with friends and colleagues--imagining that … Continue reading Pluralism III

  A fragment of an essay found among the papers of a man who recently died, found on his desk at his apartment by his son home from college for the funeral. It was posted on his son's blog a week after placing the urn on a shelf at the man's home now solely occupied … Continue reading Cornerstones [Flash Fiction]

[Originally published by the Publishing Editor on Mar. 4 2010 in The October Revue] What shall not perish? We have seen the results of an economic elite making billions of dollars in a three-card-monty-economy. You don't imagine that economics is not a shell game, do you? Perhaps we will actually start producing things at home … Continue reading Of the Elites, By the Elites, For the Elites