“THEY WERE GARGANTUAN creatures. The earth was helpless before them as they devoured at their leisure whatever in their path might satisfy their appetites for another day.” Of course, this quote might be from a curator leading a fifth grade class through the Natural Science Exhibit on dinosaurs. But it could also be a future curator—from an orbiting city— lecturing about the now extinct giant corporations – many of them with sales figures that dwarfed the economic output of whole countries. “These “machines” as we now think of them, were so focused on meeting their insatiable quotas for growth, they altered the proximate ecosphere and even economically colonized the inhabitants. Of course, after exhausting the resources of the surface they scoured the ocean

    THE PRESENT has the unique quality of being so imposing–so suddenly familiar–that despite more surreal or otherworldly events that history will deem “tumultuous” or “cataclysmic,” people never quite view themselves as living in a time of great change. Of all the happenings in the US that have broken the rules of logic, sanity,  or even common sense in recent years–and they are legion–one stands out to me. But first, I am going to list things that, twenty years ago, I would have sworn could never happen in the US during my lifetime: The US electoral system elected a “reality” TV show star who had filed for bankruptcy a number of times, had no political experience, and claimed to never read books. He also

  I BEGAN READING THE SPY NOVELS of the late John LeCarre’ thirty years ago (see https://www.moviesmarketsandmore.com/the-author-who-came-in-from-the-cold-on-john-le-carre/). I have reread most of them many times. The experiences–the places of being he draws you into–become a destination each time you open one of his books: an exotic canyon, a rare geological formation, or a hiking trail that weaves into and out of vistas and panoramas and naturescapes. And each time there’s something new you missed the last time. One drawback to reading his more “believable” espionage novels is that having been a spy, he dramatizes the plots of high intrigue that do occur, but are covered up in the interest of national security. Too much spy novel reading can leave you spotting conspiracies in even the

[Below: Soviet Poster, 1931 Public Domain.  In fact, “2+2 = 5.” is also a slogan from “1984”]     THE REPUBLICANS and their messaging partners seem to want to sabotage Biden’s Covid-19 success and don’t much mind that it shortens the life expectancy of their own voters, weakens the economy, kills innocent bystanders, and incubates new, deadlier strains of the virus. As with their Clueless Leader, they don’t seem to think or plan, but rather derive their actions from a collective Oppositional Defiant Disorder–opposing and defying order itself and most of the tenets of a functioning democratic society. But it’s gone too far with the deliberate and deadly lies. This country needs to enact some anti-propaganda legislation. Just as the right to bear arms does

A very long time ago, my brothers and I slept three beds across in the same room downstairs. Several times each week our father made popcorn, drank soda, and read his magazines in the kitchen at the top of the stairs.  It was a ritual of his, and my mother apparently gave him that space; he worked long days and Saturdays, too. Some nights, after we were supposed to have been asleep, we heard the sound as he shook the iron skillet across the stovetop. This while the smell of fresh-popped corn wafted down.  Occasionally one of us would creep upstairs and ask for a bowl–but we would not be asking for a bowl of just any popcorn. The kernels came from the farmers in