A Website of the Radical Imagination
Remarks delivered by Kurt Vonnegut at St. Marks on the Bowery on the night of September Eleventh, 2002. My text for tonight is from the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” There has so far been only one nation crazy enough to detonate atomic weapons … Read more
We asked George Lakey – a longtime proponent of nonviolent direct action – to interview Mubarak Awad – a Palestinian Christian psychologist who organized a nonviolent resistance movement against occupation of Palestinian lands at the end of the 1980’s. Israel expelled him to the United States where he currently runs an NGO based in Washington … Read more
Just what is left and what is right were things in doubt well before 9/11. Now would not be a bad time to workout where we are. (1) We should try to see the situation as it presents itself rather than read the reviews. The position adopted by the “right” is not necessarily the right … Read more
I came here tonight to talk about the response of American intellectuals to the events of September 11—and I use the neutral, meaningless term “events” to start off right where any intellectual response begins, with an attempt to name what took place, or to avoid naming it. We are all familiar with the words that … Read more
A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches there was fascinated to see undergraduates singing “God Bless America” in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined forty-eight hours before. … Read more
Bin Laden seems to have acquired his political ethics through religious rhythms coursing through his region of the world. Though I am an aging and settled secular person, quite a few of the people whose strivings I admire have drawn on sundry religious ways of being. The fact that I cannot emulate them in my … Read more
The author was in NYC from Sept. 9th to Sept. 15th and this piece was written in the week after the attack. A few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting article on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird … Read more