A Website of the Radical Imagination
In 1991, Oliver Stone slandered Lyndon Johnson in his film JFK, accusing Johnson of complicity in the assassination of President Kennedy. A number of historians and political figures (including Johnson Aide and Carter Administration Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr.) have argued that Ava DuVernay’s new movie Selma defames LBJ as … Read more
I Selma traduces LBJ (see above), but what’s worse is its take on Martin Luther King’s deliberations in the days after the police riot on Pettus Bridge terminated the first major Civil Rights march in Selma. That time after “Bloody Sunday” was one of many sequences during the 60s when King would end up “fire-fighting.” … Read more
Thanks for the inquiry about the movie Selma. I used to avoid all media about the movement. The stuff never rang true. Then I realized these treatments were just takes on an imagined past; they’re not about my reality. I saw the movie yesterday. My favorite part was the old black and white film, in … Read more
Prologue: A Society of Disc Jockeys; or Road Rage Now Out here in the Panhandle; radio sounds great. Wide expanses for radio consciousness to bounce off of. Of course I’m talking about vehicular radio here. Just you, your truck, and of course your friend the disc jockey. My favorite station is dominant — and interested … Read more
Your editor struck up a correspondence with the author of this article after we both responded to a group email from William Greider linking us to one of Greider’s recent pieces. It led to an exchange about the Affordable Care Act and to this piece of “samizdat” detailing one desperate senior’s angle on ACA (and … Read more
What follows is an exchange between George Scialabba, essayist and editor of The Baffler, and longtime First of the Month contributor, Fredric Smoler. The subject of their debate (which was sparked by Smoler’s article “Democracy Now.”) is the controversy surrounding Michael Kinsley’s Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, … Read more
I’ve been expecting you to rain on “Obamamania” for years so your Harpers piece last month didn’t come out of the blue. Though it feels a little inapposite to mention…me since your analysis nicely eschews authorial narcissism. You don’t go in for the sort of brazen self-aggrandizement that makes other wannabe-prominent leftist critics of our … Read more