The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind by Jeffrey Scheuer Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999, 280 pp., $23.95 Above all, keep it short. The message must be brisk, colorful, and to the point. Just say it and get …
The perfect battle can’t be picked. However flawed politically, the confrontation inspired by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle this past December had enough going for it to be worthy of progressives’ support. The growing hegemony of business, the …
In his appreciation of Milwaukee’s civility, David Glenn calls the state defense of civic order “a fundamental and necessary condition of a decent society.” But I don’t think our current state is defending civic order; it’s defending the concentration of …
The afterlife of the Vietnam War has lasted longer now than the war itself. Time makes new wounds. A host of legends clamor to make the disaster mean something. First things first. Symbolic Vietnam ought not to obscure the existence …
The 1999 WTO protests brought together a unique coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, and direct actionists, governed by a spirit of respect and mutual support rarely seen before—or replicated since.
Before we talk about Seattle, a few words about Milwaukee. In February 1839—less than a decade after they’d dispossessed the Menominees and other local Native Americans—the settlers of southeastern Wisconsin had a problem to solve. Hundreds of farmers had staked …
The American public has grown accustomed to the notion that very bad things happened in Vietnam—though for the entire ten year period, only one bad thing, My Lai, was accorded the label “atrocity.” The war in Korea, which the U.S. …
American women entered the twentieth century without the right to vote and ended it with the right “to have it all” as long as they “do it all.” Progress? It depends on whom you ask. The nation’s citizens are deeply …
There is an image from the late sixties, so famous now as to be cliché, of a young woman slipping a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s gun. There’s another photograph, from Paris in 1968, of a young man …
Back in the 1960s, I criticized the Vietnam War, in part, by contrasting it with the Korean War. This was a way of distinguishing myself, and the part of the antiwar movement to which I belonged, from those leftists who …
It is possible (just possible; I don’t mean to slip into the prophetic mode) that we are at the beginning of a new period of political activism. Globalization seems to be producing not only rapid-fire growth, erratic movements of capital, …
By the late eighties, it was clear to novelist David Foster Wallace that television had absorbed the ironic critique of mass culture directed at it. Now television emits that very irony, a parody of parodies, like the “ignore advertising and …
Parts of the Associated Press report reprinted here appeared in many American newspapers last fall, but we didn’t see the entire report anywhere. It is a powerful document, an unusual piece of investigative journalism, and one that has had significant …
Jack Metzgar’s Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, an excerpt from which appears below, is a combination of memoir, labor history, and meditation on the importance of unions in transforming the lives of industrial workers in the 1950s. It is the story …
The Situationist City by Simon Sadler MIT Press, 1999, 233 pp., $18.95 paper Guy Debord by Anselm Jappe; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith; foreword by T. J. Clark University of California Press, 1999, 188 pp., $17.95 paper On November 30, 1994, …
