Central Standard Time – November 2016 Issue

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

The new November issue of Joe Tortorici‘s Chicago-oriented culture e-zine, Central Standard Time is out. The election is the theme along with forays into Chicago’s arts and music scene.

From Professor Joe:

What a time to be alive! Let’s take a moment and contemplate the sweep of history unfolding before our eyes. The crystal ball of speculation grows murky as pundits, politicians, and the general electorate contemplate a future full of promise, or the need to stock food and water.

Through the coming weeks take a break and listen to your favorite music, draw a picture, sing a song, dance, sip your best wine, and read for escape and stimulation. Central Standard Time can help with reading part. Here is our new edition and it’s all about you, the reader.

David Edward Sims graces this publication for the first time. I can only hope it is the beginning of many more articles from this exceptionally talented man. David’s beat is the creative muse in all its forms and we are treated to an introspection of the spectacular Carmen McRea and the Triumph of the Lyric. Hear his interview program every Sunday morning at DePaul Radio – radio.depaul.edu

The round-table of political opinion may end up as kindling from the heat generated by our crew. Consider these offerings

I have my characteristically skeptical take on the election….

“This Election and the Nature of Republics”

….but suffice to say this turn of events was another marker in one of the ugliest and strangest presidential campaigns in American history. In terms of divisive nastiness, only 1800 and 1860 were worse, which is hardly a comforting thought and for pure weirdness, 2016 is second to none.

Why is this?

Certainly, the two candidates who are each in their own very different ways, dysfunctional and highly unpopular human beings should bear considerable blame. They have run the campaigns that they chose to run in the primaries and the general with the attendant lying, slandering, demonizing, underhanded conspiring and unprecedented behavior they consciously decided to use in seeking the Oval Office. This might be tolerable if Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton were otherwise laudatory in their personal characters, but sadly, neither would have made it past the first primary during the Cold War with their personal baggage. One candidate is a corrupt influence peddler, habitual rule-breaker and liar with a cosmic level sense of entitlement and the other a ranting, bigoted, demagogue whose inner circle is tied to Russian oligarchs and who may actually be clinically emotionally disturbed. One of them come January is going to sit where Abraham Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation and where John F. Kennedy spoke to the world about a possible nuclear war.

Read the rest here.