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.
November 1st, 2016 at 7:03 pm
Let’s keep things in perspective.
Yes, Pat Buchanan, in defending Trump’s tariffs against the GOP free trading elite, refers often to Lincoln’s successful use of them. But also, yes, the same Buchanan has agreed in the past with the libertarian/Southern take on Lincoln.
https://www.amazon.com/Real-Lincoln-Abraham-Agenda-Unnecessary/dp/0761526463
A most unpopular among many, if admittedly great president, who suspended habeus corpus and bloodily forced the Confederacy to stay in the Union-which black conservative Walter Williams agrees, was un-Constitutional.
But some of your points also argue in Trump’s favor. Russian oligarchs
who put greed before Russia are pretty much in England or Israel now.
So when you say Trump is friendly with Russian oligarchs you are really saying Trump is friendly with Putin, whereas Clinton calls him another Hitler and threatens war.
Much of the remainder of your essay begs the question: Can Americans be true to themselves and still be servants of a cohesively run, world-dominating unipolar hegemon?
It’s better we be true to ourselves; the thrust of your essay hints that it’s better if we compromise our selves into an artificial construct posing
as healthy, calling itself “liberal democracy” masking Money Power dominion.
There are a majority in the world who do not agree we are the Indispensable Nation and would rather be true to our intransigent selves working out the
peace here, in Chicago rather than Kiev, in Washington rather than Baghdad, in New York rather than Libya and Syria.
November 1st, 2016 at 8:53 pm
“the libertarian/Southern take on Lincoln”
Lincoln was the ultimate damned libertarian by securing freedom for an entire race of enslaved people. There’s nothing libertarian about slavery. Nothing.
November 1st, 2016 at 10:27 pm
Of course ruthless cheapest labor capitalism in the North made the erstwhile slave’s life in yankeeland an elysium.