Today's Stories

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Into the Great Unknown

Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Suicide has gotten a bad rap.  In our culture of endless imbecile optimism, the culture of self-help and medicated despair, we have lost respect for the suicide.  For my part, I have on a few bad nights thought of suicide but never seriously; more contemplatively, as in: death is of course the other half of our equation, a partner always growing stronger. I have a pistol here at home: how to use it effectively?  In the temple?  Or up through the palate, directly into the brain?  Coward thoughts because anodyne, without the context of real pain – you haven’t lived the long deaths of places like Iraq, the Congo, Colombia…the murmurings of one who’d like to have this balls-out vision of death and reflect on it as if it were cake. 

Still, to call the suicide a coward is an insult. The suicide enters the greatest unknown in human history.  He steps willfully toward an abyss that the priests and philosophers build gossamer webs to conceal.  Schopenhauer writes that suicide is the last act of a free man. Such a freedom is not to be dismissed. The prison, the county jail, the merest municipal lock-up confiscates the tie and shoe-lace of the incarcerated to curb this final freedom – implicit in the lock-down of a man is that suicide is indeed his last act of full agency, therefore it must be thwarted.

Suicide as ultimate freedom is excised from the popular discussion. When Hemingway pointed a shotgun into his mouth, the observers demanded ‘What went wrong?’ and few asked what went right. Can we fault a man, such a man who has loved the joys of the body, for his despair at the failing of the body while the mind putters on, horrified at the situation? Hunter S. Thompson in 2005 also killed himself with a shotgun for similar reasons.  A hero of mine, a figure who was to me I.F. Stone and Lincoln Steffens on acid, someone to follow into the breach. And even among the publications that Thompson might once have been proud in which to publish there was the unspoken trope that here was a tragedy, darkness upon literary journalism, a moment for hesitation at the “irrationality” of the event. 

Yet Thompson went with clear eyes.  "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67,” he wrote in a letter to his wife four days before he killed himself. “That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.”     The living presume so much about these dead, about the shape and meaning of a death whose math is incalculable and has no shape beyond our imaginings.  Death as circus act, or strip-tease, or blog. 

My father is 69.  He demands, in subtle ways and never serious, that I shoot him in the head with one of our shared pistols if he gets to the vegetable point, drooling on himself, stuck to machines – to the point, that is, where he is no longer, as both of us understand it, a man of agency.  I tell him, “Dad, I can’t kill you.” (It’s against the law – goddamn, who makes these laws that say that I can’t kill my own father…if this is the thing to be done….)

My father imparted to me at a very young age the joyfulness and irreverence of atheism, which came with the caveat of a high moral order.  A moral fiber as intense as a lightning storm and based on nothing more than a social instinct, something like Kant’s categorical imperative without the thousands of pages of bullshit.  That is: I’m five years old and I steal double-A batteries from a hardware store in Brooklyn, and he quickly finds out and kicks the living shit out of me (not really – a spanking that felt like a kicking). Ditto when a year later I try to drop a flower pot on the head of a friend outside my window.  Message is clear: 1) no stealing; 2) don’t hurt other people.  The only two moments when my father physically struck me.

In that moral order from my father there was later developed, implicitly, the idea that at some point your body is no longer worth keeping to feed on the planet.  That death is final and should be embraced and accepted as such and may possibly be a good thing.  Someday, I hope to have the guts to kill myself, if it should come to that (I hope it doesn’t!).  I know several people who are slowly suiciding themselves through mortgages, home ownership, prescription drugs, monogamy, insomnia, alcohol, work, perversions of marriage (“ohhnlee yooo” as the song goes), the ressentiment of ambition, the silence of resignation.  Better to leap than to slouch thus toward Bethlehem.

Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer, lives in Brooklyn and Moab, Utah. His work can be found at www.christopherketcham.com 

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