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Back when Paul Weyrich partied like it was 1999, he made a monumental admission that explains the ferocity of today’s evangelical right.

In an open letter to his extreme conservative cohorts, he acknowledged that they “probably had lost the culture war.”

Yippie!!!

He was right. And today that reality means that American democracy – and the human race – may actually survive.

Weyrich was mourning …

… a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics … the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.

The counter-cultural heathens against whom Weyrich ranted were shaped by the Vietnam war, rock music, LSD, and so much more … a ‘60s Boomer generation (76-million-strong) that utterly shattered the established mores on which the right wing depended.

The “alien ideology” Weyrich feared was feminist, LGBTQA+, post-White Supremacist, and at war with Trump misogyny, sexual Puritanism, imperial arrogance, fascist autocracy, and ecological insanity.

Another Irradiated and Charred Victim of the Nagasaki Bomb

77 years ago (August 9, 1945) an all-Christian bomber crew dropped an experimental plutonium bomb on Nagasaki City, Japan, instantly incinerating, asphyxiating and/or vaporizing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, mostly women and children. Very few Japanese soldiers were killed by the bombs.

Japan’s major religions are Shitoism and Buddhism, but a disproportionate number of the dead at Nagasaki were Christian. The bomb also wounded uncounted tens of thousands of other victims who suffered the blast trauma, the intense heat and/or the radiation sickness that killed and maimed so many of the survivors.

Jonah Goldberg and Michael Ledeen have much in common. They are both writers and also cheerleaders for military interventions and, often, for frivolous wars. Writing in the conservative rag, The National Review, months before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Goldberg paraphrased a statement which he attributed to Ledeen with reference to the interventionist US foreign policy.

I read Daniel Sherrell’s Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World sitting on the edge of what was left of the Shenandoah River after a summer of very little rain. Six inches is enough to canoe in but it’s less than that in many places. Fish are few and far between, yet humans are out there in canoes, dragging them over rocks, casting their lines, luring the last fish to their doom. I know the fish murders are not the problem, not at this scale. The problem is the power lines hanging low across the water, the 12-foot American Flag hung up on the shore, the massive actions of corrupt governments and industries — but also the cabin my family’s in and the car that drove us to it — not to mention the airplanes audible from great distances and tricking the mind into hoping for thunder.

MEK is a curious hybrid creature that pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians.

One might ask if Washington’s obsession with terrorism includes supporting radical armed groups as long as they are politically useful in attacking countries that the US regards as enemies? It is widely known that the American CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to create al-Qaeda to attack the Russians in Afghanistan and the same my-enemy’s-enemy thinking appears to drive the current relationships with radical groups in Syria.

In 2015, Alice Sabatini was an 18-year-old contestant in the Miss Italia contest in Italy. She was asked what epoch of the past she would have liked to live in. She replied: WWII. Her explanation was that her text books go on and on about it, so she’d like to actually see it, and she wouldn’t have to fight in it, because only men did that. This led to a great deal of mockery. Did she want to be bombed or starved or sent to a concentration camp? What was she, stupid? Somebody photoshopped her into a picture with Mussolini and Hitler. Somebody made an image of a sunbather viewing troops rushing onto a beach.[i]

When the Palestinian Olympic delegation of five athletes - adorned in traditional Palestinian attire and carrying the Palestinian flag - crossed into the Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium during the inauguration ceremony on July 23, I was overcome with pride and nostalgia. 

I grew up watching the Olympics. All of us did. Throughout the month-long international sports event, the Olympics were the main topic of discussion among the refugees in my refugee camp in Gaza, where I was born. 

Unlike other sports competitions such as football, you did not need to care about the sport itself to appreciate the underlying meaning of the Olympics. The entire exercise seemed to be political. 

What if . . . ?

I get lost — tangled in doubt and cynicism — when I try to pose the question in a more specific way. What if . . . a collective human voice could be heard, crying out across the borders as the pandemic surges, as the fires rage, as the planet’s life-sustaining climate collapses: “We are one”?

What if nationalism’s time has come and gone?

Open Democracy put the matter thus: “As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies around the world, we are witnessing countries making unprecedented decisions to close borders to non-citizens. And as days pass, national borders have become more visible and less permeable than ever.”

In The Last, Best Small Town playwright John Guerra has adapted Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Our Town, resetting the turn-of-the-last-century Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire at turn-of-the-21st-century Fillmore, California, which is located a bit north of Six Flags Magic Mountain, in Ventura County. In doing so, Guerra has injected contemporary ethnic, as well as economic and wartime concerns into Wilder’s Americana classic, which – along with gems like Romeo and Juliet – is one of those perennial favorites performed by junior high and high school theater departments across the USA.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The U.S. Embassy in Laos has publicly apologized
and blamed Facebook's auto-translation for describing an ethnic
Hmong-American Olympic Games teenage gymnast as "a terrorist" on the
American Embassy's official site, days before she won gold.

The embassy repeatedly posted its written apology on its official
Facebook site during July 26-27, after Hmong-Americans expressed
outrage on the site for displaying the incorrect description of U.S.
Women’s National Gymnastics Team member Suni Lee.

That mangled translation introduced the embassy's otherwise cheerful
and congratulatory update about Ms. Lee, including photos of her
performing.

A few days later Ms. Lee, 18, won a gold medal in gymnastics.

"Sunisa 'Souni' Lee is Lao-American and a terrorist who participated
in the Olympic race from the United States," an incorrect
Lao-to-English translation said when viewers clicked "translate" on
the embassy's Lao-language text.

An alternative Facebook translation of the embassy's Lao-language text