Religion Dispatches
…r her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board members have been critical of her, but that she’s unwise to rebuff them because they could be so helpful to her. But this is characteristically Palin behavior — with or without the criticism. She is, for example, the only GOP aspirant who has never spoken at the…
Read More…ent. Whereas the freethinker and the comic once shared a tour schedule and booking agent, now they are bifurcated by genre and accessibility. Both are degraded by the absence of the other, as the quest for quick hard laughter and serious statistical proof press Carlin and Jacoby to extremist corners of inflexible insight. Jacoby, a self-described “cultural conservationist,” might be right that the Bush presidency signals an all-time peak in Americ…
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…n. That said, there’s never any getting around the blunt reality of social class, and I believe Andersen deserves credit for showing how an ever-more-powerful overclass has shaped the political economy we all inhabit. If we’re lucky, we will move past the ever-more-sterile “debate” and get on with the business of uniting to overthrow an oppressive and highly racialized U.S. hypercapitalism. Because if we don’t—if we continue to spend energy in a p…
Read More…. That means you have to know where your flight is going. As it happens my flight will enter Saudi Arabia from a non-Muslim majority country, France, so will land in Jeddah, the transitional port. However, since my next stop is Makkah, and Jeddah is closer to it than any of the five miqat, then technically I have to make my intention and take on the ihram before I leave the U.S. (or in France, or mid-air). Everybody says it is great to clean up ag…
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…finance geeks poo-poo his plans, Ramsey responds with some variant of the classic retort: if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich like me? Ramsey’s daily radio show is dominated by callers, usually in some financial distress or conflict, seeking advice, intermingled with the answers to the callers’ financial problems in the form of “scriptures of the day,” frequent political rants, arguments with his critics, live radio and television simulcasts…
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…teness”—a “psychological wage,” as W. E. B. Du Bois called it that working class whites earn by construing their interests in racial rather than class terms, by attributing their economic insecurity to black people rather than to white elites and to the system they made. This same misdirected resentment—misperceiving black people as responsible for a set of socio-economic circumstances that were created by white elites (politicians, bankers, and c…
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…s, making Trumpism a revolt of the petty bourgeoisie not the white working class. Most of the real white working class, households earning less than $50,000, voted for Clinton. They voted for Biden this time around, too. As for Trump, he won voters making more than $100,000 a year, as he did last time. He is a populist, but it’s populism based largely on white supremacy, not economics. The pundit corps did not or would not see the difference. The…
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…c accommodation portion of non-discrimination laws regulate the conduct of businesses, and broadly insist that once a business opens its doors to the public, that business must provide whatever goods it offers without regard to the individual purchasing those goods. “Most businesses aren’t doing a deep inquiry [of their customers] in a manner that suggests that they’re thinking of their product, and the sale of their product, as endorsing those wh…
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…ets, passed the plate at church, and dropped bills into the basket at yoga class. But Osho’s opacity and its denial of the obvious (robes and shampoos, wine and brownies, books and videos were all moneymakers) bothered me. My fuming was worthless. Orientation still started 45 minutes late. My students and I, packed into a classroom with 20 other guests, were led through a set of meditation exercises. We danced, spun, hummed, and took deep primal b…
Read More…department. Ramadan + deportation: Bonus points on Pakistan International Airlines. Which, like fasting breath (when you don’t eat for a long time, your breath starts to kick), nobody wants to get near. See also safe distance. Namauzea: Namaz is the Persian word for ‘prayer,’ and is traditionally used by all the peoples who were introduced to Islam by Persians or Persophones, which is kind of like a talking cat. (Think Bravo’s Shahs of Sunset wit…
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