Category Archives: Current Affairs

EXCLUSIVE: A Leaked View of the “Afterlife” of the U. S. Institute of Peace

March  22, 2025

From confidential Washington sources, the following excerpt is drawn from an account of the aftermath of the March 17 seizure and closing of the U. S. Institute of Peace, by armed agents of the DOGE administration. The account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Brief Encounter at 2301

Mid-March, 2025, on the edge of the National Mall, not far from the Vietnam War Memorials.

It was almost break time, the leftover dinner pizza was hours cold, and Hennigan thought he heard something.

Standing up from the desk chair, he closed the Security Inc. employee handbook, which was making him drowsy anyway, and peered across the open atrium: first left, then right, following the protocol.

Everything seemed in order: several tiers of closed offices rose or each side. Lights were dim. Nothing moving.

Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: A Leaked View of the “Afterlife” of the U. S. Institute of Peace

“Bloody Sunday” in Selma plus 60: Victory Undone, Battle Renewed

 

Marchers re-enacting in 2005 the first crossing of the Pettus Bridge 40 years earlier.

Below is a black & white news photo from late February, 1965. It turned up a few years back (hat tip to the sharp-eyed Lewis Lewis): it was taken on the steps of Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama when John Lewis (center-left, with a tie) announced the plan to march from Selma to Montgomery.

The goal of the march was winning voting rights for southern Blacks, after three generations of formal disfranchisement; but the plan was sparked by the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson. I’m at the far right, behind Andrew Young (who is also in a tie).

I had been in Selma since the beginning of the year, and the active phase of the campaign, as a rookie member of Dr. King’s staff. I had marched often, served some days in jail, and was learning a lot very fast.

That was then.

Forty-three years later, one sunny day in April 2018, I woke up again in Selma Alabama, once more prepared to go to jail.

Continue reading “Bloody Sunday” in Selma plus 60: Victory Undone, Battle Renewed

A Shadow on the Daffodils: Preaching from the Big Book of Nobody

Daffs, going wild again.

 

This past First Day (Quaker talk for Sunday) I Zoomed into worship in my Friends meeting, the one out in the farmland of Flyover County, North By-God Carolina, where I missed one of my favorite annual scenes there: the appearance in the back 40 of a big unruly spread of wild daffodils. But I did hear a stirring message.

No one among the elders knows when or by whom the daffodils came. Their location, out behind the community building we fondly call The Hut, isn’t visible from the road, so passersby mostly miss the spread, too bad for them. Continue reading A Shadow on the Daffodils: Preaching from the Big Book of Nobody

Washington Post: More In Sorrow, But With PLENTY of Anger

 

 

 

NOTE: “Corruptio optimi pessima” = Corruption of the best is the worst of all.

I can’t remember when I started reading the Washington Post. I was following it through the Watergate years, but was a mostly broke rookie trying to find my footing as a writer to afford a subscription. By the early ‘80s, though, when I lived inside the Beltway, it was slapped down outside my front door every morning. After detours in Pennsylvania and then a move into North Carolina, I became a regular again. I was not an early adopter of the digital edition, but soon got used to it.

When Bezos killed the Harris endorsement, I didn’t like it, but mostly shrugged. After forty years as a working writer, I knew that endorsements rarely move the needle and  understood the Golden Rule of Journalism (& the rest of corporate America): Them With the Gold Make (& Break) the Rules. I was more upset by watching the once-titanic paper shrink and shrivel with the wasting disease of internet competition.

But now we’ve turned the page into the wilderness of Project 2025, and anyone can see its progress, like a rapidly-metastasizing tumor. The Post’s bending of the knee is tragically just about on schedule.

There are other news sources, mainly in the half-underground of Substack. But the loss of the Post is gall and wormwood, a bitter pill.

And not the last one.

Shot Down & Sunk: Pete Hegseth’s “American Crusade” Bags its First High-Ranking Victims: A General, an Admiral, — and Black History Month

 

If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should fall off the wagon and be dragged off the public stage to rehab, his Pentagon tenure, however brief or long, will surely be remembered for one thing; or maybe two.

The second would be turning into the answer to a question of the sort that haunts a generation, to wit: “Who lost Ukraine?”

During his maiden visit in mid-February to U.S. bases in Europe, he seemed to be auditioning to head the  honor guard that salutes Vladimir Putin’s victorious entry into the rubble of Kyiv. He acted ready to serve it up on the faux silver platter of MAGA incompetent, arrogant indifference. That would surely be one for the record– and textbooks, fodder for many poignant Banksy wall murals.

But I digress. That is one possible landmark, and (hopefully) the less likely one. Continue reading Shot Down & Sunk: Pete Hegseth’s “American Crusade” Bags its First High-Ranking Victims: A General, an Admiral, — and Black History Month