Clik here to view.
The 2010 Midterms And The 2016 Presidentials: The Lessons Not Learned
In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won 365 electoral college votes. He pulled this political feat off thanks to the Obama Coalition–a motley crew of Democratic faithful, independents,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wanted: Presidential ‘Leadership’ In North Dakota (#NODAPL)
As I have noted on this blog before (here and here), America is not done with Native Americans yet. You might have imagined that banishment to impoverished reservations was the final insult to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
V. S. Naipaul On The Supposed ‘Writing Personality’
In The Enigma of Arrival (Random House, New York, 1988, pp. 146-147) V. S. Naipaul writes: It wasn’t only that I was unformed at the age of eighteen or had no idea what I was going to write about. It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Theological Lesson Via Military History
In Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (J. B Lipincott, New York, 1966, p. 85), Bernard B. Fall describes the build-up which foretold the grim military disaster to unfold at Dien...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Dependence Of Autobiography On Biography (And Vice-Versa)
A few weeks ago, I briefly spoke at a conference hosted in honor of my dissertation advisor’s eightieth birthday. In my talk I offered some personal recollections of having worked with Distinguished...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fascism And The Problems With A ‘Glorious Past’
I grew up in India, a land of considerable antiquity with a long and rich history. All around me, there were monuments to this past; sometimes they were physical, tangible ones, like buildings built...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Tethered Eagle And The Refugee Refused Entry
A little over fourteen years ago, in the fall of 2002, shortly after I returned to the US after finishing my post-doctoral fellowship in Australia, I went to see the Yankees play at the old Yankees...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Donald Trump Impeachment Fantasy
Wishful thinking is in the air: this presidential incompetence is intolerable, it cannot last. Let us take bets on how long Donald Trump will last before he is evicted from the Oval Office by those who...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Best Little White House In ‘Murica: Carpetbaggin’ Days Are Here Again
The Pentagon and the Secret Service are about to start paying rent–like, you know, taxpayer money–to the US President. The President’s son goes on a business trip to Uruguay, eager to cash in on his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The ‘Pundits’ Are Right: Exploiting War Widows Is Presidential
It’s a hoary tradition; it’s what you do. You fight a war; you send men and women to their deaths (after they’ve sent other men and women and children to their deaths); then, at home, you make plans to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hannah Arendt On The Rehabilitation Of George W. Bush
In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics, New York, p. 144-145, [1963], 2006), Hannah Arendt, making note of Heinrich Himmler‘s ‘change of heart’–as German defeat...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pat Tillman, The Skeptical ‘Warrior’ And ‘Hero’
The Pat Tillman who is the centerpiece of Jon Krakauer‘s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman is a familiar, often admirable, archetype: the ‘warrior’ who wants to fight, to win glory, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
John Muir On The ‘Negroes’ Of The American South
John Muir often wrote soaring prose about the beauties and majesties of nature, about how the outdoors were our ‘natural cathedrals’; he urged his fellow human beings to leave behind their sordid,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nixon, Kissinger, And The 1971 Genocide In Bangladesh
This evening, Jagan Pillarisetti and will be speaking at the New York Military Affairs Symposium on ‘Indian Air Force Operations in the 1971 Liberation War.’ Our talk will be based on our book Eagles...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Historical Amnesia And Stasis In Political Action
Over on his blog, and on his Facebook page, in response to a series of repeated claims stressing the uniquely dysfunctional and authoritarian nature of the present administration¹, Corey Robin has...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Trump Presidency And The Iran-Contra Precedent
Perhaps because it has been over three decades, memories of the ginormous political clusterfuck that went by the name of Iran-Contra seem to have faded from our collective memory. As our nation’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Prophecy And Propaganda As Compensatory Fantasy
In a footnote in his chapter on Herder in Three Critics of The Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000, p. 231), Isaiah Berlin writes: Like other passionate...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Bollywood War Movie And The Indian Popular Imagination
In 1947, even as India attained independence from colonial subjugation, war broke out in Kashmir as guerrillas backed by Pakistan sought to bring it into the Pakistani fold. That war ended in stalemate...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Toppling Confederate Statues Does Not ‘Erase’ The Confederacy From ‘History’
News from Baltimore and Durham suggests a long-overdue of cleaning American towns and cities of various pieces of masonry known as ‘Confederate statues’; young folks have apparently taken it upon...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘Passing for Pakistani and the Two-Nation Theory’ At Three Quarks Daily
My essay ‘Passing for Pakistani and the Two-Nation Theory‘ is up at Three Quarks Daily.
View Article