My brother was named after a cowboy. That detail says a lot about my father, his generation, and the way America once looked from the outside: big, confident, morally certain, the man in the white hat who did ugly things for noble reasons. My dad loved Shane (Raices Profundas), and I grew up with that…
What if a dream of the sea could spark a rebellion? From the high Andes to the heart of Alberta’s oil country, The Great Landlocked Rebellion uncovers how nostalgia, geography, and fossil-fuel politics collide in a surreal story of imagined horizons and real-world resentment. Curious how a ghostly mariner becomes symbolic of modern political fever…
Banksy, Justice, and the Violence of Silence The piece begins with a striking image: a Banksy mural that appeared overnight on London’s High Court — a furious depiction of justice turned executioner, of law reduced to raw violence. Within hours, authorities erased it. But their attempt at “cleaning” only deepened the message. The ghost image…
We love to tell ourselves that history bends toward justice. But what happens when those who claim to defend tradition, order, and “the way things are” keep showing up on the wrong side of every struggle for human dignity? From slavery to segregation, from suffragettes to climate justice, from colonial wars to today’s atrocities —…
The Republic of the Self-Inflicted Wound Canada’s politics has always loved its myths. But now? They’re stitched out of cowboy hats, polyester suits, and old-school Calvinism. That’s the story I dig into in my new CounterPunch article on Cowboy Calvinism. What is “Cowboy Calvinism”? It’s the gospel of grievance dressed in rodeo drag — a…
They’ve turned “woke” into a punchline — something to mock, dismiss, or roll your eyes at. Why? Because it’s easier to discredit the word than reckon with what it actually means. “Woke” was never about arguing over coffee orders or policing T-shirt colors. It wasn’t about trends, lifestyle choices, or the internet’s latest moral panic.…
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” — Mark Twain Samuel Clemens, the master of irony, wrote this during his “Grand Tour” around the Mediterranean in the late 1800s. It’s a truism that doesn’t always stick — not everyone becomes wiser through travel. But even for the most seasoned travelers, the road can still…
Over twenty years ago, I lived in Yemen. Decades later, I found myself receiving WhatsApp messages from friends and former students in Sana’a—as bombs rained down around them. Real-time updates from people I cared about, living through hell. That experience will never leave me. What I didn’t expect was to see that same war discussed…