The Center is the Enemy of the Good
by Akim Reinhardt The perfect, so the saying goes, is the enemy of the good. Don’t deny yourself real progress by refusing to compromise. Be realistic. Pragmatic. Patient. Don’t waste resources and energy on lofty but ultimately unobtainable goals, no matter how noble they might be; that will only lead to frustration, and worse, hold…
Fetus Fetish on the Firing Line: A Conversation
by Akim Reinhardt and Jennifer Ballengee First Discussant: For anti-abortion extremists, abortion is a fetish. It’s a symptom that covers a repressed, secret, and socially unacceptable desire. What desire? I’m not sure; it’s their fetish, not mine. But whatever it may be, it drives anti-abortion protestors to scream about saving lives, to hold up posters…
American Dreams
by Akim Reinhardt Dreams are about questions. Every dream sprouts up as an innocent question in the early morning haze. Maturing in bright sunlight, it opens up, like the petals on a flower, with vibrant new questions unfolding from the original. Then, after achieving its fulsome bloom, the dream begins to sag. No longer birthing…
Postcards from America
by Akim Reinhardt Not 7,500 miles this time. Nor a mad dash from one coast to another. Rather, a wiry triangle: the first leg from Baltimore to New Orleans; the second, up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to South Dakota; the hypotenuse, back to Maryland. Abingdon, VA. I’m vaxed and boosted, but a bout of…
Lay Me Down with Jesus
by Akim Reinhardt Death was already about me. I’d recently written two death songs. Not mournful, but peaceful and welcoming. No reason. They just seeped out of me. Then came the Covid infection. It must’ve found me in upstate New York while vacationing with friends. At first, I assumed it was just those damned seasonal…
The Impossibility of History
by Akim Reinhardt Is the Past Prolog? I’m not convinced. I say this as a professional historian. The main problem, of course, is that there are many pasts. They are defined by temporality, by subjectivity, and by the limits of knowledge. The past is ten seconds ago. Ten minutes, ten days, ten weeks, ten years,…
The Long Fight: Hierarchies of Power and the Soft, Slow Motion Coup
by Akim Reinhardt The United States has always faced a fundamental tension. On one side are those who champion, enforce, and/or profit from hierarchies of power: white supremacist racism, sexist patriarchy, Christian fundamentalism, and capital concentrations chief among them. Arrayed against these hierarchies of power are people who promote and work for racial equality, gender…
The King of Pop, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and Modern Propaganda
by Akim Reinhardt Over the course of more than a decade, Michael Jackson transformed from a handsome young man with typical African American features into a ghostly apparition of a human being. Some of the changes were casual and common, such as straightening his hair. Others were the product of sophisticated surgical and medical procedures;…
Black Lives Matter? #BlackFriendsMatter
by Akim Reinhardt Three things we know about #BLM, two obvious, one a bit more subtle. 1. Activists originally created the Black Lives Matter slogan to point out and push back against the generally unstated truth that in American society, black lives do NOT matter as much as white lives. That in America, black lives…
Why Today’s Republicans Hate the New York Times So Much
by Akim Reinhardt When I was growing up during the 1970s, America still had a vibrant and thriving newspaper culture. My hometown New York City boasted a half-dozen dailies to choose from, plus countless neighborhood newspapers. Me and other kids started reading newspapers in about the 5th grade. Sports sections, comics, and movie listings mostly,…
What Will We Make of a Stolen Election?
by Akim Reinhardt It’s still a year away, maybe three, but you can see it coming. A majority of Republican voters think we’re all paying too much attention to the attempted coup of January 6. Only a quarter of them think it’s even worth finding and prosecuting the rioters who stormed the Capitol, sent elected…
If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi
by Akim Reinhardt I was about 10 miles up the road in Long Beach visiting my sister’s family when word came of last week’s massive oil spill in Huntington Beach, Orange Co., California. We were actually headed over to that very beach when my brother in law checked the conditions. Uh oh. Ten or twenty…
Modern American Extremism
by Akim Reinhardt There’s a lot we can learn about today’s America by observing the Mormon Church. Last month the Church of Latter Day Saints, as its officially known, issued a strong, positive directive to its 16.5 million members. Vaccines had been proven safe and effective, it reminded them. And please wear a mask in…
The Millions of Christs of America
by Akim Reinhardt As an undergraduate History major, I reluctantly dug up a halfway natural science class to fulfill my college’s general education requirement. It was called Psychology as a Natural Science. However, the massive textbook assigned to us turned out to be chock full of interesting tidbits ranging from optical illusions to odd tales.…
I Haven’t Settled on a Title Yet
Is this a Dagger and Fork I See Before Me: Menu Items from Shakespeare’s Diner
by Akim Reinhardt, Executive Chef (Marilyn Reinhardt, Megan Golden, Sous Chefs) Truly, Thou Art Damned Like an Ill-Roasted Egg: Breakfast All the World’s a Cage Free Omelet 10.99 Get Thee to a Buttery Croissant 8.99 Brevity is the Soul of Grits 5.99 If Muesli Be the Food of Love, Play On 5.99 What a Piece…
Deeming the Streaming
Carve
by Akim Reinhardt I say carve. You imagine a chisel flaking or chipping or gouging wood or stone. I say line. Now you see the chisel slicing and curving redoubled trenches through the surface. I say straight. You stir uneasily in your chair, or readjust your stance if you’re standing, perhaps mildly shrugging one shoulder.…
The Persistence of Pyramids
by Akim Reinhardt ^ Royalty Aristocracy Church Officials The Merchant Class Skilled Crafts Workers The Goddamned Peasants The Unbelieving Under Class Criminals to Be Caged & Tortured Those Whom We Will Publicly Execute ^ WASPS White Catholics White-Skinned Jews Model Minority Asians White-Skinned, Anglo-Latinx American Indians as they are Imagined Dark-Skinned Hispanic Latinos and Latinas…