Columnists

On July 24, Rudy Giuliani, the leading Republican presidential candidate, gave a campaign speech in San Francisco. It’s illuminating to study the former New York City mayor’s remarks because they reveal a lot about him and the prevailing philosophy of the GOP. He asserted that Democrats “do not understand a capitalist economy…they think it’s bad to make money. They think it’s bad to be rich… I think it’s great to be rich.” -more-

Sometimes when you’re walking through Briones Park, through the oak-laurel forest on the trail that leads to the archery range and that old-homestead meadow where they line up the Boy Scouts to salute things, your gaze and the sun shining through the canopy and the remnants of the day’s fogbank will intersect at just the right moment. I swear you can see the various leaves getting all excited about photosynthesis, that quotidian necessary miracle, and open themselves cell by cell to the light. -more-

Some years ago, while I was working for an African-American newspaper in South Carolina called the Charleston Chronicle, a local Black attorney tried to get me to ride down with him to a country community near the Georgia border to talk with some people he was representing. George Payton was a self-promoter who had run for public office several times and would probably be running again, and an incessant talker as well, and the idea of spending a day with him—including four hours alone in a car—just so he could get his name in the paper didn’t appeal to me, so I begged off. -more-

This is a tale about politics, influence, money and murder. It began more than 40 years ago with a bloodletting so massive no one quite knows how many people died. Half a million? A million? Through four decades the story has left a trail of misery and terror. Last month it claimed four peasants, one of them a 27-year old mother. -more-

The Kitchen -more-

Change is inevitable; it’s always reassuring when a change in a good business is in the spirit of the original, an enhancement rather than a trip to the oubliette—for example, when an owner retired and sells the place to people who are familiar with it and like its style already. A breath of fresh air is much better than a tornado where there’s something worth preserving. Oh, Toto! -more-

Ouch! That Quake Hurts! -more-

We’re at war with Germany again, and this time they’re winning. No, it’s not a shooting war but since shooting wars always start with economic pretexts, it’s not a far stretch to talk about shooting wars in conjunction with this war and since it involves energy, it’s easy to point to our differing approaches to the war in Iraq as one example of how they’re winning, both morally and physically. -more-