Author: Norman Solomon
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Beyond Hero-Worship
“Happy is the country which requires no heroes,” Bertolt Brecht commented. Today, by that standard, the United States is a very unhappy country. These days, the public’s genuine eagerness for heroes is difficult to gauge. If media output is any measure, the hero industry is engaged in massive overproduction. Whether the “products” are entertainers, star…
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How the News Media Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rumsfeld
The nation’s top dog of war is frisky again. Donald Rumsfeld has returned to high visibility — after a couple of months in the media doghouse following revelations about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison — now openly romancing the journalistic pack with his inimitable style of tough love as he growls and romps across…
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A Time of Butterflies and Bombers
We saw butterflies turning into bombers. And we weren’t dreaming. At the time when the Woodstock festival became an instant media legend in mid-August 1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of American war machinery. The music and other creative energies that drew 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm…
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A Global Perspective on Defeating Bush
written with Jeff Cohen The U.S.-centric nature of American politics often affects the U.S. left. It’s hard to get out of USA mindsets long enough to grasp the global implications of decisions made here at home. Yet the effects of U.S. government policies are so enormous across the planet that some people have suggested —…
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From Attica to Abu Ghraib – and a Prison Near You
A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, “who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages.” Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal…