Delroy Wilson - I'm Still Waiting

Happy Earth Day

Big boy is very excited about Earth Day. He's been trying to do his best to be environmentally conscious, like turning off running water. And all week he's wanted to avoid disposable containers and bags in his lunch. The Daily Show just spoofed all the saccharine kid propaganda for Earth Day, but it's certainly made an impression on BB.

Lauryn Hill

The Fugees

Wu Tang Clan - I Can't Go to Sleep

My new T-Shirt says

Open Veins of Latin America

The book that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave Obama this past week is "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" by Eduardo Galeano. This is a classic leftist text on the colonialization of Latin America. In a recent Facebook quiz, I listed Galeano's popular history trilogy "Memory of Fire" as my absolute favorite nonfiction book. Reading Galeano in my early twenties convinced me that there was a legitimate reason why Marxism could be such a powerful force for analysis and an inspiration for change. (I read Galeano not long after Reagan was working to bring down the Sandinistas and funding the Contra forces in El Salvador.) I later studied Marxism in college, but in many ways Galeano's histories still make the most sense. Whatever one thinks of Chavez, his gesture is a powerful (and admirable) recognition of the power of books.

Joni Mitchell

St. Vincent

Beatles cover.

Being Unemployed, the Latest Way to "Go Galt"

Amongst all the illogic of the teabagging right wing is this piece arguing that the recession is due to a multitude of Americans going Galt. To "go Galt" is to follow the self-described talented individualists of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," who go "on strike" to protest collectivism and government intervention. It's just sheer lunacy to reinterpret a sharp uptick in unemployment (and the lost tax receipts thereof) as the self-willed decisions of so many former workers.

As has been said in other venues more articulate than mine, I wish all the narcissistic objectivists would go Galt, and inflct their greed and selfishness on someone else.