Honey Ponders Karl Marx And Charles Dickens

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February 20, 2010 · Posted in Notes from Above Ground · Comments Off on Honey Ponders Karl Marx And Charles Dickens 

[This essay introduces Boryanabooks contributing writer Honey van Blossom. Honey is a former Marxist Belgian striptease artiste who writes from a tower on one of the Silver Lake hills, which she shares with her husband the Baron von Munchausen.]

Over the winter break, I took my eleven-year old grandson Ethan Allen to the movies and we saw Jim Carrey’s voice and eyes assemble an animated Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

I hadn’t read the novella since I was Ethan’s age, when I thought the story was a fable about a hard-hearted stingy man transformed by hallucinations into a kindly gentleman who becomes a second father to Tiny Tim.

In this winter’s film of A Christmas Carol, images of the city’s impoverished people, social injustice, coldness, death and the miserable ghost Marley chained to his boxes of money contrast with memories of an innocent English countryside from a kinder past, when Scrooge was a young man, and with the beaming and fat wealthy man who is an incarnation of charity and philanthropy and with the accepting humility of the underpaid Bob Cratchit and his family. Read more

Is Obama Going To Force Leftists To The Center?

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February 1, 2010 · Posted in Commentary · Comments Off on Is Obama Going To Force Leftists To The Center? 

By LIONEL ROLFE

A few weeks back, word got out that Obama’s been feeling tired. After a win by a rather peculiar former male model named Scott Brown of the Massachusetts senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy, a lot of the rest of us got tired. Especially when it was immediately followed by the Supreme Court giving away the store to the corporations. So the fact that Kennedy’s going to be replaced by a bank and insurance company megaphone shouldn’t be surprising. Read more