Category: Columns

  • What’s a Black Caucus?

    Ella Fitzgerald used to sing a tune that said, “I’m putting all my eggs in one basket…I’m betting everything I’ve got on you.” This may be great advice for the love game, but it’s a lousy way to play politics. If you put everything in one political basket, as African Americans in this state have…

  • Boys Will Be Boys

    I recently spent a sad evening in a basement in South Minneapolis. An acquaintance was seeking subsidised legal advice about the custody of his children. He had found it pretty difficult uncovering a voluntary agency able to offer advice to men on such matters. But now here he was with six other unfortunates waiting his…

  • Dashing Down the Aisle

    Forget road rage. I love my car. It is my pod of sanity. A micro-community I control. Yes, I understand when I slide behind the wheel and I survey all that is out in the great beyond through my windshield that I have no control of what goes on out there. Traffic jams, crazy drivers,…

  • Wine, wine, wine! Bottles, Not Boxes

    “Courage, friends,” said George Bernard Shaw. “We all hate Christmas.” These days there is a good deal more to hate about the festive season than there was in Edwardian England, particularly the annual crash-course in consumerism given to all our children by the manufacturers of worthless plastic gewgaws. No doubt the hairy Hibernian sophisticate disdained…

  • Nudies on the Net?

    After a couple of accidental clicks of the mouse the other day, I realized that I have officially seen enough naked people in my life. This does not mean that I never want to have sex again, or that I don’t want to see the person who I currently see naked all the time naked…

  • Either & Neither

    If you mix blue paint with yellow paint, you get green paint. If a Finn and an Indonesian “get together,” as my teenage boys would say, a child produced by that union would be Finnish-Indonesian. However, in our race-warped culture, when a black person and a white person produce a baby, something different happens. The…