Archibald Ephemera

Archibald Essays:
Bread and Circuses
NPR News and Information Format, Open Letter to WUNC, Chapel Hill
Yucatan Memoir
Santa Claus and Real Presence
Stress as Slow-Motion "Susto"
Amateurs, Professionals and the Make-believe Meritocracy
Waldorf Education
Dominus Iesus
A Well-Kept House is the Sure Sign of a Misspent Life
Pol Pot Proves Existence of God
Dad: Reflection; Mom Reflection
Ladakh, a Case Study in Globalization (by Helena Norberg-Hodge)
Is the Left Nuts? Or is it Me?  (by Michael Moore)
There Is No Time. There Will Be Time (by Peggy Noonan)
Home
Page2,
Chesterton, Illich,
Gatto, Berry
Page4
Religion
Page3
Alan Archibald
Preservation
Neil Postman
J. R. R. Tolkien
Bruce Cockburn
Vox Clamantis

"God would not dare appear to a starving person except in the form of bread."  Mahatma Gandhi
                      
"Man does not live by bread alone."   Y'eshua the Nazarene
Preservation Institute, Berkeley, CA
(Beyond Progressive and Conservative Politics)
On website, see: "Political Theory on the Web"
http://netwiz.net/~preserve/index.html

J. R. R. Tolkien

www.tolkiensociety.org
Bruce Cockburn

54 year-old Canadian musician/songwriter, Bruce Cockburn, has been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Weekend Edition." The attached link supplies lyrics written by Cockburn since the 1960s. If you don't know Cockburn's work, "Gospel of Bondage," "Southland of the Heart" and "Pacing the Cage" reveal his political bite and mystical bent.

Cockburn Project  http://cockburnproject.net
(Once inside Cockburn Project, click "Song Index")


Call It Democracy

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market-hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labor camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations
Idolatry of ideology

North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

Toronto, November, 1985




  




Little round planet in a big universe, sometimes it looks blessed,
sometimes it looks cursed.
Depends on what you look at obviously,
but even more
it depends on the way that you see.
Bruce Cockburn





People See Through You

You've got covert action
Prejudice to extremes
You've got primitive cunning
And high tech means
You've got eyes everywhere
But people see through you

You've got good manipulators
Got your store of dupes
You've got the idiot clamour
Of your lobby groups
You like to play on fears
But people see through you


You've got instant communication
Instant data tabulation
You got the forces of occupation
But you don't get capitulation
Cause people see through you


You've got the sounding brass
You've got the triumph of the will
You do what you want to
And we pay the bills
you hype the need for sacrifice
but people see through you

You've got anti-matter language
Contrived to conceal
You've been lying so long
You don't know what's real
You're a figment of your own imagination
And people see through you


You've got lip service tributaries
You've got death fetish mercenaries
You hold the tickets to the cemeteries
You're big and bad and scary
But people see through you


When you're lovers in a dangerous time, sometimes you're made to feel
as if your love's a crime.
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight; got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.
Bruce Cockburn



THE TROUBLE WITH NORMAL

Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees
Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local Third World's kept on reservations you don't see
"It'll all get back to normal if we put our nation first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Fashionable fascism dominates the scene
When the ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means
Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the cream
As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream
Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Toronto, June 6, 1981
Page9
Quotations I
Page5
Science
Page6
Education
Neil Postman 

Neil Postman On Line (from BigBrother.net) http://www.bigbrother.net/~mugwump/Postman/
Postman Links http://bradley.bradley.edu/%7Eell/Postmanlinks.html
More Postman Links
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~drc/critical_tools/e306_fall_1999/addlink/postman
Interview: Technopoly - the Surrender of Culture to Technology /// Technopoly as Religion  http://www.mrbauld.com/postmnint.html
New York Times Obituary http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~gedann/postman.doc
Amusing Ourselves to Death (Lengthy excerpts) http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Broadcast_Media/AmusingOurselves_Postman.html
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Interview with Neil Postman: http://www.jour.unr.edu/linn/j705/postman-cbc.html
Science and the Story that We Need  http:www.firstthings.com/menus/ft9701.html
Deus Machina   http://www.technos.net/tq_01/4postman.htm
Postman book reviews by Scott London  www.scottlondon.com

Social Criticism Review (Social criticism as if survival mattered.)
Kirkpatrick Sale, Howard Reingold, Neil Postman, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Amitai Etzioni, Robert Bellah, David Korter, Jerry Mander, Jean Bethke Elstain, Lewis Lapham, Jeremy Rifkin, Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gary Wills, Immanuel Kant, Thoreau, de Tocqueville, Dostoyevsky, Aldous Huxley, Eduardo Galeano, Sakharov, Camus, Faulkner, Aristotle, Plato www.socialcritic.org/review.htm


We're the insect life of Paradise: crawl across leaf
or among towering blades of grass -
glimpse only sometimes
the amazing breadth of heaven

You're as loved as you were
before the strangeness swept through our bodies,
our houses, our streets -
when we could speak without codes
and light swirled around,
like wind blown petals...
Page7
History
Page8
Language
Books On-Line
Mags On-Line
Page 10
Spanish Pronto
Hogar Hispano