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donate George Blecher
is a former literature professor at the City University of New York, and currently a full-time writer whose articles on American politics and culture appear in many European journals and newspapers. He is also a translator from Danish and Swedish into English. In 2009, a collection of short stories, Andre mennesker, was published in Danish, followed by Czech and Turkish editions in 2010.
Eurozine Articles
Did Obama have a choice?
Could Obama have let the US default? Given that the debt ceiling compromise merely postpones the political conflict, providing a stopgap rather than a solution, the unthinkable might not have been so bad an option, conjectures George Blecher. [more]
Learning to learn
Genuine knowledge or intellectual bullshit? Reformed bullshitter George Blecher recalls the moment he learned the difference... [more]
Whispering on paper
Email, text messaging and social networks have revolutionized the way we communicate. Yet as the magic of instantaneity fades, George Blecher begins to miss some good old-fashioned penmanship. [more]
Hand-holding and bankruptcy
Spend and save: this was the contradiction that defined Obama's State of the Union speech. Yet the US president's efforts at conciliation can do little to halt the growing wave of bankruptcy, where the public sector is the hardest hit, writes George Blecher. [more]
Everybody's scapegoat
Once wildly popular, President Obama is now under fire from all directions. Is it because his thinking is too complicated for an age of sound bites, asks George Blecher, or does he lack the kind of passion that the American electorate thrives on? [more]
The anticlimax
The much anticipated US financial regulatory bill, passed at the end of last month, is a compromise between government regulators and Wall Street, writes George Blecher. As for solving the even more pressing problems of the US economy, the bill offers no new solutions. [more]
Where people walk a mile for a chuckle
Tough materialism and existential frankness, an awareness of one's mortality balanced by the refusal to talk bullshit: George Blecher selects three works of fiction that sum up the New York attitude. [more]
Anger as the ship goes down
Obama's proposed banking reforms are likely to face insurmountable opposition from Congress, where lobby interests have become all-powerful. Worse still, writes George Blecher, the proposals themselves don't go far enough. [more]
Do the obvious
As the US economy continues to worsen, everyone including the President is holding their breath. Everyone except the veteran economist Paul Volcker, that is. George Blecher says he might be on to something. [more]
Cataclysm, anarchy and knitting
US financial experts are talking of cataclysm and anarchy, but what really worries them is nationalization, writes George Blecher. Meanwhile, at street-level, the crisis is having some unusual effects. [more]
Getting ready for the battle?
When it comes to the economy, the moral leadership Obama promised is conspicuously lacking. Will the US president and his economic advisors be willing to regulate a financial sector to which, for some, they are worryingly close? [more]
A nation like any other
Western Europe holds Israel to impossible standards
Since the conflict with Lebanon, there has been a sense among Western intellectuals that Israel has crossed some moral boundary line. But western European rhetoric holds Israel to impossible standards of perfection. [more]
Neither an editor nor a European
Writer and journalist George Blecher's first European meeting of Cultural journals was in Berlin in 1989. He has been coming back ever since -- despite his being neither an editor nor a European. [more]
Dirty secrets of a translator
"No translator can translate every author equally well. The problem is that you don't know whom you can and can't translate until you try, and by then it's too late." George Blecher divulges the translator's dirty secrets... [more]
Another America?
George Bush's State of the Union address reflected the current mood in the US: muted, sombre, and resigned. Is this new attitude suggestive of a change in the way the US is starting to look at itself? [more]
Politics dressed up as principle
When the Danish prime minister defended the Jyllands-Posten cartoons on the grounds of freedom of expression, he failed to acknowledge his political loyalties. [more]
Doctor! Doctor! My private health insurance policy is driving me crazy!
A warning to Europe from across the Atlantic: are you sure you want a privatized healthcare system? [more]
"We have met the enemy, and he is us"
Where does the prevalent feeling between the US-American Republicans and Democrats - namely hatred - derive from? George Blecher on the subject. [more]
Who's afraid of the context?
Why it pays for American networks to keep their heads down on the Iraq war. [more]
Oasis in the desert
A conversation with Kevin Klose, President of the American National Public Radio
How NPR, the virtually only outlet for fact-based journalism in the US radio market, continues to increase its listenership. [more]
The leisure class and I
On the timeliness of Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class". [more]
George Blecher commemorates Lothar Baier
"He was our intellectual and moral conscience." [more]
Notes from the Rubble
To describe as "conflicted" the political feelings of Americans these days is to make an almost comic understatement: everybody thinks everything simultaneously, writes George Blecher as he reflects on the atmosphere in the US after September 11th. [more]
America's dilemma
After the Iraq invasion, Americans are faced with an impossible choice on how to judge their government's "pre-emptive" war doctrine, argues George Blecher. [more]
Heroes, leaders, demagogues
Our personal heroes and why we can not live without them. [more]
Americans at millennium's end
How We Learned to Love the Media and Forget Who We Are
.. [more]
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