George Blecher

The popularity of recent war news documentaries in America shows that the public is hungry for more probing and serious information about the Iraq war, argues George Blecher, since the large television networks have failed to report and analyse the war in-depth and have instead opted for insubstantial, but flashy news clips that depict a sanitized and highly patriotic version of the war. Despite this renewed interest, Blecher is pessimistic about a sustained, serious engagement on behalf of Americans with the war.

National Public Radio (NPR) is the closest thing in the US to a European state-run media network, although it’s neither state-run nor a media network. It was created in 1970 as a non-profit corporation to produce radio programs “in the public interest.” In this interview, Klose speaks about public radio that, with its emphasis on fact-based journalism, offers an alternative from the steady stream of sensationalist, right-wing talk-shows available on private radio.

Since I heard of Lothar Baier’s death, I’ve had the nagging wish to call Lothar in Montreal to try to make sense together of this weird, tragic event.

George Blecher discusses the timeliness of Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and traces his own lust for the “predatoriness” of the leisure class which was in his case kickstarted by heritage and manifested in the desire to stand out from the masses – by way of the “barbarian culture of wealth and competition”.

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.

Heroes are invariably larger than life but more often than not, we choose our own heroes because they enable ourselves to be a bit more of the imperfect person that we are.

On October 11, George Blecher writes about the past month – To describe as “conflicted” the political feelings of Americans these days is to make an almost comic understatement: everybody thinks everything simultaneously.

Has there ever been a duller Presidential race?

In a fascinating addendum to Native Son (1940), the novelist Richard Wright talked about “the deep fun” of writing the book, and his sense that the nightmarish but weirdly comic saga of an illiterate black killing an upper-class white was universal.