George Blecher

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.