W.D. Ehrhart

Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

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By W.D. Ehrhart So now we find out that Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow paid the private school tuition of a boy Clarence Thomas and his wife were raising “as a son.” We can add this to Thomas selling his mother’s home to Crow, who promptly sank thousands of dollars into the house to refurbish it, and then let Thomas’s mother live there rent-free. Oh, and there are the decades of luxury vacations, luxury cruises, and luxury private jet travel, courtesy of Harlan Crow. None of this was, as required by law, reported by Thomas. And then there’s his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a stridently vocal …

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Mission: Impossible

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by W.D. Ehrhart What follows is a list of mass shootings with firearms in the United States of America since the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado on April 20th, 1999 that resulted in 13 dead and 24 wounded.  Each one of these killings has resulted in at least three dead.  Most have involved many more dead, along with many others wounded.  The worst incident resulted in 58 dead and 546 wounded. Littleton, Colo., April 20, 1999 Atlanta, Ga., July 29, 1999 Fort Worth, Texas, September 15, 1999 Honolulu, Hawaii, November 2, 1999 Tampa, Fla., December 30, 1999 Wakefield, Mass., December 26, 2000 Melrose …

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The Myth of the Spat-Upon Veteran

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have been speaking about the American War in Vietnam in high school and college classrooms ever since the spring of 1973. Over the course of half a century, I have probably spoken in 250 to 300 classrooms. Maybe more. In all those years and all those visits, I have never had a single person make the kind of fuss that a student made a few years ago in response to remarks I had made refuting the mythology of the spat-upon Vietnam War veteran. This young woman, a high school senior honors student, lodged a major complaint with the upper school head …

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Let There Be Light

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by W.D. Ehrhart Anyone who was alive and sentient back in 1966—the year I graduated from high school and joined the U.S. Marines—will surely remember that perhaps the least popular man in America (white America at least) was loudmouthed full-of-himself Cassius Clay, who had defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world only to announce that he was henceforth to be known as Muhammad Ali, proud member of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. He further alienated himself from mainstream America—even many Black Americans, including former heavyweight champ Floyd Paterson—when he refused to be drafted into the U.S. Army at the height of …

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Snowflake Culture

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have been writing poetry ever since I was 15 years old. My first published work appeared in 1971 when I was 22 years old. Since then, I’ve published over 400 poems. Along the way, I’ve probably received as many as 4,000 rejection slips, and it’s probably safe to say that every rejection notice I have ever received has come from an editor who didn’t think the poems I’d sent were very good. Recently, however, I have run into a rejection unlike any other I’ve ever received in 59 years. I recently submitted this poem to an online publication that purports to …

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In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

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by W.D. Ehrhart I had a particularly weird dream last night in which I was giving the commencement address at a school where I’d taught for many years. For reasons known only in dreams, I ended up talking about post-traumatic stress disorder and how PTSD is the inevitable result of subjecting a healthy human brain to traumatic stress. The consequences are unavoidable. If you are subjected to traumatic stress and it doesn’t screw you up, you were screwed up before you encountered the traumatic stress. You will not make the scarring go away with counselling or group solidarity (in the case of soldiers) or anything …

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