The Northcountry Chronicle

The Myth of American Idealism

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by W.D. Ehrhart I first became aware of Noam Chomsky in the early 1970s after I came back to this country as a Marine Corps veteran of the American War in Vietnam and got involved in the antiwar movement through Vietnam Veterans Against the War. For well over half a century a rare voice of sanity and reason in the wilderness of American hypocrisy, lies, and dissembling, he is high on my list of American patriot heroes. My acquaintance with the very much younger Nathan Robinson, founder and editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine, is much more recent, but he, too, is a truth-teller. Together they …

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Playing Games

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You’d think they were playingfor an NBA championship ring.Or maybe a berth in the Final Four.At least a high school division titlethe way they scramble for rebounds,pass the ball around the perimeter,look for the open player inside,shoot from the top of the keyor drive hard for the lay-up,fight for loose balls, all elbowsand knees and ponytails flying.A few of the girls are big for their age;most are not yet five feet tall,bantam bundles of energy. The Middle East reeks of hate.Putin is using North Koreansto put the screws to Ukraine.We live each day in the shadowof nuclear war and global warming,and the recent US electionsgive …

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The Greatest Show on Earth

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by W.D. Ehrhart Ever since November 6th, I’ve been doing my best to avoid reading, seeing, or hearing anything about the election. Pundits and prognosticators proclaiming who’s at fault for the utter failure of the Democratic Party, losers pointing fingers and hurling accusations at each other, Republicans grinning and gloating and enjoying the angst and agony of the millions of Americans who are not part of the even more millions of MAGAMobsters. But it’s hard to play ostrich forever. Last week, a friend sent me a recent poem titled “In Defense of Dogs,” by which I learned that Kristi Noem will be our next Secretary …

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After the Sixties, Came the Counter-Revolution

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by Jean Stimmell I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ’50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist. That’s not just my opinion. Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.” “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.”⁠ 1 I rebelled: I wanted freedom! I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through …

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Grant Me the Serenity —

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by W.D. Ehrhart I had an unusual experience this week. Very rarely does our Alleged Editor decline to publish something I’ve submitted to him. But a few days ago, he passed on not one, but two essays I sent. One about Trumpasaurus’s various cabinet choices because he has elected to write on that topic himself in his Fortnightly Rant. The other because it was too long. He suggested editing the long one, which dealt with how, though the elevation of Dolt .45 to Dolt .47 is perceived by many people as the end of democracy in the United States, in fact our country has never …

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What Now?

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by W.D. Ehrhart The election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States of America in 2016 was bizarre enough. Unimaginable almost up to the moment his election was confirmed. His defeat by Joseph Robinette Biden in 2020 seemed to indicate that the nightmare was over. But that illusion was quickly dispelled long before Biden was inaugurated, and the nightmare went on and on day after day after day for the next four years, culminating now in the return to power of the MAGAMonster and his Minions. How does one explain it? I think it was a perfect storm of misogyny (a female …

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