The Northcountry Chronicle

by W.D. Ehrhart The October attack on Israel by Hamas came as a shocking surprise and will have major repercussions no one can yet foresee. It reminds me of the Vietnamese Tet Offense in January 1968. Just as Israel has been caught off guard, so too had the U.S. The big difference is that the Tet Offensive took place on Vietnamese soil, not American. This attack is against Israel itself. And one can hardly imagine a more ruthless or brutal attack. I gather that Hamas fighters descended from the air on a rock concert largely attended by young people, indiscriminately shooting and killing unarmed civilians, …

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by W.D. Ehrhart I’ve just had a new experience.  For the first time since I began writing essays for the New Hampshire Gazette, I finally submitted one so unrelievedly pessimistic that our Alleged Editor rejected it, declining to inflict so bleak and hopeless an argument predicting the all-but-inevitable re-election of Dolt .45 next November with no way to avoid that outcome except through divine intervention. Well, fair enough.  He’s not only the editor, but also the publisher and owner of the Gazette.  He gets to print what he wants and not print what he doesn’t want.  And he’s obligated to consider his readership’s sensibilities.  Who …

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“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” – Henry IV, Part II, Act IV, Scene II by W.D. Ehrhart The first time I ever read one of my poems in public was in 1971 when I was 22 years old. That was over half a century ago. Since then, I’ve read my poems in public hundreds of times in venues ranging from universities to middle schools, union meetings to art galleries, libraries to hot dog shops in countries from Japan and Slovenia to Wales and the Netherlands as well as in a majority of these United States. But just last week …

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by W.D. Ehrhart This past weekend, my wife and I went down to Margate, New Jersey, for a friend’s birthday party. Driving on the Atlantic City Expressway, we passed a huge billboard that screamed: STOP OFFSHORE WIND. Below that, in somewhat smaller letters, it said: Never Experience the Jersey Shore the Same Way Again. Pictured was an array of wind turbines stretching from one edge of the billboard to the other. Together we marveled at the mentality that wants to preserve the scenic beauty of the seashore until the planet turns into a cosmic cinder and there’s no scenic beauty anywhere on the planet, or …

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by W.D. Ehrhart Where do I begin? Let’s just dive right in: Donald J. Trump claims he is the same as a veteran of military service because he went to a military academy as a schoolboy, though he avoided military service during the American War in Vietnam by obtaining a medical deferment for bone spurs from a podiatrist who was financially beholden to Trump’s father. Apparently, he learned a lot about war at the New York Military Academy because he has subsequently claimed that he knows more about war than career generals and admirals. He has considered awarding himself the Purple Heart Medal while musing …

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