The Northcountry Chronicle

by W. D. Ehrhart I recently received an e-mail from a Japanese friend of mine who wrote, “I have no idea what Trump is trying to do. He is making the world to be his enemy.” An Indian friend opined that #45/47 equals Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi in bigotry, intolerance, and mean-spiritedness. When an English friend asked me what Trump is trying to do, I had no answer for him. And when a friend from France observed that the United States seems to have gone off the rails, I could only agree with him. How can one even begin to catalogue the outrages …

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by W.D. Ehrhart In a famous scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” King Arthur explains to a peasant named Dennis that he became king after the Lady in the Lake gave him Excalibur. Dennis replies, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” I’ve thought a lot about that scene over the years since I first saw it in 1975. Since then, this nation has been governed by a president who was elected by the voters of a single congressional district in Michigan, a president who used to peddle Chesterfield cigarettes as great Christmas gifts and …

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I. Let us combine Washington’s birthday with Lincoln’s birthday so that we can add a holiday for the man who once described the United States government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” II. There are 14 quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. on his memorial in DC, but the quote above was not included. III. Are we supposed to honor all our presidents on Presidents’ Day? IV. William Henry Harrison was our president for 32 days, barely enough time to screw things up. Lucky man. V. Warren G. Harding appointed a US Army deserter to be the first director of the …

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by W.D. Ehrhart I woke up this morning thinking of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his unsettling poem ‘The Second Coming.” Yeats wrote it over 100 years ago, and I’m pretty sure that his title is a reference to the long awaited second coming of Jesus Christ; the poem itself, however, is an utter dismissal of whatever positive implications that concept might suggest. Certainly, Yeats could not possibly have imagined the situation here in the United States of America a century after he wrote his poem, and much of the poem bears little resemblance to what we are experiencing with the Second Coming …

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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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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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