ArcaMax

However you vote, whichever lives you think matter, you may be forgiven for asking one question.

When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was stabbed 22 times in prison, did he say to his attacker, "I can't breathe"?

The "I can't breathe" quote was supposedly uttered by George Floyd, the criminally inclined Black man Chauvin ...Read more

Buddha says don't fight back. Christ says the same thing. Both are widely ignored.

In Israel, on the border with what may or may not be Palestine, there is red war and yellow flames and humanitarian aid because war requires the camouflage of charity.

Israelis have been killed. Palestinians have been killed. Israelis have been taken hostage. ...Read more

When cannabis (what the people buying it call "weed") became legal in Massachusetts, it was like the Summer of Love all over again, dude.

Happy stoners twined flowers in each other's hair. Happy politicians twined wreaths of new tax income in each other's remaining hair. Like the liquor business, the lottery business and the casino business, ...Read more

In Ukraine, war continues and begins to go unnoticed.

Note I wrote "Ukraine" and not "The Ukraine." The first indicates I went to college. The second indicates I may have gone from high school to Vietnam, all those decades ago. In America, where we say we have no class system, we define class membership with the things we say. This is because...Read more

You'll go to work if you have to. You'll grocery shop, maybe. You'll make love or eat soup or have a drink in the evening.

And it will be Veterans Day, which was once Armistice Day, and which commemorates the end of World War I, a multinational conflict over nearly nothing that is now so safely over that most people barely observe the day. ...Read more

People can get stuck on an idea. After they do, they can only see the world in relation to that idea.

If Jesus comes back riding a Japanese motorcycle, I know at least one guy who won't pay Jesus his proper respect until Jesus gets a Harley.

"That's a chick bike," my friend will explain to Our Savior. "It's the kind of thing The Virgin Mary ...Read more

Like the phrase "I never saw her before in my life" and "I swear I won't touch the stuff," the sentence "I ain't did nothin'" is a sidewalk classic.

So beautifully anti-grammatical as to be almost not an English sentence, "I ain't did nothin'" is what you say to the cop who questions you just prior to grappling you into compliance.

"What? I ...Read more

As a culture, and as a republic, we should just give up and let Taylor Swift run everything. It's probably going to happen anyway, so we might as well get on her good side now.

This might cost me a couple years in a reeducation camp after the Swifties take over, but I'm not a Taylor Swift fan. I don't think I've ever heard one of her songs ...Read more

Maybe 20 years ago, I was sitting at the bar with a rabbi. It's not a joke. There was no priest or minister on scene.

He was the rabbi of a synagogue maybe four blocks from my house, and he used to pick up to-go food at a local restaurant, and the restaurant had a bar, and if I was there, he'd sit next to me and have a glass of red wine, and ...Read more

After the regular anchor pronoun gives you the news, the station brings out the perennially constipated-looking expert, who is seldom angry but who is using the word "chaos" a lot these days.

And, as his thin lips disappear in a private high school approximation of anger, he desperately indicates that "bipartisanship" is dead.

And it is. It'...Read more

Everyone who writes a newspaper column in America should be dragged through a Walmart at least once a month. I say "dragged" because nearly all work experiences are better if they're forced on you.

I go to Walmart all the time. A lot of people say they "never" go to Walmart, and then they look superior, as though they know things about ...Read more

"She's the kind of girl you take home to meet your parents when your parents ain't home." -- My father, Eugene Dion, who probably heard somebody say it in a bar.

Oh, Lauren Boebert, R-Back Row, The Prairie Rose, blushing first flower of spring in the Colorado mountains, a flower drooping under the weight of a holstered pistol.

Lauren, who ...Read more

Massachusetts, a state sweltering in the heat of self-congratulation, is up against it right now. Massachusetts has several "sanctuary cities," which means anyone from anywhere in the world can go there with no ID, no skills and the DEA on their tail, and we'll plop their kids into an underperforming urban school faster than you can say "Che ...Read more