ArcaMax

Sean Hannity and Alex Jones, two men who pick at American journalism the way small birds peck at the carcass of a pig, are both in legal trouble.

Myself, after 34 years as a reporter and columnist, I do not use the word "journalist" if I can stop myself in time. I believe in the crippled, nicotine-stained stained old newsroom joke which sayeth,...Read more

President Donald Trump, a pus-filled boil on the American backside, could learn what to expect from a long ago friend of mine who made his living as a professional criminal.

"You can do crimes for 10 years, and you never get arrested," he said. "You get arrested once, you get arrested every 23 months for the rest of your life."

Of course, the ...Read more

I remember my bartender father coming home with scraped knuckles.

"I could tell when the guy walked in there was something wrong with him," Pop said as my mother poured Mercurochrome into the small abrasions, the results of breaking up a fight and having to hit the guy who looked like something was wrong with him.

"Geez, I hate being right," ...Read more

Down in Louisiana, where the alligators grow fat and the politicians aren't far behind, where, in some communities, generations of semiliterate people have lived knee-deep in the toxic sewer of the oil industry, the cops shot Alton Sterling in 2016. Recently, the last door closed on Sterling. There will be no charges filed against the officers. ...Read more

Back in 2006, President Donald J. Trump is supposed to have played a brief game of bump and shove with a porn star named after a bottle of whiskey.

Trump met Ms. Stormy Daniels, the star of "Sex Door Neighbors," when she was appearing with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament, an event that can best be described as "money porn." Trump ...Read more

I live in New England, and there was a snowstorm this week. We got 18 inches of snow, and most of us hope that's it for the year. During the storm before that, we got 17 inches, and the people on my street didn't think the city did a very good job of plowing. It seemed like it took them an awfully long time to get the street down to bare ...Read more

Here's a little story from the 1960s.

My parents were ordinary working people. They went to Mass every week. They voted in every election. My father was a World War II combat veteran. My mother had worked in a defense plant, making rubber seals for gas masks on the second shift. Neither one was a college graduate. My father was the child of ...Read more

"Oh, say can you see the holster on me?

I have fed it my vote and the lives of my children."

Too dark. An anthem's got to be, well, not peppy, but you should never use words like "entrails."

In a nation that's abandoned nearly every one of its original promises, there remains the gun, the flag, the anthem, hatred of black people, worship of ...Read more

The worse the country gets, the better I dress.

I grew up in a series of working-class communities from Massachusetts to Missouri, places not carefully chosen by my parents, who moved wherever and whenever my father's job required. The towns were pretty much all the same, although the availability of fresh fish varied greatly from place to ...Read more

In the first place, anti-pedophile laws don't work.

Pedophiles want to have sexual contact with children, and no law makes them stop. Arrest them, jail them, makes no difference. They get out of jail eventually and, when they do, they usually go looking for a kid.

We make them register, but registering pedophiles doesn't work. They molest ...Read more

America still has the Army.

Oh, yeah. We can't stop our people, many of them veterans, from shooting poison into their veins. We can't promise the returning vet a union job that pays a living wage. We can't stop the rich from eating us. We still defend slavery, some of us. We argue that groping women is natural. We've got religious kook-a-...Read more

They found her near the river, on the weedy bank. The river is paved over for most of its length, but it rises in a couple spots, and one of them is near the interstate, in back of a now-abandoned Sam's Club. The river powered the first cotton mills in the city where I live, but electricity came along, and they gave the river a layoff notice, ...Read more

I am a REAL American.

Whew! Glad we got that out of the way. For a minute there, I thought I might be considered disloyal. You can't go to jail for that yet, but you will.

And why am I busting with American-ness?

Dig it.

My mother's family, the Munroes, were brought to America in the 1600s, before it was America, back when the English ...Read more