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Caligula with Orange Hair

By Robert C. Koehler So maybe this is how the U.S. demilitarizes, or the American public at least returns to the consciousness of the late ’60s, when protests rocked the streets and people demanded an end to the savagery in Vietnam: Donald Trump, the Fool in the Tarot deck, the harbinger of change, removes the […]

How Many Civilians Can We Kill?

By Robert C. Koehler “The wooden carts that residents use to carry vegetables and other wares in the once busy market area instead ferried out cadavers recovered from the rubble last week.” And so . . . another “precision” bomb strike in America’s war against terror. This was the scene in Mosul earlier this month, […]

The Mosque That Disappeared

By Robert C. Koehler We committed a quiet little war crime the other day. Forty-plus people are dead, taken out with Hellfire missiles while they were praying. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just insurgents. The women and children, if there were any, were . . . come on, you know the lingo, collateral damage. […]

The Deep State Hasn’t Gone Away

By Robert C. Koehler “In a statement to WikiLeaks, the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public . . .” Let me interrupt this quote from the world’s declassifier in chief, regarding its latest release of impertinent, humiliating and shocking data about the American security state, simply to […]

The Moment of the Fool

By Robert C. Koehler Obama . . . Trump. Could there be a bigger contrast — in attitude, style, comportment, philosophy? What irony that the two names are now linked in history: Donald Trump forever the successor to Barack Obama, forever the orange-haired blot on his legacy, forever the surrealistic next chapter of the American […]

A Crisis of Relevance

By Robert C. Koehler And the word of the moment is . . . opportunity: “What unites our party is a belief in opportunity, the idea that however you started out, whatever you look like, whoever you love, America is the place you can make it if you try.” Could you be any more tepid? […]

Costa Rica’s Peace Journey

By Robert C. Koehler “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Dwight Eisenhower gave the world some extraordinary rhetoric — indeed, his words have the sting of ironic shrapnel, considering how little they have […]

The Great American Awakening

By Robert C. Koehler Old wounds break open. Deep, encrusted wrongs are suddenly visible. The streets flow with anger and solidarity. The past and the future meet. The news is All Trump, All the Time, but what’s really happening is only minimally about Donald Trump, even though his outrageous actions and bizarre alliances are the […]

The Mass Grave We Call Collateral Damage

By Robert C. Koehler “Lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Boy, you think our country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?” We have carnage and we have irony. The speaker is the president, of course. It’s Super Bowl Sunday and here he is, generating another eyeball-popping headline as he dares […]

Creating Enemies, Creating Hell

By Robert C. Koehler “Numerous foreign-born individuals have been convicted or implicated in terrorism-related crimes since September 11, 2001.” As Donald Trump sets out to “protect America,” I dedicate the words of his explosively controversial proclamation banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, to one of his supporters: Alexandre Bissonnette, the […]

The Birth of a Movement

By Robert C. Koehler The sense of resistance was fierce: “Grab ’em by the profits” . . . “Keep your hands out of my wherever” . . . “NOT DECLAWED” . . . But it was also, oh Lord, joyous — in a scraped raw kind of way, you might say. For instance, the young […]

Tomorrow Is Today

By Robert C. Koehler The icon’s day has come and gone, and — oh, the irony — eight people were fatally shot in Chicago on his weekend. Another eight were shot during a Martin Luther King rally and celebration in Miami. God knows how many more died this past weekend: around the country, around the […]

War Consciousness and the F-35

By Robert C. Koehler “The F-35 Lightning II Program (also known as the Joint Strike Fighter Program) is the Department of Defense’s focal point for defining affordable next generation strike aircraft weapon systems for the Navy, Air Force, Marines, and our allies. The F-35 will bring cutting-edge technologies to the battlespace of the future.” Lurking […]

Leaving the Age of Disconnect

By Robert C. Koehler It’s too easy simply to blame Donald Trump for the void that’s suddenly apparent at the center of American government — or will be on Jan. 20. In fact, I’m utterly sick of hearing his name, let alone accounts of his latest outrage or trivial impertinence, which is the equivalent of […]

Pledging Allegiance

By Robert C. Koehler I pledge allegiance to . . . what? The Electoral College, to no one’s serious surprise, voted Donald Trump in as the nation’s 45th president, and the pot of outrage in the American spectator democracy begins to boil. No, no, no, no, no, no, no — no to all his right-wing […]

A Party of Transcendence

By Robert C. Koehler As we think about the election — what went wrong, what’s been unleashed and what we should do about it — please, please, let us expand our vision beyond some technical fix or updated “message.” Even if we’re talking about the Democratic Party. James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute […]

Trump, Taiwan and the Weapons Deal

By Robert C. Koehler The president-elect stumbles over the protocols of geopolitics and war, tweeting all the way. It’s not just insane. It’s awkward. “Since 1979,” the Guardian points out, “the U.S. has acknowledged Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, with relations governed by the ‘One China’ set of protocols.” But here’s what […]

Vote Recount vs. the Media Consensus

By Robert C. Koehler The impatience across much of the media is palpable. Recount? Oh groan. That’s not going to change the election results. The consensus “truth” writhing just below the surface of the mainstream, eyeball-rolling disapproval of Jill Stein’s call for and financing of a presidential vote recount in Wisconsin (and perhaps in Pennsylvania […]

Bending the Arc

By Robert C. Koehler Maybe this much is true. Donald Trump, pseudo-president-elect, loser of the real election, charismatic stump-speech populist whose actual ability to govern may well be non-existent, has inflicted significant damage on America’s political infrastructure. This is scary, of course, but not necessarily a bad thing. I say this even, or especially, if […]

Election Theft and Racist Elitism

By Robert C. Koehler “All great changes,” said Deepak Chopra, “are preceded by chaos.” That starts to get at it — how to understand, and start healing, the national wound inflicted on this country, and the world, by the 2016 presidential election. But I need to throw in a little John Oliver as well. “We […]

A Nation Up for Grabs

By Robert C. Koehler And so we are a nation up for grabs. Racist populism trounces . . . uh, trumps . . . platitudes about America’s greatness. Hillary Clinton, though slightly ahead in the popular vote, is defeated in the Electoral College. Like it or not, change is not deferred. It’s here, in our […]

Democracy and Our Vulnerable Future

By Robert C. Koehler It was a moment as tiny as marking a ballot — those two minutes of the second debate, when the presidential election hung suspended mid-diatribe and the candidates let go of their opponent’s flaws long enough to honor a bit of common humanity. No big deal. Yeah, I know. But as […]

Budgeting the Good War, for 75 Years

By Robert C. Koehler World War II never quite ended — it morphed. Today we call it the status quo, or endless war, or we just don’t bother to notice it. Indeed, now more than ever we don’t notice it. It’s barely part of the 2016 election, even though we’re engaged in active conflict in […]

Commander in Chief

By Robert Koehler Maybe it’s the phrase — “commander in chief” — that best captures the transcendent absurdity and unaddressed horrors of the 2016 election season and the business as usual that will follow. I don’t want to elect anyone commander in chief: not the xenophobic misogynist and egomaniac, not the Henry Kissinger acolyte and […]

Nuclear Standoff

By Robert C. Koehler Values the size of Planet Earth are at stake, as the American presidential election grows ever smaller, ever pettier, ever more certain that rancor triumphs over relevance. Can you imagine, let us say, an issue the size of global nuclear disarmament emerging in this race, somewhere between the groper tapes and […]