Intro to the Socialism 2023 Conference
Being a socialist in the United States requires walking a narrow path between admission of defeat and ideological hope.
By John Griswold
When Your Friend Runs for Congress
Chris Bruneau, who is no naïf, understands his odds with different eventualities. He also knows that as a junior congressperson, he would be expected to toe the party line, but he is trying to present himself, at least in conversation, as something closer to what used to be a centrist.
Calamity on Fields of Green: Gettysburg
I entered the town of Gettysburg from the west, through battlefields marked with picket fences, cannon, and statues. The town was crawling with tourists.
Calamity on Fields of Green: Flight 93
Since it is not far from there, mere seconds in flight time, to the crash site, one is made conscious of how low the aircraft was at that point, of how little time was left, and of the terror of the people onboard.
African Americans and Cars
In the American South racial violence and disenfranchisement made job openings in Northern factories short on labor seem like the possibility of escape to “the promised land.” But the expense of public transport, the dangers and inconveniences of segregated waiting rooms and modes of travel, and the problems of finding food to eat when restaurants and stores often refused to serve Black travelers, made the self-guided and -paced car vital. It represented freedom.
Moving Along Through Time
I had been thinking about how long I had wanted to see the Connecticut coast, where my Griswold ancestors—the middle portion of an unbroken line of fathers and sons going back to the year 1200—first arrived in the Americas, but I was not planning to visit on this trip. It felt like a missed opportunity, but the drive was already long, and, besides, I knew my end of the story.
All-American Models Rescued from Oblivion
Atlantis was found in 2009 by the former owners of Megahobby.com, Peter Vetri and Rick DelFavero. In 2018 they bought the die-cast molds for many historic kits you may have bought as a kid from Revell, Monogram, and Aurora, the big model brands that suspended operations as the companies and their assets reorganized.
Little Egypt, Queens
A Duzan meal, Queens, New York. Photo by John Griswold Sometimes you know the universe is at work when the metaphorical intersects with the personal. When my car suddenly shuddered and seemed to slip out of gear as I was trying to get over the Ed Koch Queensboro…
Breaking the Flatness of the Present
Coenties Slip. Photo by John Griswold The feeling comes over me at unexpected times—walking down a street of stone townhomes at dawn, lights in bay windows, stairs and gardens mounded with new snow. Sensing that the skyscraper-as-public-art was designed instead as a taunt and a cashing-in on…
The World Trade Center as the Future
In its planning phase after September 11, One World Trade was commonly called the Freedom Tower in response to the attacks. It was later named, more commercially but just as defiantly, for the old address of the North Tower, though it actually stands on the former site of 6 World Trade Center, also destroyed on 9-11.
Of Pilgrimage
When my scale gets out of whack—domestic life bullied by a universal preponderance or inner life swelling to block out the physical world—I find it is time to reintroduce one realm to the other. It is cause for pilgrimage.
‘They Cloned Tyrone’ Not Just “a Bootleg ‘Scooby-Doo’”
If Tyrone was not directed by Peele, I thought, the filmmakers must be using his methods, as the trailer seemed to show a Blaxploitation knockoff that pointed at the Tuskegee experiment.