Monthly Archives: March 2004

Guilty With an Excuse

3/25/2004 – 8:14 am

Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen used to do a monologue during his concerts about going to traffic court. Defendants were given three options: they could plead not guilty, guilty or “guilty with an excuse.” Bruce said his trip to court taught him that “everyone is guilty with an excuse.”
So it is today. [...]

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He Who Pays the Piper…

3/18/2004 – 9:36 pm

I’m writing this week from Costa Rica, the only non-militarized country in the Western Hemisphere. In 1948, following a five-week civil war, Costa Rica dissolved its army (it had lost the war to a band of rebel upstarts). At the same time, the nation launched a political experiment unique to the region. [...]

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On Account of Sex

3/11/2004 – 9:59 pm

The proposed Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is starting to look like another of George W. Bush’s announcements that we’re going to the moon, or Mars. The right-wing religious portion of the American public got its knickers twisted, so Mr. Bush read an insincere statement into the tee vee cameras, walked away and [...]

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The Good Soldier

3/4/2004 – 6:55 am

In January, I wrote that 2004 will be the year that determines whether American democracy survives. The statement was more prophetic and carried broader implications than I realized. Democracy has been killed in Haiti, the semi-island nation in the Caribbean and American fingerprints are all over the corpse.
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was hustled out [...]

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