When one commits to the life of an active citizen, spending their hours days and years reading and writing about current events, it becomes a daily struggle to overcome the cynicism that chases after you with the despairing headlines marking each newspaper or magazine.

A few days ago the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, referred to Jesus as the greatest socialist in history. I am not interested here in making a defense or an attack on his person.

The stock markets are plummeting and hundreds are dying daily in Iraq. Perhaps we need some escape from these dismal events by examining a new controversy from the world television entertainment.

Once, in a high school class, we asked the teacher why she never talked about Juan Carlos Onetti. The answer was blunt: that gentleman had received everything from Uruguay (education, fame) and "he had left" for Spain to speak ill of his own country.

Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of "all things communist or socialist" into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.

Freedom, perhaps, may be the main differential characteristic of art. And when this freedom does not turn its face away from the tragic reality of its people, then the characteristic turns into moral consciousness.

In 1992 the Chilean Ariel Dorfman debuted his work Death and the Maiden. Although without specific references, the drama alludes to the years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and the first years of the formal recuperation of democracy in Chile.

Since the day I first realized that I was a Communist some thirty-five years ago, there have always been certain things I counted on to keep me in good stead.

For some reason, the phrase "violence begets violence" was popularized the world over at the same time that its implicit meaning was kept restricted to the violence of the oppressed.

Last Saturday, June 8, one of the most influential American thinkers died at his home in California. Richard Rorty was educated as a philosopher but in his later years abandoned that field for the humanities and culture studies.

A few days ago a gentleman recommended that I read a new book about idiocy. I believe it was called The Return of the Idiot, The Idiot Returns, or something like that. I told him that I had read a similar book ten years ago, titled Manual for the Perfect Latinamerican Idiot.

Gray makes an important point early on in his article, and that is, that if evolution is correct, then the human capacity for morality must have come about “in some part from evolutionary processes.”

A few days ago, according to Pravda, (the former paper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union now specializing in National Inquirer-like gossip) a newly rich 35-year old Russian billionaire banker, Adrei Melnichenko paid Jennifer Lopez $3 million to perform at a birthday party for his wife Aleksandra at their Berkshire England estate.

Cuban artists will honor two great Mexican painters, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, a tribute that will be sponsored by several cultural institutions.

Nothing in history happens by chance, even though causes are located more in the future than in the past. It is not by accident that today we are entering into a new era of written culture that is, in great measure, the main instrument of intellectual disobedience of the nations.

Pete Seeger is an ambassador for Peace and Social Justice and has been over the course of his 87year lifetime. As a prominent musician his songs and performance style have worked to engage other people, particularly the youth, in causes to end the Vietnam war, ban nuclear weapons, work for international solidarity, and ecological responsibility.

A minor tradition in conservative thought is the definition of the dialectical adversary as mentally deficient and lacking in morality.

Great writers do not always emerge from the most revolutionary class, the working class. Great writers emerge because they are willing to be truthful, honest, and disciplined with their craft.

One of the characteristics of conservative thought throughout modern history has been to see the world as a collection of more or less independent, isolated, and incompatible compartments. In its discourse, this is simplified in a unique dividing line: God and the devil, us and them, the true men and the barbaric ones.