by Fred Reed
Today we will speak of war. I will tell you of my days as a tunnel rat. It was, I think, 1954, not a decade removed from V-E Day. We lived in Arlington, Virginia, where my father was a mathematician designing warships for the Navy Department. It was a time of intense tranquility. After the …
So I was sitting with Tom the Robot and Jonesy in La Fuente, an old and cavernous beer bar hard by the cathedral in Guadalajara, and swapping lies. Except they weren’t lies, because some people can’t lie to equal the truth. Otherwise I guess they would. Thing is, lying is a limited form. Life isn’t. …
American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren’t crazy. Today’s administration would seem unwholesome in a …
Today I must ask the reader’s pardon. I do not usually write about the intimate details of my life. They would embarrass me and bore everyone else. But in this case I am obligated, as will shortly be apparent. We have all heard of Twelve-Step Programs. Alcoholics Anonymous was the first and remains the best …
In the sweltering August of ’66 we were in training in Marine Corps boot camp, in the mosquito swamps of Parris Island, South Carolina, getting ready to go to war. The build-up for Viet Nam had begun. We were thousands of kids, from the lower middle class mostly, the nation’s usual cannon fodder, young bucks …
The Revolution of 2019 began, curiously enough, in fall of 2019 when Mary Lou Johnson, the nine-year-old daughter of a ranching family outside of Casper, Wyoming, came home from her sex-ed class at Martin Luther King Elementary with a banana, a packet of condoms, and a book called Sally Has Two Mommies. Her mother Janey …
T’other day I walked up the holler to ask Uncle Hant about space aliens. It’s because Hant knows everything ? most nearly. It was spring and birds were hooting and hollering in the rail cut through the woods to Hant’s place and bugs were shrieking. The he-bugs, anyway. They rub their legs together like fiddle …
My name’s Bond…Fred Bond. I’m a freelance news weasel in Washington DC, the heart of a darkness that would have made Conrad slit his wrists. Before, I worked as the gas-warfare editor for Soldier of Fortune magazine, but the demand for down-market extinction porn dried up and DC looked to be the best available gig. …
To begin with, the poseurs who have awarded themselves charge of the arts wouldn’t recognize an art if they found it swimming in their soup. It is true. Start with literature. I have read several times over the years of wags who copied out three chapters of some classic—The Reavers, or Moby Dick (“Call me Fishmeal.”)—and sent …
Should anyone in authority say anything sensible about racial policy, an event unlikely to occur before the next Ice Age, he would have to say that when it is not merely futile it often injures the people it is supposed to help; that it succeeds in antagonizing whites without benefiting blacks; that it has become …