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It is a shame that the Sandinista issue in the debate is proving to be just Clinton's way of calling out to old Reagan-ites and doing her shitty redbaiting, because what happened in Central America in the eighties has a lot of relevance to what is happening today.  The eighties were the crest of a century of American interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Any quasi-endogenous political structure had to be vetted with the USA, or the USA would simply knock it over. Ditto with economic po licy. However, although the US took the right to intervene as it saw fit, it did not, as other imperialist systems did, take on the responsibility for governing, or for developing these areas in any way. Even the Soviets in Eastern Europe aided the development of industry. Not the US. In consequence of a hundred years of soft imperialism, the US helped produced a perfect pocket of poor and desperate people. Many of them have, in the past two decades, decided to immigrate, one wa

There are books that are planets. One lands oon them, as in some sci-fi flick, and explores the strange ruins, the fantastic phrases that lie about and that seem to have been invented for unknown uses by a mysteriously vanished mental technology. The Bible, of course, is the most famous of those texts in the West. I like sometimes to play the astronaut among the prophets and the gospels. Which is how I came upon one of those amazing sentences, a couple of days ago, that seemed to overturn what I thought I know about the book. Its tucked, appropriately, in one of the books of the Apocrypha – The wisdom of Solomon. In the first chapter: “For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living.” Reading this sentence, I did a sort of wiley coyote thing in my head, digging in my heels even as I was sliding over the cliff. In other religious traditions, the idea of God not making something would not be a big deal. Divine power often operates in a world