Gadfly

Engine of Inequality

March 21st, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

21 January 2021

What Job Pays 90 Bucks an Hour and You Just Have to Keep Repeating “NO”?

There evidently is a great deal of truth in the old adage: “Those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it.” The Divided States of America are beginning to look more like the Roman Empire and the Vatican each day. The power of Rome grew and died over a thousand years because only sometimes it acted like a real empire.

Modern life is quicker and…

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WARNING! The Fascists Are Coming!!

March 15th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

The Only Way to Defeat Trumpistan Is to Pass the Democratic Party’s Platform

Since 2013, when Chief Justice John Roberts declared the election of Barack Obama had proven that racial discrimination no longer existed in the United States, the Republicans have closed 1,688 polling places.

Texas alone has closed 750 while Arizona and Georgia have closed hundreds in counties where there are lots of colored people. In Texas counties that had gained the most…

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Normal It Ain’t

March 8th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

08 March 2021

Dennis: “Why Did Jesus Turn Water Into Wine When He Could Have Changed It Into Chocolate Milk?”

As I listened to our resident Mara-Loco psychopath Donald Trump address his cult at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) emphasizing his “America First” white supremacist program and ranting about immigrants, I thought of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem about America and his second stanza written about a half-century ago:

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Dr. Frankenstein Built Another One

March 1st, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

28 February 2021

How Can We Reform Victims of Trumpism, QAnon, and the New Ku Klux Klan?

In a Hialeah, Florida grocery store, a Hispanic man asked a white woman standing behind him, in both Spanish and English, to move six feet from him as they stood waiting to check out. She ignored him and “mumbled bad words” at him.

Out in the parking lot, as he was putting groceries in his car, she came within one foot of his face, yelled: “This is not going to…

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Death of a Nation

February 23rd, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

21 February 2021

Have We Eliminated ‘The Giants Of Racism, Extreme Materialism, And Militarism’?

In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson saw the first American motion picture ever shown in the White House, “The Birth of a Nation,” based on the book “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon. Jr.It was a three-hour movie, part fiction and part history, covering the lives of the Northern pro-union Stonemans and the Southern pro-Confederacy Camerons.

I first saw…

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Analysis: It Can Happen Here

February 15th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

February 18, 2021

Maybe the Prophet Down on Interstate 94 Was Wrong

As a student of American literature, I have read some of Sinclair Lewis’s many books: Main Street, Babbit, Arrowsmith,Elmer Gantry, and It Can’t Happen Here come to mind. Born in Sauk Centre in 1885, Lewis was evidently a troublesome Minnesota teenager because he tried to run away from home at age 13 to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War (Philippines, Cuba, Guantanamo…

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Whatever Happened to Local Control?

February 11th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

When the Free Market Gets Very Expensive for the Little Guy

About 15 years ago we spent two winters in Sun City, Arizona when the right-wing Republican legislature was playing a child’s game of “King of the Hill,” passing all kinds of junk aberrant bills about abortion, sex, gender, free speech, race, voting, and playing “doctor.” It was a constant source of entertainment because we didn’t have to live long-term with the craziness. After all,…

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Cauldron of Chaos

February 2nd, 2021

By Ed Raymond 

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Are We Heading for ‘Double, Double, Toil and Trouble’?

Shakespeare’s MacBeth is a play about chaos that results when a person in the human chain of being rises above his level of competence. In our society we call it the Peter Principle. We have just finished four years of chaos with many more on the horizon because we elected a man to the highest office…

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Bedlam in the White House

January 20th, 2021

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

The Ku Klux Klan Don’t Wear Hoods Anymore

In a December column I wrote the following: “We are in the middle of dangerous times. We are on a knife’s edge of losing ‘it’.” “‘It’ stands for country.”

On January 13, the day the House impeached Donald J. Trump, I saw 2,000 National Guard troops trying to sleep on the well-lit marble floors of our Capitol near their rifles and equipment, taking a break from guarding it from Trumplican…

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The Chain of Being

January 13th, 2021



By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Where Do We Belong in God’s Universe?

In the 16th century the dominant religious “theory” was that everything on the planet from God down to minerals and rocks were links in the Elizabethan Chain of Being. The earth that came from the disintegration of rocks was at the bottom of the chain. At the top of the chain was God. It progressed downward to angels, demons (fallen angels), stars, moon, kings and queens, princes, nobles, men, wild animals,…

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