Gadfly

Dead Poets Mean Live Fascists

June 12th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Why Is the Divided States of America the Most Unequal Society in the World?

I have hundreds of favorite poems that mean much more to me than long-winded prose. My absolute favorite is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It contains the most depressing line about the human condition: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas.”

My top short poem is by Ogden Nash in “Reflections on…

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​Sneakers for Sale

June 4th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Can Someone Tell Me Why Sneakers Sell for $1.5 to $2.2 Million a Pair?

It has to be something other than quality. I shop for used books in thrift stores because I have discovered thick books given as gifts usually have not been read. Last week I picked up a new Microsoft ENCARTA Dictionary—the first dictionary for the Internet age--for $2.50. It was priced at $24.95 U.S. and $36.95 Canada. It’s the first dictionary published in about 30 years, so it…

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​An All-American Virus

May 27th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Question for 2024: Will a Billion Guns and a Quadrillion Bullets Make DSA Safer?

Ever since Lucy fell out of an African tree 3.2 million years ago, animals have been designing new ways to kill each other. For the last 300,000 of those years, Homo sapiens have been inventing more efficient methods.

If we are still around in a few years, one can predict that nuclear weapons will be obsolete. The machine gun probably won the trench warfare of World War I,…

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​American Zombies as Legislators

May 21st, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Fargo Superintendent and School Board Know Right from Wrong

Back in the 1950s when Corky and I lived under Jim Crow laws in Virginia and North Carolina, we were angered to see our Black Marines and neighbors forced by law to walk in the streets of Jacksonville and Parkfairfax instead of on sidewalks.

By that time the southern slave states had passed more than 200 racist laws known as Jim Crow. Southern states passed laws making it a crime to teach Blacks…

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​Will American Nazis Replace Us?

May 17th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Do American Nazis Know the Angel of Death Operated on 3,000 Twins?

I was twelve years old when pictures of thousands of dead, naked, starved Jews stacked like cordwood in neat rows or dumped in concentration camp streets were published in the world press.

Because of the absolute horrors of the Holocaust, I have made a special effort to learn more about Homo sapiens who would do such things to other humans. I have kept a file on the Holocaust for 65…

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A Victim of Schizophrenia

May 8th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

What’s Too Little and What’s Too Much? The DSA Is Famous for Both Positions

Schizophrenia is defined as “any of a group of psychotic reactions characterized by withdrawal from reality with highly variable accompanying affective behavioral and intellectual disturbances.”

Well, this is a big country of more than 335 million people, so mental health experts have determined that as much as six percent of the population, or about 20 million, go…

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A Three-Week Graduation Ceremony

April 30th, 2023

By Ed Raymond 

fargogadfly@gmail.com

When a Spear and a Boomerang Equals a Computer and a Smartphone

Eighteen years ago I wrote a column “Graduating for Life” about Australian aborigine teenagers at age 13 either dying during their graduation ceremonies or surviving the dangerous environment and becoming an adult in their tribe.

With the battles about the role of parents in the education of their children roiling millions of…

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​Anarchy or Democracy?

April 30th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Will we goose-step backward with the GOP or stumble forward with Democrats?

Two hundred years ago English poet William Wordsworth wrote a 14-line sonnet “The World Is Too Much With Us” with these opening lines: “The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little we see in nature that is ours; we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

A hundred years ago William Butler Yeats published “The…

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From Disaster to Chaos to Savage

April 15th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadly@gmail.com

Why Do Hospitals Charge $1,000 to $3,800 for CT Scans? Only the Shadow Knows!

When I typed this headline about healthcare costs, I thought of the old radio program “Shadow,” which kept us spellbound as we milked cows. The introductory lines got our immediate attention: “Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” The conclusion of the 325 radio suspense programs ended with this truth: “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit!…

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Born-Again Know Nothings

April 6th, 2023

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Who’d a Thunk It? The Reincarnation and Resurrection of a Third Political Party!

In 1853, a secret American society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner abandoned its secrets by transforming itself into a political party known at first as the American Party. Members refused to talk about what the secret society had accomplished, and were instructed by leaders to respond to questions with “I know nothing.” You get one guess what it was…

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