The book is out. The title is Tomorrow as Tribute: The Politics of the Burnt Future. It is available in paperback, in Kindle, and as a free web edition through David Boles Books. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection underway. The web edition is free because I want the argument to circulate as widely as possible.
We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.
A couple of years ago, I had a problem with someone by the name of Gonlon Davidescu — I thought I was rid of him and that I would never hear of him again since I informed the jury people that there was no such person and that it was simply my name, misspelled.
A few months ago I got a jury duty questionnaire for — not me. I did jury duty in January, and so I don’t have to worry about doing jury duty in New York for at least four years. Rather, this jury duty questionnaire was for Gonlon Davidescu. What I should have done at this point was to have filled out the questionnaire and have written in that Gonlon Davidescu did not exist and to maybe explain what had previously happened.
The weekend before the 2010 Midterm elections, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a massive rally in Washington D.C., the purpose of which was perhaps to be a contrast the so-called “Rally to Restore Honor,” held by Fox News Commentator/Gold Shiller Extraordinaire Glenn Beck. There was considerable more interest by the media in the Stewart/Colbert rally than there was in the Beck rally.
Continue reading → Gauging the Effect of the Sanity and Fear Rallies
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