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My New Book, Shaggy Man's Ramblings, Now on Sale at Amazon.com
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- Created on Monday, 30 April 2012 04:57
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Shaggy Man's Ramblings: Essays by Leslie Evans
Here from The Shaggy Man's Place, everything from ecological crises and religious wars to Edwardian authors, the scandal plagued city of Vernon, early computer games, and local Los Angeles history.
International oil production has been frozen since 2005 while demand from our 7 billion and growing global population continues upward, forcing prices of oil, gasoline, and food ever higher. Our political leaders stake our future on a strategy of economic growth just as the planet is hitting its physical limits on nonrenewable resources, from oil to farmland to potable water. Here is a close look at what we really are up against — along with a review of the really bad experience with the Marxist alternative system.
Since the Enlightenment we have expected religion to fade away. Instead it has become central to the identity of millions, from the Christian Right to Jihadi Islam, with ominous consequences. The media treats each outbreak of violence by jihadi militants as a separate event. They are also part of a global Islamic awakening that began after World War II and aspires to world hegemony for Islam, as Christianity once did a thousand years ago. Here is a look at the aims of the most famous of the jihadi theorists, Egyptian martyr Sayyid Qutb, a survey of Islamic battles on a world scale, and a critique of those who underestimate this foe.
And on a lighter note, pieces on an odd leftist bookstore in Missoula, Montana, called Freddy's Feed and Read, fabulist author Lord Dunsany, George Bernard Shaw, western lawman Wyatt Earp, a Romanian novelist who challenged Ceausescu and survived him, socialist millionaire John Randolph Haynes who gave California the ballot box initiative system that has become so troublesome today, and Doctor Margaret “Mom” Chung, daughter of a prostitute, who took out Mary Pickford's tonsils and adopted 1500 U.S. airmen and submariners in World War II into her club, called The Fair-Haired Bastards.
Leslie Evans, proprietor of The Shaggy Man's Place, is a former Trotskyist, one-time iron miner, erstwhile editor for UCLA's Asian Studies centers, the World Bank and the World Health Organization, and activist in Los Angeles' historic inner city West Adams neighborhood.
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On the Raymond Avenue Tragedy
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- Created on Thursday, 12 April 2012 22:11
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Leslie Evans
USC and the nearby West Adams neighborhood where the double murder took place April 11 are still in shock. Police are hunting the cold-blooded killer in a widening manhunt, and a new wave of fear is settling into the neighborhood after two decades of reductions in local crime. As president of the Van Buren Place Community Restoration Association, the block club for the area where the murders happened, I want to express the most profound sympathy from all of our neighbors to the parents of Ying Wu, who lived among us, and of her male friend Ming Qu.
I met Ying Wu only once, in the home where she rented a room, four doors away from mine, and remember her as lovely and laughing. She had come from distant Hunan in China's interior to study electrical engineering at USC. She was living with a nurturing couple and their daughter who are among my closest friends and in whose home I have spent many happy hours. On the day we met I had visited to watch Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, with the homeowner, my friend David. As it was ending Ying Wu and her roommate came home. We were introduced and shared momentary pleasantries, they sampled the snacks I had brought and went up to their room. Yesterday the wanton violence of our celluloid afternoon became real and she was struck down at the age of twenty-three while talking in the rain in her boyfriend's car. She was shot in the chest; he in the face. Trying to save her, Ming Qu, mortally wounded, made his way from the car, up the walk to the house. He banged on the door to summon help, breaking two small glass panes before falling unconscious. He died on the way to the hospital, also twenty-three. Under China's one-child policy they were both only children.
The Magic of Lord Dunsany
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- Created on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 16:20
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Leslie Evans
When the world is too much with you, the inanities of politics have you down, and the fount of insoluble crises discourages, it is a good time to read something by Lord Dunsany. An Edwardian Irish aristocrat, much of his voluminous work is long out of print, but what is available is mostly his early wonder tales, probably his best. Dunsany is usually described as a fantasy or science fiction writer, but such terms mislead. He is often compared to the more widely read H. P. Lovecraft, who readily acknowledged Dunsany's influence, yet their work shows more differences than similarities.
A French Philosopher Challenges Europe's Sympathy for Third World Despotisms
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- Created on Sunday, 26 February 2012 15:21
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The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism - Pascal Bruckner. Translated from the French by Steven Rendall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 (original French version, 2006).
Leslie Evans
Pascal Bruckner is one of that inimitable French breed of public intellectuals: philosopher, academic, novelist, and polemicist. Born at the end of 1948, he is a veteran of the sixties, when he had a certain sympathy for Maoism. Today he is a firm liberal, in American terms perhaps a very moderate leftist. He is a leading figure among the New Philosophers who broke with Marxism in the early 1970s, others including Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, Alain Badiou, and Bernard-Henri Levy, though even those grouped under this sobriquet share no common platform.
Bruckner presents an unapologetic defense of liberal democracy in its confrontations with religious and third world authoritarians. He endorsed the NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in defense of Muslims under attack by Serbian forces in the former Yugoslavia. He supported the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq, though he was later critical of the U.S. conduct of the war. And, like Paul Berman in his Flight of the Intellectuals, Bruckner came to the defense of Somali exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali when she was contemptuously labeled an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" by leftist authors Ian Baruma and Timothy Garton Ash for her campaign against Islamic female genital mutilation, the two authors contrasting her unfavorably to the supposed Islamic moderate Tariq Ramadan. Bruckner dismissed Ash and Baruma as epitomizing the "racism of the anti-racists."
Read more: A French Philosopher Challenges Europe's Sympathy for Third World Despotisms
George Bernard Shaw: Can His Reputation Survive His Dark Side?
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- Created on Monday, 30 January 2012 16:57
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By Leslie Evans
It is with a certain sadness that I come to write this. George Bernard Shaw, through his plays, was one of my early heroes. I knew only the good of him then. More recently I have come to learn things, about his political views, that I could have known then but did not, and knowing, would have seen him differently. Learning them prompts me to want to know more about his contradictory character, to decide anew what we should think of him.
Read more: George Bernard Shaw: Can His Reputation Survive His Dark Side?
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