Tag: USA

• Music: Ideas for living free (2025)

  A song that emerged after my participation in the October 18 “No Kings” protest in Oak Park, Illinois, my home town.

  abendelow

  November 17, 2025

  db’s music

  authortarianism, constitution, democracy, music, no kings, oak park, USA, violence, world war II

• Notes from an Alaska trip (2025)

  

  “I enlisted in the Marines when I was 17, and when I got back from Vietnam two years later, I was an E5 Sergeant, 19 years old. It was 1970. And I couldn’t buy a beer.” Our white-bearded, energetic driver smiled at his reminiscence. “The age was 21. Well, here in the state of Alaska,…

  abendelow

  June 18, 2025

  Reflection

  alaska, Dawson City, democracy, drinking age, entrepreneur, Fairbanks, red-blue, rural-urban, travel, USA, war on drugs

• Music: Puritan death march to the right (2024)

  

  Here’s a song that emerged after the November elections. The lyrics: This world would be my fourteenth change of a nation’s blood This place has been leaning ever since the flood. The game looks like forever, he said we could all go home. What follows is a process over which we’ve no control (no control).…

  abendelow

  December 13, 2024

  db’s music

  crisis, puritan, right vs left, us presidential elections, USA

• Memoir/book review: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

  

  Emerson’s idealism encounters Camus’ reckoning with the absurdity of human suffering.

  abendelow

  February 2, 2024

  book review, memoir

  american fiction, American literature, existentialism, invisible man, memoir, ralph ellison, Ralph Emerson, transcendentalism, USA

• It’s a wonderful lie

  Around this time of year, my wife and I look ahead to the holidays, when the desire to spend time with adult children and grandchildren is large. I make a suggestion or two for events that could bring us together with the younger generations. Then she proposes something we’ve been doing every year for the…

  abendelow

  October 17, 2023

  Theater/Film review

  1970s, American Blues Theater, capitalism, depression, frank capra, GenZ, holiday film, It’s a wonderful life, meet john doe, socialism, USA