Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one’s actions, courage that could be described as “grace under pressure”—grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure. Within a system which denies … Continue reading
Tagged with Democracy …
Get Really Close to Another Human Being This Life Time
Now I understand why Georges Bataille wrote about some sovereign moments between two people in love, and everybody would take it as an allegory of the bloody Spanish Civil War. Hong Kong cultural critic Leung Man-tao discusses love and marriage in a recent interview, and his main point, if you allow me for an intentional … Continue reading
Por ahora: Remembering Tiananmen, June 4, 1989
Red Shirt for Burma, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in My Heart, originally uploaded by Taekwonweirdo. If you ask me which photo of me I like the most, I have to say this one. I was in front of the Chinese diplomatic mission in Chicago, supporting Burma’s failed Saffron revolution. Failed, to borrow Hugo … Continue reading
The Queen in My Heart
I have some friends who are pretty oblivious to politics. Education cannot be a factor in deciding how they want to conduct their collective, social lives because I have seen extreme some cases of people seeking doctoral degrees from renowned research universities but do not even regularly read any news–in paper, online, mainstream, alternate, local, … Continue reading
Dog Chow
I don’t even know where or how to begin. No matter how politically pungent or extreme some commentators are in this great country, as “opinion leaders,” they still have to submit to the marketplace of opinions. They either risk being sidelined and thus recede into total oblivion, or they lose all credibility and influence in … Continue reading
Estado Plurinacional
There are not that many fairly recent books on Bolivian society and history in English, and even fewer on her literature and arts. So it is no surprise that almost every anglophone reader would grab a copy of Herbert Klein’s A Concise History of Bolivia as a handy reference, should one find the history section … Continue reading
On the Ridge of Pratt 