I was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1950 and
grew up in a tenement in nearby Lawrence, a factory town of smokestacks, old brick taverns and poolrooms on the Merrimack
River 25 miles north of Boston. Today, I am a college professor, professional translator, musician, blogger, citizen
journalist, textbook editor, poet, composer, artist, carpenter, energy healer, world traveler, herbalist, poet, satirist,
iconoclast, and beer-drinking, non-proselytizing, imperfect Christian.
In the past, I have worked as a professional nightclub
musician, hospital orderly, construction worker, textile worker, insole tacker in a shoe factory, meter reader, taxi driver,
janitor, security guard, amusement park ride operator, day laborer, salesman, newspaper columnist, house painter, agricultural
worker, boiler room fireman, dish washer and street musician in Madrid, Spain.
My
interests are wide and varied; besides being a voracious reader and lifelong learner, my life’s path has led meto the study and practce of holistic wellness,
including but not limited to yoga, herbalism, conscious aging, nutrition, organic gardening and cookery, psychotherapy, hypnosis,
martial arts, energy healing, and Reichian massage.
A natural born iconoclast and questioner of authority,
I have published over 200 articles on a wide range of subjects. My wife and I established the Lawrence
(Massachusetts) Film Festival in 1998. I have a Master’s Degree in Education from Salem State College and have
done graduate work in journalism at Harvard University. I enjoy being with my family and whenever possible
I relax by taking taking media “fasts,” i.e spending time in Vermont listening to mountain streams, breathing
clean air, and being around a campfire with friends in the deep woods.
What is an educated man?
“A man should be able to change a diaper, use a gun, build
a house, speak a foreign language, write a poem, play a musical instrument, balance accounts, fix a car, grow food, comfort
the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, deliver a speech, gather and prepare wild herbs, program a computer,
cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
G. Bush Sr. with Carlyle Group Business Associates
"The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living." (John Adams)
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." W.B.Yeats
Whoever fights monsters
should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into
you.
Friedrich Nietzche
"No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war."
Theorore Roosevelt
“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be
glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them;
and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after
this process of grotesque self-deception.” – Mark Twain
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing
governments, and that is a puzzlement to me... I don't understand what there is in the American character... that almost automatically,
even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them." William Shirer
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution
of way of life, or say and so things that make people think. William O. Douglas
"War may sometimes be
a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together
in peace by killing each other's children. " President Jimmy Carter
"The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified
by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical
armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing,
sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness." Wilhelm Reich
"As a result of thousands of years of social and educational warping,
the masses of the people have become biologically rigid and incapable of freedom. They are no longer capable of organizing
a peaceful living-together." The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As
a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power
of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth
is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Abraham Lincoln
"The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off
and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness
in a compact collective whole. " Eric Hoffer
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery
of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. . ." President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, Farewell Speech, 1961
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where
the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." Frank Herbert Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, "Dune"
US science fiction novelist (1920 - 1986)
Let us speak plain; There is more force in names than most men dream of; and a lie
may keep it's throne a whole age longer if it skulk behind the shield of some fair seeming name. Let us call tyrants tyrants,
and maintain that only freedom comes by grace of God, and all that comes not by His grace must fall - James Russell Lowell.
Click links below for my
poetry, some samples of my artwork, musical compositions, photography and of course a collection of pictures from my travels
around the world. In addition I have included a link to the film festival I established in Lawrence, Massachusetts several
years ago.
“Our whole life is an Education — we are ‘ever-learning,’
every moment of time, everywhere, under all circumstances something is being
added to the stock of our previous attainments. Mind is always at work when
once its operations commence. All men are learners, whatever their occupation,
in the palace, in the cottage, in the park, and in the field. These are the
laws stamped upon Humanity.” – Edward Paxton Hood, Self-Education: Twelve
Chapters for Young Thinkers, 1852
o
"It is the awareness of unfulfilled
desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny." Eric Hoffer
"The frustrated follow a leader
less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is
leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they
are led is of secondary importance." Eric Hoffer
Quote of the Day
I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
and fight like hell for the living... Mother Jones
"I am saddened that it
is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Allan Greenspan, former
chief, Federal Reserve
"I am tired and sick of war.
Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded
who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell." General William Tecumseh Sherman
"Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths,
and how many, what day it’s gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant.
So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Barbara Bush on Good Morning America, March 18, 2003
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease
is reflected in the press."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Drug use, some might say, is
destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws
are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods, which become consumed by them. And so if people
are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."
Rush Limbaugh (later busted for drug use)
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come
to hate war. War settles nothing." General Dwight Eisenhower
"We are here to unlearn the teachings
of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh
at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." Charles Bukowski
"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing
my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political
and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." David
Rockefeller
“The Presidency tends,
year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of
the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts
desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” —H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore
Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. ...James Minchner
"Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. "Eric Hoffer
"To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children. to earn the appreciation
of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends. to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others. to leave the
world a bit better, whether by a healthy child; a garden patch...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have
lived. This is to have succeeded!" - R W Emerson
What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less
arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities
to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.—Samuel Gompers
