Monday, November 27, 2017

Deconstructing American Holidays

--> by Michael Grosso
I recall when I was a boy living in Astoria, Queens, a day when my father took me to witness the unveiling of a new statue of Christopher Columbus--the hero that sailed the Ocean Blue and “discovered” America. This was all I knew about the meaning of the new statue.

 I had no idea that one day I would read a book by David Stannard, American Holocaust (1992), which details the destruction of the native peoples of the Americas, a destruction whose effects we still witness today, all of it a sequel of Columbus’s “discovery” of America.  And so it has been suggested that we rename the Columbus “holiday” Indigenous People’s Day.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Facing a Global Near-Death Experience

by Michael Grosso
 
While I was writing The Millennium Myth (1995), I got tired of recording dates for all the predictions of when the world was supposed to end.  Doomsday was regularly announced as imminent, but the doomsayers didn’t know what they were talking about.

But by 2017 something uncanny had happened.  It now appears that there are several global trends, all gaining momentum, which clearly point to a coming disaster of unprecedented proportions.  All these trends are the result of what human beings have done, are, as they say, anthropogenic.   

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Doing the Impossible With the Right Partner

by Michael Grosso
 
I turned the radio on at the tail-end of the NPR interview, and heard the voice of Byron Janis, renown pianist, and author with his wife, Maria Cooper Janis, of a book with a very unusual title: Chopin and Beyond: My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Paranormal.  This is a book I recommend as providing a rare glimpse into the surprising connections between creativity, partnership, and the paranormal. Here’s a statement from a chapter called “Paranormal High Jinks,” which  covers such topics as table-tilting. Byron Janis writes: “I generally seem to be able to activate tables quite quickly, and this one came to life within a couple of minutes.”

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