A passionate call for cultural and political awakening that leaves little room for discourse.
Schulte presents a poetry collection that critiques contemporary culture from a libertarian perspective.
These poems often rail against what the author sees as greed, elitism, progressivism, and complacency in the United States. In “Free Market Flop,” the author denounces the idea that socialist policies are the solution to economic issues, arguing that they stifle freedom, strip people of their rights, and create an “Au-Pair State.” The Orwell-inspired “Final Legs of Collectivism” critiques the power dynamics and hypocrisy of collectivism, claiming that its version of equality is anything but equal. “Elephants and Donkeys” portrays Washington, D.C., as a zoo and chastises Republicans and Democrats as power-hungry politicians who “feast on the public dime.” “Coastal Despots” takes aim at the wealthy on the East and West Coasts, regarding them as ignorant of ordinary citizens’ plights: “Not lookin for redistribution of wealth / just want a job to care for myself // Once upon a time, I was self-reliant / now I’m just a government client,” the speaker laments. “The Supremes” calls for the “meek” Congress to stand up to the Supreme Court justices and “Have some guts for once in your life.” Schulte takes the perspective of a woman looking for love in “Her Question”; she has a “long and explicit” list of must-haves for her mate, including being free of sexually transmitted diseases and having a full-time job and 401k; however, her most pressing question for a prospective suitor is, “Are you a Libertarian?” “Pork Me” uses a bacon metaphor to decry governmental spending: “We scream for budget cuts / The national debt a crime / Eager to slash another’s pork / As long as it doesn’t affect mine.” The poet concludes by urging readers to “Seek truth / with reason your guide.”
Schulte’s tone is direct and unapologetic, clearly conjuring a political climate of “Backs without spines / boxers without balls.” Occasionally, he interrupts his criticism to inject some humor, as in “Socrates’ Final Torment,” which reimagines Greek philosophers’ perspectives through a modern lens. “This hemlock is fair-trade, organic, / and patriarchy-free, right?” The poet can also be creatively referential, as in his take on “The Star-Spangled Banner” in “Privacy Redux”: “Oh, say can you see / what we once proudly hailed / A people chiefly self-governed, / as Jefferson hoped we would be.” However, some poems’ meanings are somewhat unclear, as in “The Supremes”: “Some prefer the Supreme Court / Some prefer the supreme burrito / I prefer the House and Senate.” Many poems take perspectives that don’t seem to consider the nuances of individuals and their circumstances; “Vomit on My Door,” for example, seems to categorize each person as either part of the “elite crew” or as a “boorish country bumpkin.” And although “Offend Me Please” ask readers to “Contest my ideas and beliefs / Make me a better person / Force me to deeply think,” the collection doesn’t seriously entertain any viewpoints counter to libertarian ideals.
A passionate call for cultural and political awakening that leaves little room for discourse.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798822949102
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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