Tag Archives: Revolution

Hugo on Freedom-Loving Insurgents

To get a sense of protesters in Myanmar, Hong Kong, and elsewhere who are risking their lives, read Hugo’s “Misérables.”

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Another Way Frankenstein Is Relevant

Friday I somehow missed this New Yorker article on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when it appeared last year in observance of the novel’s 200th anniversary. Although anti-Trump pundits have frequently cited Frankenstein in recent years to capture how the GOP created a monster it couldn’t control (see here and here), Joan Lepore argues that the novel […]

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Fighting Back against the Program

In this Scott Bates parable, one can get pushed around only so much before turning to rebellion.

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Song to the Men and Women of Bahrain

As the remarkable uprisings continue to erupt across the Middle East, I turn for a third time to the revolutionary poetry of Percy Shelley.  When one looks at his time period, one finds a number of modern day parallels. Napoleon’s wars, although imperial, still carried the ideas of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” into the rest of […]

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Egypt’s Glorious Phantom Bursts Through

I’ve been looking for literature that can speak to the earth-shaking events going on in Egypt. Poetry seems almost unable to do justice to the joy that people are feeling as they revel in a vision of liberty. Maybe this sonnet by Percy Shelley gets at their breakthrough. On August 16, 1819, a large but […]

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Poetry Unleashed in the Streets of Cairo

The Daily Beast website has an article about poetry that is being chanted in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt. (Thanks to the Daily Dish for alerting me to it.) It shows once again that language well used has the power to move mountains—or at any rate, to give historical players a firm place upon […]

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Egypt’s Mubarak, Colossal Wreck

As Egypt, following the lead of Tunisia (see my post here), teeters on the verge of revolution, everyone seems to be looking to different historical pasts to predict the future. My former Carleton classmate Kai Bird fears that Barack Obama will repeat the mistakes that Jimmy Carter made with the Shaw of Iran but adds […]

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Revolution in Tunisia–A Good Thing?

While I want to be optimistic about the recent Tunisian overthrow of its dictatorial ruling family, I also appreciate Anne Appelbaum’s pessimistic assessment in a Washington Post column. Her caution brings to mind one of my father’s witty animal fables entitled “The Revolutionary Mice.”  You can read it below. Appelbaum succinctly expresses her concern thus: […]

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