Josh Bolotsky's blog

Reading Liberally Page Turner
by Nora Eisenberg

(We're honored that Nora Eisenberg, longtime friend of Living Liberally, award-winning novelist, and author of the soon to be published When You Come Home (Curbstone Press), the first American novel about the 1991 Gulf War and Gulf War illness, has allowed us to publish this special Veteran's Day post.)

What does a war injury look like? In the case of Iraq, we tend to picture veterans bravely getting on with their lives with the help of steel legs or computerised limbs. Trauma injuries are certainly the most visible of health problems – the ones that grab our attention. A campaign ad for congressman Tom Udall featured an Iraq war veteran who had survived a shot to his head. Speaking through the computer that now substitutes for his voice, Sergeant Erik Schei extols the top-notch care that saved his life.

As politicians argue about healthcare for veterans, it is generally people like Sgt Schei that they have in mind, men and women torn apart by a bullet or bomb. And of course, these Iraq war veterans must receive the best care available for such complex and catastrophic injuries.

Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Lee Camp

Okay team, don't forget to dispose of this memo when you're done reading it. Anyway, clearly we need a late-October surprise. Here are the possibilities I've come up with. Some may sound outlandish, but I'm willing to do anything and spend any amount to win this bullshit election.

Bertha Lewis, Chief Organizer with ACORN, made this great little video thanking the netroots for their work defending ACORN from the scurrilous accusations of the last few weeks, and also makes a shout-out to the Obama on Row E campaign of our friends at the New York Working Families Party:

If you're in New York and want to learn more about the project she endorses towards the end, check out Working Families For Obama.

Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Katie Halper

Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Katie Halper

Screening Liberally Big Picture
by Katie Halper

(Disclaimer: Katie's interview subject, director Matt O'Neill, is also a co-founder of Living Liberally.)

Most Americans have never heard of Section 60, let alone visited it. But tonight, thanks to filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, you can get a glimpse of the area in Arlington National Cemetery where the men and women who have died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery is the third of a trilogy of collaborations between the filmmakers and HBO that capture the costs of the current wars. Section 60, in fact, picks up where Baghdad ER left off. The tragic death from shrapnel wounds of 21-year-old Lance Cpl. Robert T. Mininger comes at the unforgettable end of Baghdad ER. Their latest documentary opens with a mother visiting the grave of her son “Bobby.” Unlike like the action-packed Baghdad ER or the stylized Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, Section 60 offers an almost unmediated view into the lives of the men and women, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, who, week after week, day after day, find solace, community, and a place to grieve visiting their lost loved ones in Section 60.

The Emmy Award-winning directors are based in NY out of DCTV. Yesterday they were in Washington D.C. to attend a special TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors) screening of their film at the Navy Memorial. I caught up with Alpert and O’Neill over the phone as they got ready for the screening and talked to me about why Section 60 matters now, how making this film affected them in a way no other documentary has, and what it’s like feeling “trapped in Section 60.”

Check out Section 60 on HBO at the screening times linked here.

Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by James Adomian

In preparation for tonight's debate...

Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Lee Camp

Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Katie Halper

Everyone in the office Living Liberally office is already excited/petrified/ambivalent/crouched over in empathy pain about tonight's debate. Though we wonder if it'll be as Jim Lehrer-y as last Friday's - to provide a quick recap, Katie Halper has kindly offered a flashback at the top ten debate moments thus far.

Screening Liberally Big Picture
by Josh Bolotsky

If you went to a public high school, then you've met this kid before. It's that simple.

You know the one - trying so hard to sell himself as the pervy class clown with a secret heart of gold. The routine is simple enough: he makes a few unsavory wisecracks cracks about gonorrhea during health class, but, when lunchtime rolls around, he can be found sitting alone at the table towards the back of the cafeteria, writing feverishly in a mead composition journal, trying so hard to look pained and, well, sensitive, earnest, quietly perceptive and bittersweetly melancholic without seeming too lugubrious.

In other words, hoping against hope that someone will ask him what, exactly, he's writing, so he can half-smile, blush as he looks at the floor and stage-mutters, "just some poem, it's not, I mean, it's nothing special." Hoping against hope that the inquisitor will let out a wide-eyed and wide-grinned non-ironic "Really...?" and beg to read it. And when, after much further faux-protestation, he gives in and does read a verse, the whole school, nay, the whole town will see what a vibrant, insightful heart he really has, will see that he's not just this joker in an 80s metal t-shirt - it just takes one poem read out loud in a cafeteria and they'll all overlook his awful remarks about his female classmates' bodies, all the gym class "joking" that really constituted a minor reign of terror, and just, somehow, write all of it off as a self-defense mechanism, will just know that he means well and is so inconceivably lonely.