Once, in a high school class, we asked the teacher why she never talked about Juan Carlos Onetti. The answer was blunt: that gentleman had received everything from Uruguay (education, fame) and "he had left" for Spain to speak ill of his own country.

Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of "all things communist or socialist" into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.

Freedom, perhaps, may be the main differential characteristic of art. And when this freedom does not turn its face away from the tragic reality of its people, then the characteristic turns into moral consciousness.

In 1992 the Chilean Ariel Dorfman debuted his work Death and the Maiden. Although without specific references, the drama alludes to the years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and the first years of the formal recuperation of democracy in Chile.

Since the day I first realized that I was a Communist some thirty-five years ago, there have always been certain things I counted on to keep me in good stead.

For some reason, the phrase "violence begets violence" was popularized the world over at the same time that its implicit meaning was kept restricted to the violence of the oppressed.

Last Saturday, June 8, one of the most influential American thinkers died at his home in California. Richard Rorty was educated as a philosopher but in his later years abandoned that field for the humanities and culture studies.

A few days ago a gentleman recommended that I read a new book about idiocy. I believe it was called The Return of the Idiot, The Idiot Returns, or something like that. I told him that I had read a similar book ten years ago, titled Manual for the Perfect Latinamerican Idiot.

Gray makes an important point early on in his article, and that is, that if evolution is correct, then the human capacity for morality must have come about “in some part from evolutionary processes.”

A few days ago, according to Pravda, (the former paper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union now specializing in National Inquirer-like gossip) a newly rich 35-year old Russian billionaire banker, Adrei Melnichenko paid Jennifer Lopez $3 million to perform at a birthday party for his wife Aleksandra at their Berkshire England estate.

Cuban artists will honor two great Mexican painters, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, a tribute that will be sponsored by several cultural institutions.

Nothing in history happens by chance, even though causes are located more in the future than in the past. It is not by accident that today we are entering into a new era of written culture that is, in great measure, the main instrument of intellectual disobedience of the nations.

Pete Seeger is an ambassador for Peace and Social Justice and has been over the course of his 87year lifetime. As a prominent musician his songs and performance style have worked to engage other people, particularly the youth, in causes to end the Vietnam war, ban nuclear weapons, work for international solidarity, and ecological responsibility.

A minor tradition in conservative thought is the definition of the dialectical adversary as mentally deficient and lacking in morality.

Great writers do not always emerge from the most revolutionary class, the working class. Great writers emerge because they are willing to be truthful, honest, and disciplined with their craft.

One of the characteristics of conservative thought throughout modern history has been to see the world as a collection of more or less independent, isolated, and incompatible compartments. In its discourse, this is simplified in a unique dividing line: God and the devil, us and them, the true men and the barbaric ones.

Mary Perry, now ninety-seven years old, went to art school at the age of 15 in 1923. In New York City she attended the Art Students League and the Traphagen School of Fashion and Design. She was one of 40 women sculptors on the New York City Federal Arts Project (Commonly referred to as the WPA) At that time, in the 1930's, she began to do social-protest art which has been her life long interest. On the Federal Arts Project , besides doing her own sculpture, she also taught children sculpture at the Harlem Art Center and the East Side House. Later she assisted the sculptor Cesare Stea on a sculpture for West Point.

During the 1930's and 1940's, she exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, Carnegie Hall, New York University, Rockefeller Center, The Roerich Musuem, The New School for Social Reseach, Radio City, Independence Hall, and such galleries as the ACA Gallery and the Municipal Gallery in New York City.

After moving with her husband and child to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1950's, she exhibited during the 50's and 60's in San Francisco galleries, Telegraph Hill, East West, Greta Willliams, and the Artists Cooperative, and in Oakland at the Oakland Museum. At Dominican College in San Rafael, California she had a solo show on her response to the Vietnam War. In 1968 she had her own gallery in San Rafael, California.

In the 70's and 80's, she had shows in California including Benicia, Sausalito, and in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club. Mary has lived in the Rogue Valley since 1992, her work has been shown at the Grants Pass Museum, The Rogue Valley Art Gallery, The Jega Gallery, Garos, and the Art Space Gallery near Tillamook , Oregon. In February 2006 her social- protest work was shown at the Thorndike Gallery on the Southern Oregon University campus.

In 2001 " Art and Antiques Magazine," had an essay on her Federal Arts Project experiences. Her art papers are in the Smithsonian, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, and at Sonoma State University in their collection on women artists.

An award winner at both the Metropolitan and Oakland Museum for her sculpture, she was also an award winner for her painting from Mill Valley which honored her with their Spirit of Mill Valley Award.

On November 7, 2001, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit program unveiled a mammoth tile mosaic by African American artist Jacob Lawrence in the Tunes Square subway station.

Long-time readers of my commentaries will know that I do not subscribe to the liberal notion that our main problems in the Middle East derive from our blundering in without really understanding the peoples and cultures of the region – any more than I believe that the situation in Iraq right now derives from our lack of understanding that “Shi’a and Sunni have been killing each other for 14 centuries in Iraq.”