Michael Goldfarb

1 week ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

After 600+ days of war and the utter destruction of Gaza, Israel’s military aims are not close to being achieved. There are still a few living hostages in Hamas captivity hoping to be freed and the corpses of many more to be returned. The population of the Strip still hovers around 2 million despite the deaths of 55,000 Palestinians and the departure of perhaps 100,000 more. The only reasonable way to describe the Netanyahu government’s military and diplomatic operation is: utter failure.

2 weeks ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

Do you vote FOR a candidate or party or do you vote to PREVENT a candidate or party from taking power? You can dice and splice the results of the 2024 presidential election anyway you choose: Did Kamala/Donald gain or lose: Male, Female, college-educated, White, Black, Latino (what happened to Latinx, did they all die?), rural, urban, regular, irregular, high, low information but in the end, in a society as hopelessly split as the United States the essential question is the one I pose above.

4 weeks ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

The last two weeks have seen reality come to the rescue of the slowly swelling ranks of beleaguered, anti-MAGA Americans. First, right-wing parties which had been favored to win national elections lost to incumbent liberal-left parties in Canada and Australia because of the global right’s association with Trump. Then the Vatican Conclave elected an ant-MAGA Cardinal as the first Pope born in the United States.

1 month ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

When you live on the thin ice of freelance journalism your survival depends on the ability to generate good, sellable ideas. Great ideas that need no selling come around rarely. Thirty-five years ago I had one of my best: a socio-cultural history of the post-war US called:“Inside Dan Quayle’s Brain”The premise was simple. In 1990, Vice-President Dan Quayle was the first American who had been born in the television age to get within sniffing distance of the Oval Office.

1 month ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

By the rood bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stoodAnd fired the shot heard round the world. That quatrain opens the Concord Hymn, a poem written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 to mark the unveiling of a monument on the site of the Battle of Concord, one of the first battles of the American Revolution.