"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
There is such a thing as a Canadian vision. We had it, years ago in the era of St. Laurent and Diefenbaker and Pearson ...
... when our flag was not a Maple Leaf, but a Union Jack with a Coat of Arms.
When we looked on America as a senior partner and not a rabid elephant. When we could persuade the world that we could keep the peace, and they believed us.
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Dawn Eden offers a creative interpretation of The Day the Earth Stood Still as an apologia for Alger Hiss.
Klaatu/Hiss's final message to the world reveals that his plan for world peace is based on reliance upon robots who police planets and destroy all aggressors. This is the ultimate realization of a Marxian god of the machine…
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Bringing back fighting, and with it, the two-fisted policeman who Gort-like enforces The Code on the ice, is the prescription for what ails hockey, according to Globe columnist Kevin Paul Dupont and commentators including Dave "The Hammer" Schultz on a CBC report on hockey fights.
Dupont writes:
Fighting -- It's hard not to come across tongue-in-cheek here, but let's be honest, real fighting, up to and including the donnybrooks, personified the game's passion. Sure, it sometimes got out of hand. But it also put real juice in the building on a nightly basis, and it did a masterful job of keeping most everyone honest. The punk who tried to get away with shifts of hook and hold ultimately had to answer to a right hand to the kisser. Bettman and others cleaned it up, because fighting made for a tough sell when the game tried to court a national TV market. Oh, those brutes. Not politically correct. Too crude for television. Well, the national TV thing never developed. Hockey's TV ratings have been just south of abysmal. And here in 2005, nothing is too crude for TV. If North America goes bonkers for shows that have people licking tarantulas and covering their bodies with snakes and giant cockroaches, could it tolerate a modern-day version of a Terry O'Reilly-Clark Gillies mid-ice brawl? Oh, man, could it.
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Old Time Hockey personified: Sugar Jim Henry and Rocket Richard shaking hands after the 1952 Stanley Cup semifinals.
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