Category: Indiana Writers Group

by Leo Morris I think there are two Americas. But the two I see are not the two a lot of people seem to be obsessing about these days. I experience one America through the fevered rantings of politicians and their media co-conspirators, and it seems so vivid I sometimes forget it is the fake…

by Leo Morris My reading habits have taken a strange turn lately, but it’s not really my fault. My Kindle has been bossing me around. It started when I discovered and downloaded a mystery novel about a small- college librarian named Charlie who solves murders when not walking his Maine Coon cat around town on…

Eric Schansberg November 11th (11/11) at 11:00 a.m. is the 100th anniversary of the armistice with Germany that ended World War I. At the time, it was considered “the war to end all wars.. It was soon replaced in the public imagination by an even larger war. Still, World War I was important both for what…

Listening to the acceptance speeches after a harrowing midterm election, was it clear what the winners thought had been won? Some seemed to have counted the votes in their heads and concluded that the number represented fellow citizens who had astutely assessed character, intelligence and experience and had chosen him or her specifically to be…

by Mark Franke I’m not a veteran, and therein lies a story. I was in college during the height of the Vietnam War and all the protests that were de rigueur on college campuses in those days. I was getting sick of going to school and since I was a a card-carrying member of Young…

by Leo Morris This is a quiet, unassuming little state, isn’t it? While scandals from Washington bubble and froth in the social media septic tank, accusations of sexual malpractice against two of the most powerful Indiana GOP politicians drip like slow leaks too inconsequential to bother with. We can only conclude that our journalists are…

by Mark Franke One of the strengths of American representative democracy is the requirement in most states for the voters to approve amendments to their state constitutions. This election cycle alone can boast of 37 states with 167 amendments and other initiatives, those in Florida and North Carolina getting the most press coverage and producing…

by Leo Morris We’ve all heard that if we can’t remember the past, we are condemned to repeat it. But the truth is that even when we remember it, we repeat it anyway. We can’t help ourselves. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a 1930 letter: “It’s not true that life is one damn…

by T. Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. In discussions of international trade, the pervasive mindset is that exports are a positive entry in a country’s “economic well-being” ledger, while imports are a negative entry in the ledger. In other words, exports are intrinsically “good” and imports intrinsically “bad.” Who hasn’t heard that imports “destroy” jobs while…

by Leo Morris Earlier this month, I came across this Tweet from a liberalish Lafayette attorney whose blog I have followed for a few years: “I didn’t watch the Senate debate. I do know that Trump is an incessant liar with bad ideas. Joe Donnelly will vote against him sometimes & Mike Braun never will.…