robertsgriffin.com |
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WRITINGSThree parts in this section, and I'll add entries as time goes on
If you want to get my view
of American life and our individual lives, you could read
the books in the order I have listed them here, beginning
with Sports in the Lives of Children and
Adolescence. Add to that the short writings
since the publication of my last book, Living White--they
are listed in the "Recent Short Writings" section
below--and then the material in the "Thoughts" section of
this site. If you only have the time or interest to
read just one book, I suggest The Fame of a Dead Man's
Deeds. If you want the latest and/or a sense of who
I am, read the thoughts in the order they are listed
in the Thoughts section of this site, beginning with "On
Foucault"--and you can read them in any order, they are
self-contained.
If the PDF links are oversize, adjust them to accommodate your reading preference.. Recent Short Writings
•
Robert S. Griffin, Three Fine Films, 4 pp., 2020.
In late December of 2020, I wrote a thought for this
site called “On the Working Poor.” It was based on three
films that, tied together,
• Robert S. Griffin, Was “Eyes Wide Shut” A Cultural
Watershed?, 10 pp.. 2020.
its merits wanting to say the least, I speculate that it may have been a watershed in our collective life, a turning point, an historical moment in the core culture. Read the essay here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Looking Into “What’s My Line?” 9
pp., 2020.
When I was a kid, around eleven or twelve I
suppose--this was way back in the 1950s, Saint Paul,
Minnesota--in an upstairs room Mother,
• Robert
S. Griffin, The White Wolf, 2020.
See the image here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Competing with the Negative Story
About Whites, 21 pp., 2020.
We need to put forth a positive narrative of the white
race to counter the negative one being propagated from
all sides. Read
the complete
• Robert S. Griffin, Getting
Control in Your Life,
11 pp.,
2020.
This writing began with a meditation on a slogan of the
authoritarian, repressive Party in George Orwell’s
dystopian novel,
• Robert S. Griffin,
The Tale of Bob Mathews, 12 pp., 2020.
Washington, D.C. A young mine worker from the Pacific Northwest by the name of Bob Mathews was scheduled to give a talk at the convention. Mathews had been an Alliance member for three years and actively recruiting new members for the organization among the farmers and ranchers and working people around where he lived in Washington state. Dr. Pierce asked Bob to tell the people at the convention how his efforts were going, and about the situation generally in his part of the country. Read the tale here.
Ideals, 10 pp., 2020.
This is a shortened version of the article just below on
this site, The
White Racial Movement’s Historic—and
Unfortunate--Embrace of the
• Robert S. Griffin, The White Racial Movement’s
Historic—and Unfortunate--Embrace of the Far Right, 15
pp., 2020.
The cause of white people has historically been linked
to the far-right end of the social/political spectrum,
which I find problematic
• Robert S, Griffin, More on a Recent Article About
COVID-19, 5pp., 2020.
I wrote an article on the public response to the
COVID-19 virus called “Thoughts from a Leather Couch on
Covid-19.” This
article expands
• Robert S.
Griffin, Thoughts from a Leather Couch About COVID-19,
11 pp., 2020.
Yesterday’s (March 30th, 2020) New York Times headline
was “As U.S. Death Toll Climbs, Washington Weighs New
Emergency Steps.” Today’s
is “Virus May
• Robert S. Griffin, A Rejoinder to “The ABC’s of the Alt-Right: A Guide for Students by
Thomas Dalton, Ph.D,” 16pp., 2019.
I read with interest Professor Thomas Dalton’s article
in The Occidental
Observer (an online magazine) posted on December
8th, 2019,
• Robert S. Griffin, Why I Owe
Jim Bakker an Apology and Thank You, 14 pp., 2019.
In the mid-1970s to the late-‘80s, Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy
Faye hosted a daily Christian talk show called
“The PTL Club,” which
• Robert S. Griffin, “Midnight Cowboy”
Revisited: Making New Sense of an Iconic Old Film, 14
pp., 2019.
The film “Midnight Cowboy” has turned
out to be one of the three iconic American films of
the 1960s—the other two, “The Graduate” and • Robert S. Griffin, Who Shall Remain Nameless: Al Hanzal and Democracy in Action, 14 pp., 2019.
In Saint Paul, Minnesota, a parent at the Linwood Arts
Plus School brought his concern about the Monroe part of
the school’s name to the
• Robert S. Griffin, Where is Calvin Coolidge When We
Need Him? 10 pp., 2019.
People who have done the talking all of my life don’t
like presidents like Calvin Coolidge. Read the
article here.
At this writing, a story dominating the sports
headlines—ESPN, the sports pages of newspapers, and so
on--is the fate of baseball free
• Robert S.
Griffin, William Gayley
Simpson on Christianity and the West, 9 pp., 2018. I was leaving his office at the end of one of our evening talks, "is William Gayley Simpson. Do you know about him?" Read the full article here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, A Commentary on The Sky King, 5 pp.
2018.
On
August 10th, 2018, Richard Russell,
29-years-old and married, a baggage handler at the
Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who had no training as a pilot,
and who as far as anyone knows had never flown a plane
before, took an empty 75-seat twin-turboprop bombardier
Q400 plane and flew it for about an hour over Puget
Sound, executing wild,
dangerous, and highly impressive rolls and such, all the
while engaging in self-effacing chat with an air traffic
controller, before—in all likelihood with suicidal
intent--plunging into sparsely populated Ketron Island
25 miles southwest of the airport, demolishing the plane
and ending his life.
Read the commentary here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, The White Racial Movement and Gays,
12 pp., 2018. Back
in
2008, I wrote an essay/review for this site--I called it
a review at the time, but it was as much an essay as a
review--of the book
• Robert S. Griffin, William
Pierce and a Play by George Bernard Shaw, 9 pp., 2018. In the early part of this
century, I published a portrait, as I called it, of the
white activist William Pierce, who died shortly
thereafter, called The Fame of a Dead
Man’s Deeds.
I called the book a portrait rather than a
biography because it was basically my sense of Pearce
after spending a month living in close contact with him
on his remote compound in West Virginia. One of
Pierce’s prime traits, he took ideas very seriously and
lived in accordance with the ones that gave him
direction in his life’s project of living an honorable
and meaningful existence in the time he had allotted to
him on earth (it turned out to be 68 years). One
major source of perspective and guidance for Pierce was
a stage play, Man
and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw. The following
is an excerpt from the Fame book about that play’s
impact on him. Read
the complete article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Where’s Nordic-Boy? A Game for Our
Time, 8 pp., 2018.
During intermission of a modern dance performance I
attended, I looked through the program handed out to
everyone in attendance that
• Robert S. Griffin, Learning from Baseball, 3 pp.,
2018.
of 2018, I felt drawn to revisit them. Read the article here.
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