Three parts in this section, and I'll add entries as time
goes on
Recent Short
writings. Comments on and a copy
of my short writings produced since the publication
early in 2006 of my latest book, Living White. The
most recent writing is listed first.
Books.
Comments and availability information on five books I
have published since 1998.
Short Writings,
2001-2005. Published and unpublished
short writings, absent commentaries, from 2001 to the
publication of Living White. Again, most recent
first, and unpublished material is available here.
If you wa
nt 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 tcrosbysiteA.pdfhem 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, Thoughts Prompted by “Rich Men North of
Richmond: Including One About Celebration, 8 pp.,
2023.
I've been especially taken by the “Rich Men North of
Richmond” phenomenon that’s so big in the news these
days
(it’s late August of ‘23). It’s a song by a
heretofore unknown singer/songwriter who goes by the
name of Oliver Anthony.
· Robert S.
Griffin, Why I Write (Or Wrote) on White Racial Matters,
8 pp., 2023.
I received an email asking how I came to write about
“white people like John Kasper, who is seen by most to
be very dubious if
not altogether immoral.” I
assumed I’d reply briefly, a short paragraph, and that
would be it, but I found myself going on, and it
was for me, not him.What I was writing was getting at the question of
what has propelled the extensive amount of writing on
white racial matters I’ve done the last couple of
decades.See
the complete reply here.
·
Robert S. Griffin, An Exchange with a Newspaper
Reporter, 8 pp., 2023.
In the first half of May, 2023, I received an email
from John Terhune, a reporter for the Portland Press Herald
newspaper in Portland, Maine, who
was working on a story about White racial activism that
resulted in an email exchange between us. I’ve
decided what we wrote each other and what I
make of it might be of worth to others.See the
article here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, Thoughts Upon David Crosby’s Death, 6 pp.,
2023.
David Crosby, who died January 18, 2023, helped create
two of the most popular and influential American musical
groups in the 1960s and ‘70s, the
Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.He endured the
ravages of a severe drug problem, including addictions
to cocaine and heroin that landed him
in jail, as well as obesity and a general lack of
self-care. His
life involved a stark contradiction: while he gave an
enormous gift to the world through
his music, for many years he badly abused himself and
paid a great personal price for it. Read the article
here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, A
Tenth White American Voice, 3 pp., 2023
In 1831 while a student at the Andover Theological
Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, Samuel Francis Smith
wrote the lyrics to “America”
(“My Country 'Tis of Thee”) to the melody of “God Save
the Queen.” Read the article here.
·
Robert S. Griffin, Nine White American Voices, 12 pp.,
2022.
In the
article below this one on this site, The American
Political System and White Racial Discourse, I suggested that
White advocacy dialogue and debate
[m]ake
room for American voices—Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, and (I’m thinking out loud) Emerson and Thoreau
and Mark Twain and Edgar Rice
Burroughs (the Tarzan author) and Teddy Roosevelt and
H.L. Mencken and . . . oh, I don’t know, just somebody
besides Julius Evola, you know? American thinkers,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Teddy Roosevelt,
Ernest Hemingway, somebody.
I’ve asked myself, “Who are White ‘somebodies’
you think ought to be heard?”Of
course, the possibilities are virtually endless, but
I’ve got to
start somewhere and nine people come to mind.Read the
article here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, The American Political System and White
Racial Discourse, 7 pp., 2022.
In the recent mid-term elections (this is being written
in December of 2022), Democrats, apparently with a good
amount of success,
Republicans with
being no less than a threat to American democracy.I’ll use the
democracy-under-siege talk so prominent lately as
a springboard to a consideration of the America’s
political system from the perspective of White racial
advocacy.Read
the
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, What Does Watching the Film
“Shadowlands” Bring Up for You? 3pp., 2022.
I streamed a movie the other day that prompted responses
in me that made a difference in how I see things,
including
myself,
and that have stayed with me, and I think it might do
the same for you.Read
the article here.
• Robert
S. Griffin, Schooling and Education Amid the Siege: A
Perspective, 12 pp., 2022.
This writing sketches out a perspective on schooling and
education (they are different things; more on that later
on) for your
consideration, including what, if anything, to do about
it.Read it
here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Looking Over the Wall to See
What a Stranger is Up To, 12 pp., 2022.
These days, very near the end, images from long ago pop
into my head, seemingly on their own; I don’t know what
prompts them, and
I let them take me where they will.A
couple of days ago, it was of a moment from the mid- to
late-1980s in Burlington Vermont. Read the article here.
• Robert
S. Griffin, “What-If” Thinking:Imagining
Alternative Histories as a Way to Know, 13 pp., 2021.
I’ve found it useful to engage in a “what-if” thought
exercise. The idea is to imagine what it would be like now
if what
happened in the past had happened in some other way, to
envision an alternative history and see what it implies.Read the
article here.
• Robert
S. Griffin, Thoughts on Kenosha, 9 pp., 2021.
This was written on November 20th, 2021, the day after
the not guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case in
Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Streaming the trial got me thinking.This
article shares some of what came up for me for your
consideration. Read
the article here.
•Robert
S. Griffin, What’s to be Learned from Jon Gruden
Getting Kicked Out of the Game, 6 pp., 2021.
At this writing in mid-October, 2021, Jon Gruden,
coach of the National Football League’s Los Vegas
Raiders, has forced to resign
from his coaching position and undoubtedly been
cancelled for life after it was found he used offensive
language in personal emails to
former Washington Football Team president. Bruce Allen.
Race hasn’t surfaced in the Gruden matter, at least
explicitly, but it informs
what went down in his case. Read the article
here.
• Robert S. Griffin, My Take on James W. Loewen,
Sociologist and Civil Rights Champion, 13 pp., 2021.
At my late stage of life, I find that the first thing I
read every morning is the obituary section of The New
York Times.I
took particular
notice of the obituary of James W. Loewen in the August
20, 2021 edition of the paper.It
prompted me to rework a review of a book of
his I had written many years earlier.Read the
reworked review here
• Robert S. Griffin, If
I Had Made the Closing Argument in
Defense of Derek Chauvin . . . , 13 pp., 2021.
At this writing, in mid-May, 2021, former Minneapolis
police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted by a
jury of second-degree
murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree
manslaughter in the death of George Floyd during Floyd’s
arrest.The
first charge carries
a
maximum of forty years in prison.I watched the
defense closing argument on television, which brought up
questions for me and
prompted this writing. Read the
article here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, Hemingway’s
Truth: A Consideration of Across the River
and into the Trees, 9 pp., 2021.
I don’t consider Across the River and into the Trees
a major literary accomplishment, so why am I putting
energy into writing about it?
It’s because
after I finished the book I did what I often do with
books and films, cruised the internet reading what other
people,
including scholars, have said about it and it hit me
that if the people I read are right I misread the book’s
plot in a big way, and that intrigues
•
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,
I found artistically superb, personally moving, and very
thought-provoking.I decided to expand it into an article.Read the
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Was “Eyes Wide Shut” A Cultural
Watershed?, 10 pp.. 2020.
“Eyes
Wide
Shut,” released in 1999, was the last film of the
legendary director Stanley Kubrick. I watched
again recently, and while I found
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,
Dad, and I rented in Mr. Jensen’s house—he and his
family lived on the first floor--all alone, I watched a
game show called “What’s My
Line?” on CBS at 9:30 p.m. on Sunday nights on our
17-inch black-and-white Zenith television set that
looked like a small refrigerator,
never missed the show.Read the essay 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
article here.
• 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,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, often referred to as 1984, published
in 1949.I
let the process take me wherever it did and it turned
out to be some
advice
to young people especially.Read the
complete essay—I think that’s what this is—here.
• Robert S. Griffin,
The Tale of Bob Mathews, 12 pp., 2020.
In 1983, The
National Alliance—a white activist organization founded
and headed by William Pierce—held its annual convention in
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.
• Robert S. Griffin, A Suggestion to American White
Advocates:Root
Your Arguments in This Country’s Core Political and
Cultural
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
Far
Right.It was posted
in the internet magazine, The Occidental
Observer, in June of 2020.The edit
required a change in title.Read
this
version of the article here.
• 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
both philosophically and
practically.Read
the article here.
• 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
on it.Read
this article here.
