This article was first published in The eXile in February 2005.

You wouldn’t have guessed he’d shoot himself, but it made sense after the fact. He always meant what he said and did, and he always had the guns around. It was right that he used one to blow his brains out.

I can’t remember the last time a celebrity death made me sad like this. I’d been meaning to write a tribute to him, because I consider him a great and underrated writer. Too late now. (more…)

In memory of our favorite dead warmongering neocon, Christopher Hitchens, The eXiled is reposting Dr. Dolan’s classic review of Hitchens’ fake waterboarding stunt in 2008.

Hitchens Gets Waterboarded, Withdraws from Iraq in 11 Seconds

by John Dolan

Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Hitchens announced the news like he’d brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. “Believe me,” he told a waiting nation, “it’s torture.” Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it’s “extreme interrogation.” (more…)

They think that things are all right/For the deer and the dachshund are one.
— Wallace Stevens

I just came back from two days of snubbery at a conference in Budapest, and I’m here to tell you that even in middle age, getting snubbed is mighty uncomfortable.

You think it’s the kind of thing that only hurts in high school, but nope; all the old pain receptors are in place and ready to start throbbing. Of course, I was out of pain-shape and that made it worse. The past few years, people have been so nice to me I forgot what a primate quorum can do to the odd ape out, how easily they can make him feel like the unworthiest chimp in the jungle.

It was my own fault. It’s always my own fault. I’m getting tired of that. Never mind the old whinge, “Where is the justice?” My question: where the Hell is the injustice? A little injustice would warm me up no end. Instead I just go around getting what I deserve. (more…)

“I know these people in my goddamn blood!”

–Hunter S. Thompson’s Attorney

I’ve had Reagan all my life. In 1967, 13 years before the rest of you got President Reagan, he became governor of California. It was the terrarium in which Reagan’s tinkerers figured out how to stimulate the beasts in the tract houses to hatred and bathos, the tools with which they ruled and destroyed the nation.

Nixon usually gets the blame for that, but I’ve always found Nixon a rather sympathetic figure: wretched, ugly, and without much malice for either the forests or the ordinary American. Nixon didn’t even share the worship of “business” forced on us all in Reagan’s reign. Nixon’s dreams were old-fashioned Soviet machinations, full of maps and coups; he was willing enough to toss the rest of us a few bones if we’d let him play with his schemes undisturbed. And some of the bones he tossed us were rather significant. It was Nixon who created the EPA and OSHA. Reagan would have strangled both in the cradle. (more…)

In all of America, isn’t there one person brave enough to dump wet cement on Reagan’s Hollywood Boulevard star? Isn’t there one bitter reject with nothing to lose, willing to pour lighter fluid over the “tributes” Reagan’s fans have been laying outside the funeral home?

Apparently not.

Every fool in America is deep in mourning for this worthless man, who had no conscience, no intellect and no shame. He had all the faults and none of the virtues of the fascist: malice without frankness; cruelty without courage; pomp without dignity. And if all 285 million of you suckers are willing to sit there and let the jerks lie about him to your face, then you deserve him. He really was your kind of man. (more…)

Meet John Agresto, the corrupt neocon labeled a “mediocrity” by 16 academic organizations

The slime just keeps spewing from the blubbery lips of my former employer, John Agresto, Provost of the American University of Iraq-Suleimaniya (AUI-S). As those who’ve read my last eXiled article will recall, Agresto hired me as an associate professor of English at AUI-S in 2009; I taught there—damn well, by the way—in the 2009-2010 academic year, and was signed to a new, two-year contract in May 2010. But over the summer, an enemy on the faculty fed Agresto copies of an antiwar article I’d written way back in 2005, and so naturally Agresto fired me for it. In July 2010.

Agresto seems to have been outraged, that I would dare to object to being fired in midsummer via email, and responded with a surprisingly lame attempt at slander, called “John Dolan: Academic Fraud.”

Like the bomb under Ace Rothstein’s caddy, Agresto’s article is “strictly amateur night.” For one thing, he never even gets around to accusing me of anything that could be called “academic fraud.” Academic fraud means faking one or more of a short set of credentials: degrees, recommendations, publications, teaching experience, student evaluations. And my creds in all these areas are solid, to say the least. (more…)

This article was first published at Alternet.

The hero of this story is the $100 bill — or rather, the wad of $100 bills. My first meeting with those lovely $100 bills came at the end of my interview for a job teaching English at the American University of Iraq Sulaimaniya (AUIS). At the end of the interview, the Chancellor, Joshua Mitchell asked me what my travel expenses had been and pulled out a wad of $100 bills. He peeled off 11 of them — the cost of my ticket — and slapped them down on the table, snarling, “There, that’s how I do business!”

It certainly wasn’t the way most American academics do business. Most Americans are horrified by the sight of large amounts of cash, and American academics, an even more squeamish lot than most, would never have slapped that much money down on a table without asking for a receipt or any other formality. I was impressed; there’s something appealing about raw gangsterism popping up when you expected overcautious pedantry — especially when that raw gangsterism is giving you cash. (more…)