"Swollen corporations rule more or less unchallenged. When a big one falls as Enron fell, it's like a missing tooth in the blinding corporate smile that mesmerizes America. For a moment anyone who cares to look can see all the infection and corruption in the hungry mouth that threatens to swallow us whole. Expect a brief glimpse, before the Big Smile is repaired by the best oral surgeons money can buy. But what we see, and the way we respond to what we see, is more critical to America's survival than the fate of a million Islamic terrorists."
Hal Crowther’s writing career has had him wearing several hats, including film/drama critic for the Buffalo News, media critic for Newsweek, and writer for Time. He was executive editor for the Spectator in Raleigh, NC from 1984 until 1989. He has written for both film and television, and writes columns for The Independent Weekly and The Progressive Populist.
Crowther’s essays cover whatever he feels strongly about, and as such his topics run the gamut from the Enron scandal, to living conditions in Cuba, to rape charges against the Duke University lacrosse team. As the issues he writes on vary, so too do the points he makes in each article. His recent trips to Prague and Cuba shed insight on the way Americans, and America as a whole, are perceived by other people. An article recalling the myth of Robin Hood shows the disparity between those who have in this country, and those who have not. His anti-war activism concerning Iraq comes through in powerful prose, as when he writes, “If there ever was a deal-breaker, a faith-breaker between a president and the people who elected him (or, in this case, allowed him to take office when his election was in question), it’s this bloody-minded travesty of a war that Bush concocted out of far-Right obsessions and cooked intelligence, lied flagrantly to legitimize and then pursued to such a tragic, pitiful cul-de-sac. Such poor judgment yoked to such abysmal incompetence is unprecedented in all presidential history known to me.”
Even Crowther’s own profession, journalism, is not above reproach in his critical lens. He recently wrote, “As Murrow demonstrated in 1954 and Moyers is telling us now, any journalism of substance has a moral, judgmental component. Two sides, sure - but rarely two sides of equal merit. And at the point when the side with the power begins to ignore the facts, the laws, and other people’s rights – a point Bush passed years ago – anyone with special knowledge, access or influence is ethically obligated to tell the public what he knows and what he thinks. No matter who proclaims it, “objectivity” that ducks this responsibility is a contemptible sham.”
His essays are not all of a political nature, however. Crowther speaks on the human condition in his 2005 collection of various essays entitled Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South. In one article about writer Thomas Wolfe, he asserts, “As a people, Americans don’t think like Wolfe anymore. They’re hive creatures who network and conform, and practice petty avarice and sell themselves cheap.” Of an essay on sex in the South, he says, “Sex will never be dignified, but it can and should be private…Though we share 99.4 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, our exclusive .006 percent must be responsible for romantic love, idealized marriage, erotic nuance and the hominid novelties we call privacy and dignity.” More information can be found at http://www.halcrowther.com .
