Towards the end of his life Townes Van Zandt was asked by a Dutch journalist about the great number of sad songs in his repertoire. Slightly confounded by the question, he tried to give an answer, paused, and replied “well you know...you don't think life's sad?” When asked – or when I ask myself, more likely – who my favorite songwriter is, a host of familiar qualifying counter-questions arise in my mind: What era exactly? What genre? From where? So settling on the most basic

I wish I could recall which interview it was that anarchist professor and activist Noam Chomsky freely admitted – after being asked about the British monarchy – that he had been to Buckingham Palace with his family and that actually “it was kind of fun.” He went on to suggest that the formal establishment of a royal family, if it were nested in a constitutional parliamentary system, perhaps decreased rather than strengthened the impulse towards power worship. The United Kingd