Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist writer, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry, and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive and IT executive, he’s found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could have made up.
He has a B.A. from St. Lawrence University, and a graduate degree from Loyola. He’s studied with Sharon Mesmer, Sidney Offit, Josh Gaylord and Justus Rosenberg in The New School’s writing program, and since 2009, in Pulitzer Prize winner Phil Schultz’s Writers Studio. In 2010 he was selected to attend the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore at the masters level, where he studied with Rick Moody. Somewhere along the way he learned to write about himself in the third person.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, one filled with ideas re-emerging as vastly powerful things, even in the simple acts of everyday life, and the creation of long periodic sentences to explain it all.
Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
Barack Orwell Obama
“Just don’t call it a surge”.
From a policy perspective I guess I should be happy. The Obama administration is pursuing policies that look identical to those from the last administration, even if they are named differently. It’s become so blatant that even the New York (Obama is the messiah!) Times has begun to report it, and Jon Stewart is laughing at it.
Tens of thousand of troops are pouring into terrorist enclaves. (We used to call that “the surge”)
Know enemies of the state will be detained indefinitely (Close Guantanamo, but move the prisoners to an other secret facility, and keep some there, perhaps, forever)
Pay cap restrictions are being circumvented (The administration is building loop holes into the Pay for Performance act and providing instruction to their employees at the banks on how to use them)
We no longer are fighting a war on terror, now we have “overseas contingency operations” to prevent “man-caused catastrophes” (Listening to Hillary say these ridiculous phrases makes me think of the sweetness of political revenge. No woman from the Midwest can say those words without sounding churlish.)
But somehow I am dishearten by the disingenuousness of it all...