Empire Blues with Tim Shorrock

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If you follow me on Twitter/X, where I do most of my posting these days, you know that I took off from DC last Monday for a badly needed road trip (952 miles both ways) to Knoxville, Tennessee, to see Bob Dylan and his great band play once again. It was my first major trip outside of DC since I lost my daughter Roxanne in 2024 and went through the trauma of legal conflict with her mother and step-father in the year that followed.

If you follow me on Twitter/X, where I do most of my posting these days, you know that I took off from DC last Monday for a badly needed road trip (952 miles both ways) to Knoxville, Tennessee, to see Bob Dylan and his great band play once again. It was my first major trip outside of DC since I lost my daughter Roxanne in 2024 and went through the trauma of legal conflict with her mother and step-father in the year that followed.

On March 9th, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK aired a documentary about General Curtis LeMay, the man who led the World War II aerial firebombing of Japanese cities that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The NHK website explained the intent of the film.

Gwangju My investigation of the US role in the South Korean military suppression of the Gwangju Uprising, based on 4,000 declassified US documents, was a wake-up call for the Korean people. In 2016, while visiting Korea as one of the foreign “5.18 journalists” who reported on Gwangju, I visited the offices of Sisa Journal (now Sisa In) and posed with the bound issues of my 1996 stories.

Discover more from Empire Blues with Tim Shorrock Independent journalist, Korea specialist, and Bob Dylan fan back from the brink with hidden histories of Cold War DC, US military intervention in Asia, Spies for Hire, global labor, the Left after Vietnam, plus field notes from a new book, DMZ Empire. Already have an account?

Korea Behind their smiles and solidarity are similar stories of intense worker struggles during periods of US-backed military dictatorships - and a familiar tale of Cold War betrayal by the AFL-CIO. Presidents Lula and Lee in Seoul (Pedro Rousseff via X) On Monday, February 23rd, President Lee Jay-Myung of South Korea took to Twitter/X to post a moving tribute to his visiting head of state, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, universally known as Lula.

Roxanne in Lake Tahoe, our special place, in 1996. On Sunday, March 17th, 2024, I woke up to the phone call that every parent dreads. It was my ex-wife and the mother of our daughter Roxanne Shorrock. In a trembling voice, she told me that Roxy had just been found “unresponsive” by the D.C. police in a hotel downtown. Detectives had found cocaine in her purse, and they suspected it was cut with fentanyl. Two days later I went downtown to identify her body.

Dick Cheney - the man who practically invented neconservatism, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost of millions of lives, introduced torture into US defense and intelligence policy, and cleared the way for the vast surveillance of American citizens - is dead. Morte. While the New York Times lauds him as “the most powerful vice president in American history” and George W.

I’m a child of empire. I look at America through the eyes of a boy living in Tokyo and Seoul in the smoky aftermath of World War II and Korea, during the Age of MacArthur and Truman. They are blue, East Coast Anglo eyes, shaped by a missionary boyhood in a foreign land where American power reigned supreme and the clouds of war still darken the Asian skies.