Skip to main content
All Posts By

Dan Monaco

June 2026

This Oval Office

Geopix/Alamy “Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered,” said Mr. Erskine. “I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray[1]   Prior to the arrival within its storied circumference of the effulgent portfolio of pathologies bound up in the decreasingly resilient skin of Donald Trump, the symbolic power of the postwar Oval Office relied in part on an oppositional quality. Existing at once inside of and walled off from the America it guided, the Oval Office in the age of postwar televised politics had served to signify an essence, to throw into stark relief the contrast between the monastic meditations required to keep America on its course and the ephemeral din
BY    Dan Monaco
March 22, 2026
springsummer2008

Enough of Your Yankee Bloodshed

Emily Dickinson’s Victory comes late— first appears in a letter (absent any contents but the poem) sent to Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, in late 1861 or, at the latest, early 1862:

BY    Dan Monaco
October 18, 2023
fall2010

Yojimbo and Administration

“Everybody’s after easy money.  Gambling, throwing dice.  Can’t tell whose money is whose.  I hear the sake brewer’s become a silk trader.  Says he’ll pay more than the silk merchant.”

BY    Dan Monaco
October 13, 2023
fall2010

The Straddler Review: Barack Obama and the Culture of Consultancy in collaboration with James Comerford

I Heroic icons produced by the story of American history have often been put to use in the service of the office of the presidency, typically to harmonize as well as possible the President’s preexisting personality traits or image with a ready-made figure evocative of “the real America” or “what America is all about.“

BY    James Comerford and Dan Monaco
October 13, 2023