I got an email from a reader asking if the title of this blog was taken from Danny Goldberg's book of the same name. I've actually gotten this question before, but I don't think I ever answered it publicly. The answer is no. In fact, I'd never heard of Goldberg or this book until long after I'd started this blog and I had to look them up. Turns out this book, which apparently deals with the importance of pop culture and music in politics, was published in June of 2003, just a few months before I started writing under the same title here.
The real story of the title is that I stole it from myself. About 12 years ago, I wrote a monthly column for a short-lived literary magazine called The Bard, published in Ann Arbor, Michigan (published by Aaron Dworkin, incidentally, who has been mentioned here many times in connection with his Sphinx Organization, which provides opportunities in classical music for minority kids). The name of that monthly column was Dispatches from the Culture Wars. So in fact, this name has been mine for well over a decade now. But I'm sure I am as unknown to Danny Goldberg as he is to me. And now you know....the rest of the story.