Before:
Fighting for civil rights with Dr King.
After:
Former United Nations Ambassador and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young speaks during a news conference in Atlanta Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006. Young will be the public spokesman for Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group organized with backing from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that defends the world’s largest retailer against mounting attacks from its critics, the group announced Monday, Feb. 27, 2006. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)
Revelers scream for beads as the Krewe of Orpheus Mardi Gras parade on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans February 27, 2006. REUTERS/Jeff Zelevansky
Martin Luther King III speaks at Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Monday, Feb. 27, 2006. King said Monday that he wants to apply his father’s teachings on nonviolence to today’s troubled world, and left open the possibility of doing so separately from the nonprofit center founded by his mother that’s now the topic of debate in the King family. (AP Photo/Janet Hostetter)
Discovery in News archives leads to publication of unseen images of civil rights movement in Birmingham.
May 3-9, 1963 Civil rights leaders disagreed on whether to use students as part of the movement, but public perception changed after photographs showed the children being arrested, sprayed by fire hoses and dodging police dogs.
Good Question: Can a man love God and hate his brother?
The highly-subversive cartoonist and political commentator, Aaron McGruder makes the transition from the page to the small screen with his deathly funny comic strip, ‘The Boondocks.’
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.
The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.
When liberty returns, I will return.
- August 18, 1859 (On when he planned to end his exile from France.)
Popularity? It’s glory’s small change.
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.
- from Hugo’s will, written August 2, 1883, when Hugo thought he was near death. (He died in 1885).
I don’t mind what Congress does, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
~Victor Hugo
Above our life we love a steadfast friend.
All places are alike, and every earth is fit for burial.
Goodness is beauty in the best estate.
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d one self place; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there must we ever be.
Is it not passing brave to be a King and ride in triumph through Persepolis?
O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
That perfect bliss and sole felicity, the sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
Virtue is the fount whence honour springs.
~Christopher Marlowe
You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
So, I learn from my mistakes. It’s a very painful way to learn, but without pain, the old saying is, there’s no gain. I found that to be true in my life. You miss a lot of opportunities by making mistakes, but that’s part of it: knowing that you’re not shut out forever, and that there’s a goal you still can reach.
Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.
You’ve got to know your limitations. I don’t know what your limitations are. I found out what mine were when I was twelve. I found out that there weren’t too many limitations, if I did it my way.
After about three lessons the voice teacher said, “Don’t take voice lessons. Do it your way.
~Johnny Cash
Feb. 21, 2006 — The director of Milwaukee’s National Black Holocaust Museum reflects on what’s missing from school and community observances of Black History Month.
Feb. 23, 2006 — This Sunday, NBC will air a prime-time documentary about the little-known story of Vernon J. Baker, a black WWII soldier who waited half a century for this nation to recognize his valor.
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
Every dogma has its day.
I didn’t think; I experimented.
I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us.
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.
The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
~Anthony Burgess
Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. ~Malcolm Muggeridge
As happy a man as any in the world, for the whole world seems to smile upon me!
I find my wife hath something in her gizzard, that only waits an opportunity of being provoked to bring up; but I will not, for my content-sake, give it.
I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition.
Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.
Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.
Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.
Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them.
Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.
But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.
In appearance, at least, he being on all occasions glad to be at friendship with me, though we hate one another, and know it on both sides.
I did not like that Clergy should meddle with matters of state.
He that will not stoop for a pin will never be worth a pound.
~Samuel Pepys
The greatest dignity and respect you can give [victims of war] is to show the horror they suffered, the absolute gruesome horror. ~War Photographer David Lesson
February 24, 2006
NYC
Rappers, as a Rule, Do Not Sing
By CLYDE HABERMAN
SINCE some members of the Hip-Hop Nation seem to regard themselves as belonging to a separate land, perhaps we need creative ways to deal with the criminals among them. New York officials might want to check out Article 1 of the United States Constitution.
It says, among other things, that no state shall “enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power.” At least no state may do so, Article 1 says, “without the consent of Congress.”
Why not have New York ask Congress for permission to strike a deal with the Hip-Hop Nation?
If Washington gives the O.K., arrangements could be worked out with recognized leaders of that nation: Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, whomever. They get to go about their business, maybe with a tax break or two thrown in as a sweetener. But they must agree to extradite any of their own who egregiously violate our laws — say, by killing someone.
Just a thought.
Alternatively, we could get real and make clear to certain rappers that they do not belong to a separate nation. They are citizens of New York and the United States, and are expected to tell what they know about a violent crime or go straight to jail, bling and all.
This seems to be the direction in which the Police Department and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office are headed in a case involving Busta Rhymes, the nom de rap of a performer whose real name is Trevor Smith. But their progress has had all the speed of ketchup from a newly opened bottle.
About three weeks have passed since a bodyguard for Mr. Smith, Israel Ramirez, was shot to death outside a warehouse in Brooklyn, where his boss was shooting a music video. The basic details are all too familiar in the rap world. There was a typically brainless argument. Nasty words were exchanged. Someone pulled a gun. Shots were fired.
And Mr. Ramirez, 29, the father of three small children, lay dead.
A plainly disgusted Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, estimated that 30 to 50 people were at the scene but were unwilling to tell what they saw. They include Mr. Smith, who has been as faithful to Mr. Ramirez’s memory as Enron was to its shareholders. Help catch the killer of a loyal employee? Not Busta Rhymes.
The police have been left in the ludicrous — or, to be true to this topic, ludacris — situation of practically having to beg for information. So the next step may be to force witnesses to testify before a special grand jury or else face jail time.
“Right now the detectives working the case have met the D.A.’s staff with the notion that they’ll be using an investigative grand jury as a vehicle to induce witness cooperation,” said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman.
That sort of grand jury is not commonplace. It is also not clear when one might be formed. But if that’s what it takes to make people do the right thing, so be it. The same tactic had to be used to make recalcitrant witnesses talk in the case of Mark Fisher, the Fairfield University student murdered in Brooklyn in 2003.
AH, but we should be more culturally tolerant, some say. It is very difficult, they say, for a big-time rapper to cooperate with the police. He would be seen as a snitch. He would lose credibility on the street. Worse, album sales might suffer.
Poor Mr. Smith. What an ordeal this must be for him.
It is this sort of mind-set that has led critics to dismiss some hip-hop performers as “updated minstrel figures,” to borrow from the essayist Stanley Crouch.
The film director Spike Lee has singled out 50 Cent, the glowering rapper who, as a result of a shooting, has more holes in him than a Dunkin’ Donuts shop. In a recent interview with Complex magazine, Mr. Lee referred to a movie in which 50 Cent starred. “That whole mantra — ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ — for me that’s criminal,” he said.
There are other signs of rejection, including talk of an anti-Busta boycott, unless Mr. Smith talks to the authorities.
Thus far, his public remarks have been confined to a written statement in which he expressed his condolences to the Ramirez family. Naturally, he said nothing about the culture of violence that infects the Hip-Hop Nation and explains why his own bodyguard is in the ground.
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.
But what of black women? . . . I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.
One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.
As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
~W.E.B. DuBois
Dear Jen,
Thank you for your support of the Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc.
As you know, we are planning to build a memorial to Dr. King on the Mall in Washington, DC to remember and promote Dr. King’s legacy and his universal messages of love, non-violence, and equality.
You’ve already taken the first important step by supporting our efforts financially. But today I hope you will take a moment to also become a spokesperson for the Memorial by doing the following:
1) Watch the virtual tour of our Memorial by clicking here, and then
2) Spread the word to ten friends here.
Getting the word out is the second most important thing you can do to help us “build the dream”.
Thanks again for your support.
Sincerely,
Harry E. Johnson, Sr., Esq.
President and CEO
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an elite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
Art is born of humiliation.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say: Sanctity is the state about which theology has nothing to say.
I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
It is… axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
It takes little talent to see what lies under one’s nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that “faith” is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
No hero is mortal till he dies.
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
Now is the age of anxiety.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master’s commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too “personal” style.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
You know there are no secrets in America. It’s quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.
~W. H. Auden
I spoke to an audience of Washington University alumni last December at the new Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, one of the most impressive monuments ever built to the memory of an athlete, living or dead. It would have been hard to imagine in the 1960’s that Louisville would ever do such a thing for Ali. But as time has passed, Louisville must have come to the realization that, at least as a tourist attraction, Ali is their most famous and highly regarded native. And I suppose that many have come to love him there, as elsewhere, or at least to not hate him. He is a Muslim to boot, and we need to be nice to Islam these days in our war for hearts and minds in the Middle East.
It may have seemed odd at such a shrine to Ali’s transcendence that I told the gathering that as new generations come along and as we ourselves age, we’re likely to see serious revision about the meaning and significance of Ali. My daughters, for instance, both in their 20’s, find old footage of Ali amusing but cannot understand what the big fuss was about. His fights mean nothing to them. Why were people so worked up about them? Why were they so transfixed by his trash talking? I have met several people who lived through the Ali era, who never liked boxing, and who, too, are mystified about why they were so consumed with the fights, why they thought Ali’s winning or losing meant so much. They speak of it now as if they had been in a trance or dream.
My daughters do respect his stance against the draft, but only in the light that Ali was a more honest and sincere draft dodger than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others. He couldn’t duck into the National Guard and have a good chance of avoiding altogether going over to Vietnam (many state National Guards weren’t even integrated in the 1960’s); couldn’t hide out in college and get student deferments (he was too poorly educated and boxing was not a college scholarship sport); and couldn’t run off to Canada (he loved living in America too much to do that).
As a noted military historian once told me, the Vietnam War draft was designed to protect from combat the people society most valued. One way of looking at this, as my daughters analyzed it, was that our country thought that Joe Namath, who was classified 4-F because of a bum knee but could still play football every Sunday, was more important than Muhammad Ali. Actor George Hamilton, then dating President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, was given a hardship deferment to support his socialite mother.
“It was unfair,” they declare with moral outrage, “Ali was just expressing openly what other people felt about that war.” But they still don’t think that his stance against the draft makes him very important. To them, the 1960’s as a whole seemed a sorry time. “He was just a silly, naive guy who was a fighter and a draft dodger,” they said.
To be fair, my prediction of revisionism last December was not all that visionary: Ali revisionism has already begun. Mark Kram’s “Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier,” published in 2001, was an important shot across the bow. In his book, Kram, who died in 2002, takes a highly critical view of Ali during the 1960’s, insisting Ali was neither hero nor race leader. Many of the people I know who are big fans of Ali, particularly those who grew up with the Louisville Lip, were outraged by the book and imputed all sorts of ulterior motives to Kram. The most common story I heard was that Kram had originally written a positive book about Ali, couldn’t get a publisher, and decided to make it negative to get it published.
Now comes Jack Cashill’s “Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream.” Published late last month, “Sucker Punch” is the most thorough-going conservative revisionist view of Ali or, as Cashill puts it, the Ali myth, largely constructed by a white, liberal left cultural elite. Cashill condemns Ali for a whole host of sins: for having “knowingly betrayed Malcolm X”; for “publicly turning his back on his press secretary, Leon 4X Ameer,” which led directly to Ameer’s death; for not having quit the Nation of Islam or protested when its members executed family and friends of the Hanafi sect; for publicly degrading Joe Frazier, his chief nemesis, “along the crudest racial lines”; for being “an unapologetic sexist”; for being “an unabashed racist, calling for an American apartheid and the lynching of interracial couples as late as 1975”; and for rejecting “his country in its hour of need” and expressing “no regret at the fate of those millions we all abandoned.”
Cashill is right on virtually every point. Ali did all these things, and more. Cahill scores some other good points, especially in making the case of how the white left needed Ali. In the end, though, by virtue of its very critique of him, the book endorses rather then undermines Ali’s importance. And Ali’s dissent about Vietnam, no matter its motives, was important for a free society. His hero status is deserved for the most part, despite his considerable flaws.
But what’s important about Cashill’s book has as much to do with the author’s own story, threaded throughout the book: a lower-middle class white boy who grew up around blacks in Newark. His is the story of how New Deal liberalism’s black and white coalition broke apart over economic and social issues, Ali among them. Ali never rose above his divisive times, like Joe Louis did in the 30’s, or Floyd Patterson tried to do in the 50’s and 60’s. Ali was merely an emblem of them. That is Cashill’s view.
Cashill’s father was a police officer who lost his rank on the force when an Italian became mayor of Newark and chose only to reward other Italians, even though Cashill’s father had supported him. His father eventually committed suicide. He struggled in a home with a single mother and three siblings as his neighborhood grew blacker as the 60’s progressed and whites fled in a panic to the suburbs. Eventually he was the lone white kid on the basketball court. Crime increased, services deteriorated, and he faced greater hostility from the blacks around him. At first, he liked Ali, during his Cassius Clay days; but as Clay became more racially self-conscious, joining the the Nation of Islam and speaking more critically of the United States, Cashill grew to dislike him.
I grew up in Philadelphia and knew a number of urban ethnic whites like Cashill. (I exclude Jews from this grouping, as their interactions with blacks were and are very different.) They tended to work hard, keep neat homes, hold conservative views greatly influenced by the church, have philistine tastes, serve their country when called. They were also staunchly Democratic, for two reasons: they believed in unions and they believed in the common man getting a break. The Democrats stood for that.
When blacks began to push for their rights, these whites hated it intensely. They thought blacks were complaining, and the idea of complaining they found distasteful. They also thought that blacks wanted something special because they were black. When blacks had been seen just as other members of the working class, urban ethnic whites seemed to see a certain common cause with them: everyone was Democratic and proud of it. Once blacks became a special grievance group — a move the Democratic Party supported for a variety of reasons — white urban ethnics found them and the party unbearable. They particularly did not want to be blamed for blacks’ troubles, as Martin Luther King seemed to be doing when he held his 1966 march through white, working-class neighborhoods of Chicago. The violent reaction he got was very predictable. As a teenager at the time, I thought he was goofy to attempt what he did, showing that he did not understand the difference in the mind of the white southerner and the mind of the white urban ethnic.
I know many white urban ethnics who felt, in the end, that they paid for the civil rights movement by being made the goats for it. “Rich liberal WASPs could blame us as the bad racist guys who were against integration. But all the integration was falling on us, in our neighborhoods and schools. They didn’t worry much about it out where the rich people lived,” one white ethnic told me a few years ago.
Sports was a common ground between white urban ethnics and blacks, but Ali seemed to violate that, polarizing things as a way to sell himself and his fights. In the end, there is a certain elegiac, tragic sense to Cashill’s book, as if, sadly, Ali failed his moment. I think Ali’s failure truly wounded Cashill, truly disappointed him. In such a whirlwind as the 60’s, it would have been miraculous if it had been otherwise.
February 21, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Let Your People Stay
By JOHN TIERNEY
MILWAUKEE
If you were a Democrat watching Coretta Scott King’s funeral, you could congratulate yourself on the party’s role in past civil rights struggles. But if you saw what’s been on television in Milwaukee in the past month, you’d wonder what’s become of your party.
Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, looks like public enemy No. 1 for African-American schoolchildren. “He’s throwing away my dream,” one Milwaukee student says in a TV commercial supporting the city’s school voucher program for low-income families. Another commercial shows a black father on the verge of tears saying: “School choice is good enough for the governor’s family. I ought to be able to have it, too.”
Radio audiences have been hearing an ad calling the voucher battle “one of the greatest social justice issues we have in the country.” The speaker is Ken Johnson, an African-American who leads Milwaukee’s school board.
You read that correctly: the head of the public school board supports giving students in his system a chance to escape public schools. That would be unthinkable in most cities, but Milwaukee’s voucher program has been so successful over the past 15 years that it’s won a wide array of converts — except among the Democrats terrified of teachers’ unions.
The governor repeatedly vetoed bills passed by Republican legislators who were trying to head off a problem that became official yesterday: there aren’t enough vouchers for all the students who want them. The original law limited the number of vouchers to 15 percent of the city’s public school enrollment — which works out to almost 15,000 vouchers — but the program has grown beyond that limit.
So the state announced a rationing plan yesterday that would deny vouchers next year to thousands of students, many of them already using vouchers to attend private schools. These students and their parents have been appearing in television commercials, paid for by a pro-voucher group, and showing up at the State Capitol carrying signs reading, “Governor Doyle, Don’t Cap My Future.”
The pressure has worked. The governor and the Republicans have negotiated a last-minute deal — expected to be enacted shortly — to stave off the rationing plan by allotting extra vouchers. That would spare the Democrats from the immediate prospect of kicking black children out of private schools.
But it still leaves the party in Wisconsin and elsewhere with long-term problems. How long will blacks vote for a party that opposes the voucher programs they strongly favor? And how can Democratic leaders keep preaching their devotion to public schools while sending their own children to private schools, as Governor Doyle does? He’s what I call a Lypsy, an acronym for Let Your People Stay.
Doyle told me that he wasn’t bothered by the personal attacks, and that he had compromised only to avoid disrupting students’ education. He said he was still philosophically opposed to vouchers and didn’t fear reprisals from black voters. “I don’t think this is an issue that moves voters,” he said, arguing that blacks distrust Republicans on too many other issues.
He may be right — for now. Howard Fuller, a prominent advocate for vouchers as well as a former superintendent of Milwaukee’s public schools, told me he hadn’t seen the popularity of the voucher program translate into much affection for Republicans among his fellow African-Americans, especially his civil rights comrades.
“Those people you saw at Coretta Scott King’s funeral are not going to change,” he said. “My generation pushed for social change through government solutions, but younger blacks are much more interested in private initiatives. They understand that the public school system cannot by itself be the solution to educating low-income children.”
One of those younger blacks is Jason Fields, a first-term state legislator who has defied his fellow Democrats by supporting vouchers. “If the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the little guy, where do we get off opposing a chance to help those with the least of all?” he asked. The answer he’s heard from his party is that supporting vouchers can end your career if the teachers’ union supports a candidate against you in the Democratic primary.
But Fields, who represents a predominantly black district in Milwaukee, is that rare Democrat who will stand up for his constituents against the union. “If they run someone against me, so be it,” Fields said. “I’m willing to leave it up to the voters to decide who really cares about African-Americans, and who’s just spitting out rhetoric.”
[I can't stand Tierney, but if you want to read his b.s., you shouldn't have to pay for it.]
I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.
Don’t expect me to cry for all the reasons you had to die.
Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self esteem.
I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.
I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.
I wanted to move to Seattle, sell my ass, and be a punk rocker, but I was too afraid.
I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time. Something different from heavy metal, a different attitude.
I’m so happy because today I found my friends - they’re in my head.
I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.
I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man - they’ve always been a threat to me.
If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.
If you ever need anything please don’t hesitate to ask someone else first.
It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.
My generation’s apathy. I’m disgusted with it. I’m disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.
Never met a wise man if so it’s a woman!
Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.
Rather be dead than cool.
That’s what music is entertainment. The more you put yourself into it, the more of you comes out in it.
The worst crime is faking it.
Thought the sun is gone, I have a light.
Vandalism is as beautiful as a rock in a cop’s face.
Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.
We’re so trendy we cant even escape ourselves.
What people don’t realize is that the so-called Seattle grunge scene grew out of several close-knit gourmet supper clubs - we would only pick up guitars to pass the time while our dishes were simmering, baking, boiling, etc.
The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!
I used to try to make my head explode by holding my breath, thinking that if I blew up my head, they’d [mom and dad] be sorry.
By definition pop is extremely catchy, whether you like it or not,” Cobain says. There are some pop songs I hate but I can’t get them out of my head. Our songs also have the standard pop format: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.
We were just amazed we were putting out a record. We were, and are, still learning. But we’ve never cared much for professionalism as long as the energy was there. Like our live shows: We’re out of tune and use a lot of feedback. That’s not on purpose or because we don’t care, we’re just musically and rhythmically retarded and we play so hard that we can’t tune our guitars fast enough.
~Kurt Cobain
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish. ~Albert Einstein
And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
Of course I’m a black writer. I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
Passion is never enough; neither is skill.
The function of freedom is to free somebody else.
There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don’t mean a thing.
Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That’s where we live. And that’s where the juices come from and that’s where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
Bit by bit . . . she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
I have my own list of objections that I can peruse at my leisure, not least of which is an almost comic obtuseness regarding women, … generous; impractical; often wrong; always engaged; mindful of, and often amused by, his own power.
Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty per cent of useful work of the world.
Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.
The loneliest woman in the world is the woman without a close woman friend.
Bit by bit . . . she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
(Love) is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion—because hatred is involved in it, too.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither…. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
When I write, I don’t translate for white readers…. Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we’re able to read him. If I’m specific, and I don’t overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
There is really nothing more to say — except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Birth, life, and death — each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
I’m a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I’m also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I’m an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I’m spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I’d like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.
In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.
Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, ‘Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?’ I could have spoken up, ‘I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.’
~Toni Morrison
Contractors upset by raccoon at work site
Minority contractors arrived at work Thursday and found a dead raccoon hanging from a sign pole. Bill Mason, president of the Minority Contractors Association, called it “a racist tactic to scare black people. In the South where I was born, it was common for whites to hang raccoons. It symbolized the hanging of blacks,” Mason said.[thx f2b]
Like so many African-American women of her generation, Lillie Mae Graham worked her whole life for others — cooking, cleaning and being a caregiver.
Now, at 81, when it should be her turn to get help, she sometimes wonders if anybody even cares if she’s alive.
“I wanted to go back home. I’ll be feeling down and I’ll cry sometimes,” said Graham, who lives in a tiny apartment in the Central Area.
We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful what we pretend to be. ~Kurt Vonnegut
In the Center of it All
Has Summers Lost His Faculty?
Categories: Academia
Harvard President Lawrence Summers is in trouble again. Or let us say his troubles have reached a certain pitch as to make the news again. This time, a number of his faculty are up in arms about the resignation of William Kirby as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Some feel he is being pushed out. Mr. Kirby, a professor of Chinese History, was a professor at my institution, Washington University, before he went to Harvard several years ago. I’m sure he scarcely imagined he would eventually make newspapers across the country in this way. Indeed, when most deans step down from their jobs — whether pushed, bribed, exhausted or fired outright — they never make news beyond the local campus paper.
Most people outside the academy have no idea what any dean of an arts and sciences faculty does. Most deans spend a great deal of time dispensing budgetary allocations, asking donors for money or having department heads and faculty ask them for money. Mr. Kirby, like his peers at other institutions, determines the annual budgets of all the departments of arts and sciences. He determines which departments get approvals for new faculty hires. He greatly influences decisions as to who becomes a department chair. He controls the way fundraising dollars flow to departments and programs. He sits on the tenure committee, oversees tenure decisions and can veto any favorable tenure decision if he doesn’t like it.
In short, it is a powerful job. If a faculty has a dean they like or are used to working with, they loathe change. If the president does not have the complete confidence of his or her faculty and makes a change like this, it could be very difficult. The old saw that the battles in academe are so nasty because the stakes are so petty is not quite true. Harvard is a $25 billion institution, after all.
The arts and science faculty have scheduled a no-confidence vote for February 28. (He has already been the unhappy recipient of one such resolution, last March.) Some are ready to move to have him fired. It seems remarkable that a man who has had such success in life as Mr. Summers seems so inept at keeping his job; that is, as Casey Stengel put it, seems so inept at keeping the people who hate him from joining forces with the people who aren’t sure.
Mr. Summers’s problems started shortly after he became president of Harvard in 2001 and got into a contretemps with Cornel West, an internationally known professor in philosophy and African American Studies. Apparently, Mr. Summers did not think much of Mr. West’s non-academic activities and thought he should be writing more straight scholarship and fewer op-ed pieces. Mr. West did not take kindly either to this advice, the way it was delivered or both. He thought Mr. Summers was racist.
On the one hand, it is not so unusual for a college president or dean to take aside one of his or her star faculty, if he or she thinks the person is not quite living up to the marquee lettering. Sometimes, faculty do badly detour in their careers or are mesmerized by the glamorous world of punditry or suffer a kind of “scholar’s block.” In those cases, some avuncular guidance is often useful.
On the other hand, star faculty are famous people who have achieved considerable notice in the world for something that is, more or less, a real set of accomplishments. Like stars in any other profession, they must be approached and handled with some degree of shrewdness and aplomb. According to reports, Mr. Summers does not have the most pleasing bedside manner. In the elite academic world, contention is rife and rivalry is maddening, egos are fragile and stars can easily walk. Mr. West went to Princeton. This made the front page in The New York Times, in part as a story of race and racism in the academy. But I thought that if a black man can have a choice between working at Harvard or working at Princeton, this hardly seems like a story of victimization. It might even seem an old-fashioned story of progress. (Or, otherwise, in America, some blacks are becoming mighty high-priced victims!)
Last year, Mr. Summers offended many of his women faculty when in welcoming remarks at a conference he said that women might be biologically predisposed to not having great success in pursuing scientific careers. Clearly, men and women are different genetically, but whether this difference amounts to nothing more than that one sex carries fetuses for nine months while the other doesn’t has become a source of great political fractiousness. Mr. Summers stepped right into it with the grace of an elephant washing dishes.
There was some debate as to how he framed and intended the remarks but there is little debate about how they were received. When most college presidents make welcoming remarks at a conference, they indicate that they have no idea what the conference is about and are in a considerable hurry to leave to meet with a donor. So, they employ drowse-inducing bureaucratic non-speak: vague phrases about “excellence,” “the spirit of academic inquiry” and “collegial and interdisciplinary exchange.”
Both to his credit and to his folly, Mr. Summers chose to actually say something, as if what the conference was about was actually of some interest to him! It was this, and other things that did not make the news reports, that led to the first no-confidence resolution. How much more of this Mr. Summers can survive is certainly up in the air. Clearly some deep pockets at Harvard want him around; otherwise he would have been fired long ago, if only as a nuisance who keeps getting Harvard bad publicity as a troubled place. But I suspect the opposition is probably lining up deep pockets, too. Faculty at most prestigious colleges and universities are so wrapped up in their research, their intellectual cliques and their classes that it takes something like an administrative earthquake to get them to pay much attention to broader institutional issues. Once they’re riled, they can give the administration and board of trustees all they can handle.
Now, some have interpreted this business at Harvard as yet another battle in the culture wars, that hoary phrase. Whether Mr. Summers is an incompetent or a brusque breath of fresh air is not really the point. Conservatives think Mr. Summers is disliked by his faculty because he exhibits the speech and the attitude of a neo-con. There is no real free speech at the university these days, their argument continues, unless one accepts all liberal left assumptions about the world. The attempts to oust Mr. Summers proves their case. Liberals bristle at this, claiming that Mr. Summers lacks leadership skills, is a difficult personality and exercises poor judgment.
Now, it cannot be denied that there is a liberal or leftward bias among faculty at most prestigious colleges and universities. This bias, often unnoticed because it is assumed to be a self-evident sane view of the world — rather like believing that the sun rises in the east — can have something of a stifling effect on the dimensions of academic dialogue. There are clearly certain things that cannot be said without the speaker bringing down waterfalls of execration. I know what most of my colleagues want to hear. But then again Mr. Summers may be an incompetent who should be fired regardless of whether he is politically incorrect.
As for my own views of the matter: first, I don’t work at Harvard, so I don’t have to have a view. Second, I learned when I was a kid to be enough of a conservative to every liberal and enough of liberal to every conservative to put people in the quandary of whether they should court me madly as a convert or distrust me as traitor. I take my lessons from baseball: be a good pitcher and give the batter what he wants but not quite in the way he is expecting to get it. There is no other way to live.
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Never mind that George W Bush, his entire oil-swilling family and many Republicans are completely and totally in the pocket of this “ugly and tyrannical regime.” This phony outrage on the part of Republicans is a joke and their hypocrisy never ceases.
Comment by Angie — February 15, 2006 @ 12:24 pm
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In the same speech Mr. Gore also criticized Iran for its nuclear program and corruption. The former Vice President can defend his own words, successfully or not, to the American people if given a chance. He can be invited by Tim Russert to NBC’s Meet the Press or by George Stephanopolus to ABC’s This Week to explain himself.
As Samuel Johnson said, (false) Patriotism can be used as the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Comment by Deinde Alade — February 15, 2006 @ 12:48 pm
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I find it troubling that the Main Stream Media has ignored Sheik Al’s comments but rise in indignation about a hunting accident. They have muzzeled themselves about cartoons but publish degrading Christian pictures as art. Where is the outrage and or concern about freedoms given away for fear of offending one relegious minority?
Comment by John B. — February 15, 2006 @ 12:48 pm
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Just to be sure that I understand correctly: It is perfectly acceptable for Republicans like Tom DeLay to travel to Europe and the Middle East and publicly criticize the Bush Administration’s policy for Israel, which he and others have done. It is not acceptable, however, for Democrats to criticize Bush Administration policies at home or abroad because it undermines the U.S. in a time of war. The double standard is almost as mind-boggling as the number of Americans who buy into the blatent attempts to distract the public from the truth.
Comment by allen — February 15, 2006 @ 12:49 pm
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Well at least there is some recognition by (some) Republican pundits that Saudi Arabia is an “ugly and tyrannical regime.” So, why does this administration still behave as their lap dog? Of course we know, it’s just a rhetorical question. It is high time the democrats speak up without fear and tell it as it is: The emperor has no clothes. By now, it should be crystal clear this administration is not made of patriots but profiteers.
We are at a war of Bush’s choosing. And just follow the money trail and you’ll see who’s benefiting from all this. I’ll vote for Sheik Al-Gore over any of these clowns, any day!
Comment by Ali E. — February 15, 2006 @ 1:13 pm
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Who paid for Al’s speech? What plans do the Democrats have to cure all of the supposed ills they pin on W? How many people did Sheik Al know at the WTC on 11 September?
Comment by John B. — February 15, 2006 @ 1:29 pm
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The right will use any excuse they can find to criticize Gore. It is important to devalue him politically because they know the public still sees him as the candidate whose presidency was stolen in a very close race by a Supreme Court divided along party lines.
The other issue here is the War on Terrorism. When does this war end? Does anyone think terrorism will ever go away completely? So we will be at war forever. In this state of war the government will feel free to discard the Constitution and claim it is necessary in a time of war. Torture and the lack of due process are only the most visible signs of the “Big Brother” mentality that absolute power breeds. Any question or expressed doubt about their use of this power is met with accusations of disloyalty or worse.
The truth is the truth where ever it is spoken.
Comment by Stringband — February 15, 2006 @ 1:36 pm
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It seems impossible that the Republicans could come up with a more incompetent and corrupt president than Warren G. Harding, but Harding looks like Teddy Roosevelt by comparison to George Bush! Teapot Dome
will look like a minor incident by comparison with mendacity of W. Gore is more than fair given the completely corrupt Bush “chicken-hawk” gang.
Comment by Dennis Johnston — February 15, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
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I heard the rant of a right-wing radio talk show host goofy about Gore’s remarks in Saudi Arabia. I thought surely that he was being misquoted so I scoured the (online) pages of the Good Grey NYT for a less biased report or version. Sadly, perhaps through my own ineptitude, I couldn’t find the story there or on MSN or MSNBC.
Comment by Irwin Brown — February 15, 2006 @ 1:58 pm
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This highlights one of the major problems with blog opinion. People feel relatively anonymous, post whatever pops into their head, and need to resort to hyperbole to get any attention. It inevitably leads to the type of glib “outrage” noted above. These reaction are far from genuine, and show how group blogging in the wrong hands turns into a mindless game of partisan one-up-manship. The blogosphere at its worst.
By the way, how often has anyone heard somebody from the Bush administration publicly criticize the Saudis? Democrats have been a lot more vocal about criticizing the Saudis. The Republicans are the ones holding hands with the Saudi Wahhabis (literally as well as figuratively).
Comment by A.S. — February 15, 2006 @ 2:09 pm
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The Republicans here are desparate to deflect the attention from the failed policies they have to defend. Massive redistibution of wealth to the upper class, the destruction of our social safety net by placing a debt bomb in our budget so we can’t afford social programs, the give aways to the oil and pharmicutial, and all other, as well as lieing, breaking the law with illegal wiretaps, provoking a war that costs billions, and dirtying our countries honor and good will around the world. Gore didn’t say enough, or loud enough. Bush is a misguided enemy of our government, and seeks to destroy it.
Comment by Steve Spitsnogle — February 15, 2006 @ 2:13 pm
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So why has this speech not appeared in any way in the news part of the Times? I’ve searched the name “Gore” several times and no mention. Not in the AP stories, not in the news section, not in any opinion piece. It’s as if the NYT has scrubbed this sad piece of shamefulness from the paper of record. To what end?
The only place it’s mentioned at all is behind the screen of TimesSelect. I guess Gore’s comments weren’t fit to print.
Of course that’s usually the case, but usually his comments are printed.
Comment by hambone_mcgoo — February 15, 2006 @ 2:13 pm
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I don’t understand why TigerHawk believes Gore’s remarks “undermined” the U.S. At the very least, his remarks demonstrate to his Arab audience that there is active dissent in our country, which prides itself on tolerance for active dissent. More likely, his criticism of the treatment of Arab detainess will be received as an apology which will improve our relationship with the Arab community and improve stability everywhere. I can’t think of a single instance in American history when blind loyalty to an unpopular presidential administration has improved international relations.
I also don’t understand why TigerHawk refers to Bush’s number one business partner and ally in the Middle East as an oppressor. A huge chunk of our tax dollars go towards insuring that the Saudi monarchy is kept safe to continue doing business with Mr. Bush and U.S. oil companies.
Comment by William H. Payne — February 15, 2006 @ 2:38 pm
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Gore has shown himself in recent years to be a brave, intelligent and yes, at times, passionate critic of the current administration’s foreign policies. He has done so with rigor and dignity. He is also focusing a necessary spotlight on the imminent catastrophe that global warming will bring, especially if US energy policies are allowed to continue unchecked.
I applaud his efforts to speak the truth.
Comment by Amy V. — February 15, 2006 @ 2:54 pm
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Another conservative that says that it doesn’t matter what we do here because it isn’t as bad as what they do there. Does anyone see how that is disloyalty to the constitution and the country? How the practices they support debase and degrade our country so that in the end we won’t stand for anything but realpolitik and oil profits.
I am additionally sick of the entire “don’t criticize the government during wartime.” It looks as though we may never NOT be in wartime again. If you want to see how crazy the people that use that logic are ask them if we could have won in Vietnam if not for all the people “undermining the effort” and “giving comfort to the enemy.” Then ask them if Joseph McCarthy was an upright American.
Now is the time to stop all of the un-American practices, including the squelching of dissent, and now is the time to criticize everything about not only our government, but our entire way of life, because if we’re only fighting for something we don’t actually stand by when it is inconvenient to what our greed or prejudice drives us towards then that isn’t enough to give us the spirit we’ll need to succeed, or even to survive.
How about this for a change: if you believe that people shouldn’t question their government when their government lies to them, spies on them, tortures and murders them, tortures and murders ANYONE ANYWHERE, and especially that they shouldn’t hold them accountable for getting them into an illegal war principally because the illegal war is STILL GOING ON (and failing miserably, sorry if stating that indisputable fact prolongs the war and gives comfort to the enemy), then please go spring Saddam Hussein from jail and start a new country with him because you’re in the wrong one.
America’s spirit comes from the spirit of its people, and these illegal, inhuman and evil actions are undermining the basis of that spirit. Without it we stand for nothing, we are just another country, and our days are numbered. You can see it in the “passivity” that resulted in Katrina, but moreso you can see it in the passivity of the people that find less and less reason to care about whether this decay is happening. Because without the constitution and the bill of rights, and without even the belief of righteousness (not to mention the real thing) we’re just a country of malls and consumers tearing through the planet’s resources several times faster than anyone else and living on land we took through genocide. That’s not going to be enough. If America isn’t “Good” then it will be a country without a soul, descend into nihilism, and, mirroring the saying in the trailer for that Mel Gibson movie: destroy ourselves from within before any terrorist has to. If that happens, it won’t be the people with the printing presses or the people speaking out that are to blame, it will be the people that silence them.
Comment by Craig H. — February 15, 2006 @ 3:34 pm
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If anyone is guilty of “supreme disloyalty”, it is first and foremost the perpetrators of the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere — they betrayed the human rights, freedoms and the humane treatment of prisoners that the US has stood for until now. They are the ones who let our country down in the worst possible way. I applaud Gore for his remarks — it is important for the Arab world to know that there are decent Americans who are shocked and outraged at what was done in our name, and are not afraid to say it.
Comment by Art T — February 15, 2006 @ 3:53 pm
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Criticism of the Bush administration is a threat to our security and undermines the troops. The best response to such criticism is, of course, an ad hominem attack against the critic (see Swiftboat inter alia).
Gore’s haunting rhetorial question remains — “How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through Sadaam Hussein’s torture chambers?” I’d like to see how the W’s ilk answers that in 2008!
Comment by Joshua G — February 15, 2006 @ 4:31 pm
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Bush had Saudi members of the Bin Laden family secretly flown out of NYC on 9/12/01 when all other flights were grounded. He has sold US foreign policy to wealthy oil nations. His failed policy in the Mid East. His shaping policy and military action in Iraq to suit the interests of the energy industry over that of American security is treasonous. Hard right bloggers making an issue of what Gore is doing as a private citizen is a distration from the real issues, impeachable issues, that are currently plaguing the White House. Every time people talk about Katrina, the economy or Iraq expect someone to shout “Look, a covy of quail!”
Comment by J Winkleman — February 15, 2006 @ 4:56 pm
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I score the responses so far as Gore 16, Bush 2.
I have a lot of empathy (Laura’s request) for Mr. Bush. Neither Bush nor any of his cronies and flacks can do anything right.
It’s all coming out. Gore’s criticism was mild compared to what Republicans are saying.
I would enjoy seeing and hearing the outraged defenders of loyalty in wartime present their candid evaluations of Republican critics of the failing Bush mob.
Comment by Realist — February 15, 2006 @ 5:23 pm
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Could someone please explain what war we are “at?” Who are we at war with? It isn’t Iraq — that mission was accomplished years ago. We run the country now, right? Ditto the Taliban and Afghanistan. I keep reading the phrase “in a time of war.” But Congress never declared war against Iraq, and we are merely occupiers in that country fighting a tiny band of insurgents, right? And, unless I’m mistaken, we can’t really be at war with a gang of crazed, well-armed rabble-rousers, can we? And surely people can’t be referring to the “war on terrorism,” can they? If that’s the case, we will be “in a time of war” for the rest of time. So if that’s what people are talking about, that’s just silly and stupid. BTW, is Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld going to tell us when we are no longer “at war” so we can begin criticizing the administration without being called unpatriotic or enemy sympathizers? That would really be helpful, especially for those of us who aren’t at all sure what war we’re in. But, in the meantime, help me — what war is it that everyone keeps referring to?
Comment by Craig C. — February 15, 2006 @ 5:29 pm
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If the right-wing extremists at Fox News expressed a tiny shred of outrage at the anti-American abuses of power of the Bush administration, including the disgraceful treatment of American citizens of Arab descent, as the outrage at those who speak up for America’s values and traditions, such as Al Gore in this speech, I would try to listen to their arguments. Al Gore presided over the Senate that voted to steal the election from him, and ruled protests that supported him out of order, in a gracious gesture towards national unity. This deference has been rewarded by continued insults by those who represent an extreme fringe, albeit a vocal one that owns TV and radio networks.
Do you think the man who was ridiculed as an obsessive policy wonk by the right during the 2000 election would have taken the month of August 2001 as a holiday while threats of an attack were growing?
Gore’s obsessiveness might well have prevented the 9/11 attacks, much as the LA airport/Millennium terrorist attack had been thwarted by the Clinton administration attention to it, but he is too much of a gentleman to point that out.
Comment by Lynn — February 15, 2006 @ 5:47 pm
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Are these jokers expecting people to take them seriously? We get “supreme disloyalty” because a U.S. public figure–who actually won an election that was later stolen by neo-fascists–gives his opinion in a foreign country? If we think about why we are “in time of war” in Iraq, should we worry about the context of Al Gore’s comments? I think some of them hit the mark. Today, that matter more than where he said them. I’m ashamed of our government and many of its actions, too.
Comment by N. Bell of N.CA. — February 15, 2006 @ 5:52 pm
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Anyone who dares criticize Bush and his adminsitration is considered to be a liberal by his supporters, who claim to be conservative but are really part of a personality cult. It doesn’t matter if you are an old style Republican conservative who believes in limited government. If you dare criticize Bush for a Federal budget that is out of control, for the slow response to Katrina, for the mismanaged war in Iraq or for the intrusion of big government into the personal lives of people in the form of warrantless domestic spying, you will be labeled a “liberal” as if that word is obscene.
Comment by Richard T. — February 15, 2006 @ 9:36 pm
“The Black National Anthem”
Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring.
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise,
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast’ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee,
Shadowed beneath thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgement upon anything new.
Wine is sunlight, held together by water.
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
What greater stupidity can be imagined than that of calling jewels, silver, and gold ‘precious,’ and earth and soil ‘base’? People who do this ought to remember that if there were as great a scarcity of soil as of jewels or precious metals, there would not be a prince who would not spend a bushel of diamonds and rubies and a cartload of gold just to have enough earth to plant a jasmine in a little pot, or to sow an orange seed and watch it sprout, grow, and produce its handsome leaves, its fragrant flowers, and fine fruit. It is scarcity and plenty that make the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water.
Doubt is the father of invention.
But where the senses fail us, reason must step in.
By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.
Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant, either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin ofcommonwealths and the subversion of the state.
~Galileo Galilei
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. ~Mark Twain
Liberty, freedom and the inherent right of self-determination will never be granted unto the oppressed by the oppressor. The victims of exploitation and tyranny must always take the right of democratic self-rule from those who deny it from them.
Early American radical and revolutionary Patrick Henry famously summed up the downtrodden battle cry-”Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
This patriotic declaration of humankind’s inherent right to self-determination is a primary attribute of the truly courageous souls.
No organization personified this attitude and its subsequent mission more than the Niagara Movement.
Founded in 1905 by W.E.B. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter and 30 others in a Buffalo church, this organization rejected the accommodation policies of Booker T. Washington.
Dubois summed up this group’s mission: “We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now…We are men! We want to be treated as men. And we shall win.” Du Bois and his fellows were obvious men of courage, undaunted in their determination for equality. Many women also joined the organization, which also advocated full suffrage for women.
The general public often characterized the Niagara movement as “too radical” to achieve its ends. This accusation was well deserved because the chief political tool of the Niagara Movement was to use unconventional means, such as strikes and protests, to fight for their cause.
Caucasians and accommodationists such as Booker T. Washington said the Niagara Movement would only continue to pour gas on to the fire of racial tension. Some still accuse men like Dubois and Trotter of using fear tactics to achieve equality. They argued that the best way for African Americans to achieve equality was to wait and use the proper channels of participation.
But really, how could African Americans use “the proper channels of participation” if they were denied those channels? The real question we must ask when we are confronted with civil disobedience is “what would I do if I were in their situation.”
Say, for example, U students were severely persecuted just for the fact that we go to the U. We were beaten, lynched, raped, killed, bombed, shot at and denied jobs, education and general human dignity. What would you do?
I like to think that most U students would have the attitude of Patrick Henry. Certainly, unconventional political participation is necessary to achieve equal rights for those who are denied them.
The Niagara Movement, the precursor for the NAACP, was a necessary movement organized by true American patriots. The U.S. government officially honors and recognizes slaveholders such as George Washington and genocidal tyrants like Columbus, but refuses to recognize people like Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. It’s obvious to see whose history the government respects.
American history ought to tell the story of the Niagara Movement and those early black patriots. America would not be the land it is today without their sacrifices and persistence.
Think of how our society could be if we hearkened to the principles of the Niagara Movement. We would cease to be the land of inequality and warmongering and start to live out the ideal of the Declaration of Independence-that all men and women are created equal.
Bvenitta’s grandmother told her Bill Williams got in “a spot of trouble and had to lay low” but didn’t share details.
…a black mob lynched a white man for the alleged criminal assault of a black girl who died afterward, Bvenitta said. She learned Bill Williams was sentenced to be hanged in 1889 for his part in the death of the white man but he was pardoned because of a public outcry.
Through her research of newspaper stories and court records, Bvenitta learned the white man who was arrested for the rape of the black girl was going to be released for lack of evidence. That’s when Bill Williams and other black men decided to hang the white man, she said.
Rev. Robert Woods - Robert Aikens&#
