Slog News & Arts

Line Out

Music & Nightlife

History Category Archive

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Crumbling in Theory

posted by on July 11 at 11:16 AM

From a letter Goethe wrote to Lavater:

Like a big city, our moral and political world is undermined with subterranean roads, cellars, and sewers, about whose connection and dwelling conditions nobody seems to reflect or think; but those who know something of this will find it much more understandable if here or there, now or then, the earth crumbles away, smoke rises out of a crack, and strange voices are heard.

In this passage we see the seed of what the 20th century will recognize as Walter Benjamin's way of thinking and style of writing. This is it completely.

The last paragraph of Oparin's Origin of Life:

What we do not know today we shall know tomorrow. A whole army of biologists is studying the structure and organization of living matter, while a no less number of physicists and chemists are daily reveling to us new properties of dead things. Like two parties of workers boring from the opposite ends of a tunnel, they are working towards the same goal. The work has already gone a long way and very, very soon the last barriers between the living and the dead will crumble under the attack of patient work and powerful scientific thought.

When discussing the best literature produced in Russia's Silver Age (from Leonid Andreyev's peak to Isaac Babel's disappearance), we must not exclude Oparin's short scientific study of the possible origin of life. It's impossible to separate the spirit and beauty of this text from, say, Bely's Kotik Letaev .

From Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i' the ground so fast?”) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such a time, when the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away, and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted. This work of the spirit to know itself, this activity to find itself, is the life of the spirit and the spirit itself.

Hegel's "Final Result" is something that must be read at least once week. Writing rarely gets better (or muscular) than the conclusion to his lecture on the history of philosophy. It reads like an owl flying above the massive sprawl of a civilization in its magic hour, the hour of dusk.


Tuesday, July 10, 2007

The Nixon High

posted by on July 10 at 9:06 AM

Bush's disapproval rating hits historic milestone: He matches the disapproval rating hit by Nixon, 66% disapproval, right before Nixon resigned.

Bush's lowest approval rating, 29% approval, hasn't quite hit the all-time Presidential low hit by Harry Truman (who knew?)—22%.

From Open Left.


Friday, July 6, 2007

The Flamboyant Symbol of Masculinity

posted by on July 6 at 3:56 PM

The first two paragraphs of a lovely review of AK47: the Story of the People's Gun:

At the beginning of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), in which Sylvester Stallone takes on the entire North Vietnamese army with an AK47, an American colleague regards the weapon with scepticism: "A beat-to-shit AK? Every 12-year-old in 'Nam's got one of those." Rambo looks pleased, slowly nods his meaty head, and laboriously masticates his reply: "Exactly."

Unlike practically everything else in the film, Rambo's choice of gun is historically accurate. American soldiers in Vietnam were equipped with the M16 rifle, invented by Eugene Stoner, which tended to malfunction if it was even sneezed on. When they came across the Chinese AKs of the fallen Viet Cong, they discovered that they still worked, even if they had been lying in the rain for weeks, so at every opportunity they abandoned their modern capitalist gun for a 25-year-old socialist one.

RamboIIIGun300.jpg

Power to the people! Our guns or our votes! When they knock down your front door, how are you going to come? With your hands on your head or the trigger of your gun?

farc-woman2.jpg


Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Stasi Smell Museum

posted by on July 3 at 11:04 AM

The inevitable conclusion of the totalitarian police state:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many astounding revelations came to light about the Stasi, the East German secret police. One of the more bizarre activities the Stasi was found to have engaged in was the collection of Geruchsproben — smell samples — for the benefit of the East German smell hounds. The odors, collected during interrogations using a perforated metal “smell sample chair” or by breaking into people’s homes and stealing their dirty underwear, were stored in small glass jars. Many of the remaining East German smell jars are on display at the Stasi Museum in Berlin. They are also described in Stasiland by Anna Funder.

Via BoingBoing.


Monday, June 25, 2007

Re: The Birth of the Anatomy Theater

posted by on June 25 at 12:35 PM

This

made me want to become a scientist.

The Birth of the Anatomy Theater

posted by on June 25 at 10:33 AM

What does this 17th century etching of an anatomy theater show us?
Z1anatomy.leiden.jpg That in the way it's almost impossible to separate the history of religion from the history of science, it's almost impossible to separate the history of science from the history of entertainment.If you happened to be in Europe in the 17th century, and also happened to be well-to-do, bored, and looking for something to do with your free time, one place to go was the anatomy theater. There you could meet friends, chat about how things are going in the world, and exchange gossip as the body of a dead prisoner is dissected and the cause of science is advanced.

Here's another etching.
hogarthanatomytheatre.jpg Indeed, it's far better to be a living dog than a dead man.


Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Happy Juneteenth!

posted by on June 19 at 5:22 PM

Don't know what Juneteenth is? Juneteenth.org provides a little background:


Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All or none of them could be true. For whatever the reason, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.

Texas was the last state to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was the first to make Juneteenth an official holiday, on January 1, 1980.

I couldn't find any info about Seattle-area celebrations on the Juneteenth web site, but if you know of any, leave 'em in the comments.

A Quick Thought

posted by on June 19 at 2:07 PM

What is it that makes Muslims more passionate than Christians? No book, or novel, that contradicted Christian beliefs or morality could inspire such anger, such outrage. Here is a theory. It possibly has to do with the fact that Christianity, born and developed in the Roman world, is all about the end, the last days, revelation, apocalypse. Jesus even hinted that the end was just around the corner, and the fame of many early Christian prophets was made on their fevered claims that the world, meaning Rome, was about to be obliterated. In short, Christianity is about waiting--waiting for something big to happen, waiting for God.

Now let's look at Islam. One of its defining features is that it sees itself as the end of a spiritual development. Muslims are more Hegelian than even Hegel. God, the world spirit, first revealed himself to the Jews, then the Christians, and finally them, the Muslims. What this means: Islam is the end of history. Fukuyama thought history ended with fall of the Soviet Union and the final victory of liberal democracy. Hegel thought history ended with him, the mind (or spiritual reflection) of Napoleon. With Islam, it is itself the result of a world process: it's a faith that's completed and complete. This sense of completeness might be the source of its most heated passions. Christians cant be so passionate because all they are doing is waiting around for something big to happen. (Christian fundamentalism is essentially an effort to give Christians something to do in the world they are waiting in.) No waiting for Muslims. What happens now, what happens in this world, is finally happening.


Friday, June 15, 2007

Rock, Paper, Revolutionary

posted by on June 15 at 3:02 PM

When I moved to Virginia for college (I'd grown up here in Seattle), I heard people use the term "rochambeau" for the game "rock, paper, scissors" for the first time.

I had always thought that "ro" maybe stood for "rock," and "cham"... well, my theory trailed off here, but who knows, maybe the French use champagne in place of scissors? (Champage would get the paper wet, a rock would smash the bottle?)

But today in the New York Times, there's an article about descendants of the historical Rochambeau, a Frenchman who helped out with the American Revolution. (He's better known as Maréchal, after the field marshal title given him by Louis XVI after he returned from America.)

Is this where the name of the game comes from? The OED is no help, it doesn't even have an entry for "rochambeau." I shall have to investigate further.

Marechal-de-rochambeau.jpg


Thursday, June 14, 2007

The Tree of Life

posted by on June 14 at 12:34 PM

This image of a very big tree can be found on the comment section of Burial's Myspace music account.
l_94b797a59c61305c29a9751b0a6ccef9.jpg The tree is for pagans what the cross is for Christians. The tree is a complex life system; the cross is a simple death machine. In the period that saw the replacement of life worship with death worship in much of Europe, the Middle Ages, a popular method of converting German pagans to Christianity was to chop down their huge and sacred trees. In Willibald's Life Of St Boniface--an account of the Anglo-Saxon missionary, Boniface, who killed his earthy Germanic name and adopted a dead Latin one--you will find this favorable description of his felling of a huge pagan tree, The Oak of Thunor, in AD 723:

Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), [Boniface] cut the first notch. But when he had made a superficial cut, suddenly, the oak's vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above crashed to the ground, shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God... the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord.

Boniface did not stop with just cutting down the tree; he used the dead oak to build a chapel, which he dedicated to Saint Peter.

From my failed project, The Big Trees of Seattle:

Big trees amaze me. They rise up into the open sky and spread out, covering a wide area of city life. During the summer, when big trees have all of their leaves, each is a total universe—a self-contained, self-governed, self-determined society of critters, birds, fungi, and tiny insects that go about their tiny business in the shallow and deep grooves of the bark. Cutting down a big tree is the same as wiping out a whole city, which is why a powerful chain saw is to a big tree what Hurricane Katrina was to New Orleans. In an instant, an entire economy is gone, and exposed insects are stranded, and stunned birds go crazy in the massive absence of what was just there—a big tree.



Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Wow. People, THEY DUMB.

posted by on June 13 at 10:52 AM

The magic question: "When Did 9-11 happen?"
The YouTube tags read, 'american, 9 11, terrorist, terror, usa, us, twin towers, jihad, dumb americans'...


Tuesday, June 12, 2007

From the Annals of Medicine

posted by on June 12 at 10:33 AM

From Wikipedia:

[Nitrous oxide] was used on 30 September 1846 for painless tooth extraction upon patient Eben Frost by American dentist William Thomas Green Morton. Horace Wells Connecticut, a travelling dentist, had demonstrated it the previous year 1845, at Massachusetts General Hospital. Wells made a mistake, in choosing a particularly sturdy male volunteer, and the patient suffered considerable pain. This lost the colourful Wells any support. Later the patient told Wells he screamed in shock and not in pain.

From Trivia Library:

In December of 1846, Wells printed the results of his studies in anesthesia, but his ostracism by the Boston medical profession had left him an emotionally crippled man. He continued to experiment--on himself--with a variety of gases, including nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform. These vapor inhalations strongly affected him emotionally, and he deteriorated mentally. In New York City in 1848, he sniffed chloroform, went berserk, and threw acid on the clothes of a prostitute. Jailed for this offense, Wells committed suicide by slashing an artery in his leg.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Today in Anaesthesia

posted by on June 11 at 2:39 PM



Friday, June 8, 2007

Today in History

posted by on June 8 at 4:33 PM

On June 8, 632, Muhammad (picture unavailable) died in the city of Medina, exactly 62 years to the day that the religion of Islam was founded in Mecca (according to Scopes "Any Day In History"), and 1297 years before the birth of Jerry Stiller.


Thursday, June 7, 2007

Let There Be Riots

posted by on June 7 at 11:45 AM

scaled.paris.jpg

If you haven't heard, asshole heiress Paris Hilton was released from prison this morning, "reassigned" to 40 days home detention.

Clearly, this is a mile-high mountain of bullshit. The official reason for Hilton's early release: unspecified "medical issues," which were presumably too great for the prison infirmary to handle but not so serious that Hilton required medical attention beyond what was available at her West Hollywood home, where she was taken upon her release.

Entertainment Tonight reports "Sources close to the Hilton family tell ET the medical reason was actually a rash she developed on her body." (According to People, Paris was having trouble behind bars. "She cries all day," a source told the magazine. "She looks unwashed, she has no makeup and her hair is tangled. She cried audibly through the first two nights.")

Understandably, people are pissed. Count me in.

I wonder how Martha Stewart feels about all this...


Friday, May 25, 2007

Star Wars Turns 30, Begins Mid-life Crisis

posted by on May 25 at 12:52 PM

Bradley Steinbacher just asked me if I was "a Star Wars nerd." I prefer the term aficionado. As such, it is my duty to inform/remind you that thirty years ago today, Star Wars was released in theaters in all of its digitally unmolested glory.

Since that fateful day in 1977, Star Wars has become a cultural phenomenon. Jedi was included as a religion on the 2001 UK census form, Reagan's crazy space laser program shared a name with the series and uh, Ghyslain Raza got super famous on the internet with his wicked lightsaber skills:

Despite the undeniable cultural impact of the series, no one in our office would admit to loving Star Wars. Stranger film editor Annie Wagner says she is "totally indifferent to Star Wars" and Josh Feit was only able to confirm that "he saw it" on its initial release but threatened to kill me if I revealed his age at the time. By my calculations, he was 55.

Finally, enjoy this vintage Nightline clip where film critic John Simon outs himself as the world's biggest asshole:

I'll be watching SW while doing bong rips and making Wookie noises at my cats all weekend. Feel free to stop by.


Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Today in Drowned Dudes

posted by on May 22 at 1:52 PM

John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man to sink with the Titanic.

He made millions investing in real estate, wrote a science-fiction novel (A Journey in Other Worlds, 1894, about life on Saturn in the year 2000), invented things (a bicycle brake, a "vibratory disintegrator" which has something to do with gas and peat moss), loaned his yacht to the U.S. government during the Spanish-American war, and owned a dog named Kitty.

astor.jpg

From Wikipedia:

His divorce, followed by his marriage [September 11, 1911] to the much younger Madeleine Talmadge Force, caused a scandal. The couple planned an extended honeymoon abroad to wait out the controversy, but cut it short because of Madeleine Astor's pregnancy. They booked passage home on the Titanic.
Many exaggerated and unsubstantiated accounts about what Astor did the night Titanic sank appeared in newspapers and books after the disaster. There was a story that he was the one who opened Titanic's kennel and released the dogs; another story has Astor putting a woman's hat on a boy to make sure he was able to get into a lifeboat. Another legend states that after the ship hit the iceberg, he quipped, "I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous."

Tomorrow in drowned dudes: Yusuf Ismail, "the Terrible Turk," a wrestler who only lost one match in his life but drowned in a shipwreck 1898.

For Josh

posted by on May 22 at 12:02 PM

The Anne Frank photo gallery.

018.jpg

Via.


Friday, May 18, 2007

Fantasy and Reality

posted by on May 18 at 4:46 PM

doc3.jpg

bonniepicnic.jpg

9/11: Debunking the Debunkers

posted by on May 18 at 2:44 PM

What’s that mean? I don’t know, but it’s the name of a forum tonight at Town Hall. Lots of folks have their panties in a bunch about what actually happened on September 11, 2001. They think a Neo-con conspiracy may have been behind the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Are they correct? Are they insane? Are they paranoid delusional anti-authoritarian wing-nut crack heads? Like I said. I don’t know. However, I do know that when people suggest Americans might have had a hand in harming fellow citizens for political or financial gain and then covered it up—which we know has never happened before—seemingly sane folks lose their fucking minds.

Decide for yourself tonight at 7:30 p.m. when Dr. David Ray Griffin responds to critics of the so-called 9/11 truth movement. (Town Hall, 1119 8th Ave, doors at 6:30 p.m., $15 at the door.)


Tuesday, May 15, 2007

A Critically Ill Attorney General, a Late-Night Showdown in a Dark Hospital Room...

posted by on May 15 at 1:02 PM

The Grilling of Gonzales is bringing out some dramatic stories. From NYT:

On the night of March 10, 2004, a high-ranking Justice Department official rushed to a Washington hospital to prevent two White House aides from taking advantage of the critically ill Attorney General, John Ashcroft, the official testified today. One of those aides was Alberto R. Gonzales, who was then White House counsel and eventually succeeded Mr. Ashcroft as Attorney General.

Those aides wanted Ashcroft, who was "barely aware of his surroundings," to sign a renewal of a then-secret domestic surveillance program which he had opposed when he was well. The rushing "high-ranking Justice Department official" was James B. Comey, who had been appointed acting Attorney General while Ashcroft was in the hospital.

Comey said Gonzales and the other goon, Andrew H. Card, were in the darkened hospital room, trying to talk Ashcroft into signing the renewal...

“And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me,” Mr. Comey went on: He raised his head from the pillow, reiterated his objections to the program, then lay back down, pointing to Mr. Comey as the attorney general during his illness... Mr. Ashcroft had such serious reservations about the program that he considered resigning then, Mr. Comey testified. Instead, he stayed on until November 2004.

Cloak and motherfucking dagger.

History's on Our Side

posted by on May 15 at 7:41 AM

I re-read one of my favorite books this weekend, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89, a 1956 standard by brainiac U.S. historian Edmund S. Morgan.

There's a lull in the third-to-last chapter—between the end of the war and the Constitutional Convention. But then it's a page-turner until the very last paragraph. And what a paragraph! Check this, the last three sentences:

The Constitution was a bulwark to protect what they had gained, but it was also a base from which to continue the exploration. The bulwark still stands, and in spite of halts and pauses along the way the exploration still goes on. As long as any man remains less free than another, it cannot hardly cease.

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

The Original

posted by on May 9 at 10:35 AM

We often forget that the spacing of words was not something that came naturally to us but had to be invented. Before spacing, and punctuation, this was how you read a text in Latin:

GODHAVINGBECOMENATUREHADEXTENDED
HIMSELFINTOTHEMAGNIGICENCEAND
THEMUTECYCLEOFOFFORMATIONSBECOMESCONCSCIOUS
OFTHEEXPANSION
OFTHELOSTPUNCTUALITYANDGROWN ANGRYABOUTIT
THEANGERISTHISSHAPING
THISGATHERINGINTOTHEEMPTY
POINTHEFINDSHIMSELFASSUCHANDESSENSE ISPOUREDOUTINTOUNQUITERESTLESSETERNITY
WHERETHEREISNOPRESENTONLYAWILDGOING
OUTWARDALWAYSBECOMEINGAS
FASTASTRANCENDED
An excruciating thicket of thought and letters.


Tuesday, May 8, 2007

The Second Week in May

posted by on May 8 at 3:00 AM

nash_film-lede-1-1.jpg

As the second week in May 1934 began, Bonnie and Clyde were making themselves at home in Bienville Parish. They met with Henry Methvin's brothers and other kinfolks at out-of-the-way places in the woods for picnics and frequented their houses for meals. As for their own accommodations, they were sick and tired of living in their car, so they looked for a real house. About ten miles south of Gibsland, near Henry's parents , was a house back in the woods that belonged to a man named Otis Cole. It was locally known as the "John Cole Place" for Otis's father, who had built it. The house had been empty for several years but was still very livable. One evening, Ivy Methvin went to see Otis Cole at the small store he ran. They talked about the abandoned house, and then Methvin left. Some people say that Bonnie and Clyde actually made arrangements to buy the place, while others say they just moved in. Whatever the truth , Bonnie and Clyde began to be seen fairly regularly around the area, Clyde posing with Henry's father and brother Terrell as a logger.

... Henry's older brother Terrell and his wife Emma met with them regularly at the picnics in the woods and had Bonnie and Clyde in their home for dinner once. On this occasion the outlaws admired a small bed. Terrell and Emma had two young daughters, and their grandfather had made the girls their own bed out of native wood. Bonnie and Clyde lay down on the bed and told everybody that it was the first time they had slept in months. ...

There were several stories circulating about the new young couple in the old Cole House, but one the most interesting to the ladies was the story that Bonnie was pregnant. By this time, it was said to be common knowledge among the Methvin women and neighbor ladies that Bonnie was "expecting." —From Ch. 36, Bonnie and Clyde a Twenty-First-Century Update, by James R. Knight

102_bonnie_clyde.jpg


Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Tin Soldiers and Nixon...

posted by on May 2 at 5:15 PM

I think my colleagues are a little stunned that I haven't Slogged this yet.

(Two co-workers zapped it to me yesterday.)

I guess I'm trying to shake my rep here at the office as a Eugene McCarthy volunteer.

But I'm posting it because I do have a question.

It's a tape (recently discovered) of the Kent State shooting. The tape sacks the longstanding claim by the National Guard that they never gave orders to shoot. On the tape you can hear these words: "Right here. Get set. Point. Fire." Then there's a chilling stampede of gunfire.

My question, though, is this: What does the woman yell at the beginning of the tape? Is it: "Fuckers!" ?

Cakewalk Parade

posted by on May 2 at 3:00 PM

Via Howard Kurtz:

On the anniversary of "Mission Accomplished," Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Dick Polman compiled some telling quotations from a bygone era.

Neoconservative leader Bill Kristol, April 1, 2003: “There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni….There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”

David Asman, Fox News, April 9, 2003 (upon the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, where tight shots by the cameras masked the fact that the crowd barely filled one quarter of the plaza): “My goose bumps have never been higher than they are right now.”

Brit Hume, Fox News, same time: “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen.”

Dick Morris, Fox News, April 9, 2003: “Over the next couple of weeks, when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing…the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years.”

Fred Barnes, Fox News, April 10, 2003: “The war was the hard part….And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, April 19, 2003: “The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are upper West Side liberals, and a few people here in Washington.”

David Broder, The Washington Post, reacting to the events of May 1: “This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command.”

Columnist Robert Novak: “Could Joe Lieberman get into a jet pilot’s jump suit and look credible?”

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, same day: “I think it was time to say to the American people, the hostilities in Iraq have ended.”

Bush, speaking to the press, May 29, 2003: “We found the weapons of mass destruction,” claiming that two mobile labs “to build biological weapons” had been discovered. (This was false.) “For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.”


Thursday, April 26, 2007

Until there was Slog You Only Had God

posted by on April 26 at 10:45 AM

Today's is Slog's 2nd birthday. On April 26, 2005, with two lonely posts (and no comments threads?), we launched Slog.

As a result, time is now divided between pre-Slog and Slog.

Here's what we wrote on that first day.

Posted at 3:40 pm: Burn on Us?

and at 5:48 pm: permafrost

That's it.


Tuesday, April 24, 2007

I Love Sam Harris Too! Oh, Wait...

posted by on April 24 at 8:13 PM

Oh! OH! I thought you meant SAM HARRIS, 80's Star Search pseudo-phenom, whose vibrato could rattle windows underground on Mars and whose Judy Garland covers brought even her corpse to tears! Remember? Remember?

I don't.

Ladies and gentleman...the ORIGINAL American fucking Idol (and, uh, Liza)...

samliza2.jpg


What is he doing now, do you think? And what is his relationship with Jesus? I wonder...


Monday, April 23, 2007

Eternal Mammy

posted by on April 23 at 1:15 PM

Florida and James:
amos9495_0014.jpg
In the ’70s TV show Good Times Florida was played by Esther Rolle and James by John Amos; both were talented actors, and both loathed Jimmie Walker, the man who played J.J., Florida and Amos's eldest son. J.J. became the star of the show because he was a buffoon. The youngest child, Micheal, was a genius and progressive; the sister, Thelma, was practical and beautiful; the eldest son was an illiterate idiot. But the J.J. matter is for another post (I will one day post about meeting Jimmie Walker in a bar in Harare, Zimbabwe. He was in the country filming Going Bananas, and it was instantly evident to me and all the rest who were there that no line existed between the personality of Jimmie Walker and his stupid TV character J.J.)

What I want to point out for now is that in the picture John Amos ( James) is 34 and Esther Rolle (Florida) is 53. Meaning Esther is old enough to be John's mother, yet on Good Times they are husband and wife, not mother and son. Now, what does this mean? Here is my answer: The role Esther actually played had its essence in the eternal mammy; as for John, it was the "buck nigger"--remember the role John played in Roots, a recalcitrant African, Kunta Kinte, who was emasculated by an axe and broken by a whip.

When the producers of the show were presented with a script that imaged a married black couple, instead of drawing the characters directly from life, they drew them from myth. The myth of Uncle Tom married to the myth of mammy was not possible because Uncle Tom is asexual (how could they have kids?), and so the producers gave up and picked a buck as the one who fucked mammy and made all of these kids happen. The marriage, however, did not last long. The buck was out of the show after two seasons. The buck could not be domesticated (in real life and in the show) and so it was left to mammy to bring up the two smart kids and the one dumb kid.


Friday, April 13, 2007

Out of Africa

posted by on April 13 at 10:45 AM

Right here at the start I'm going to state that, hey, I don't really know what the hell I'm talking about. I'm not an expert on Africa--but I have been a regular reader of multiple newspapers over the last 25-or-so years. And over that quarter of a century I've been reading pretty much the same stories about Africa again and again--you know: regional war, grinding poverty, famine, habitat loss, endangered species in decline, AIDS, "Do They Know It's Christmas," Bono, etc.

Anyway... Thomas Friedman wrote a column about Africa in Wednesday's New York Times. (Can't link--it's behind the TimesSelect firewall.) He focused on Kenya and the impact that climate change is going to have on that long-suffering country. Kenya wasn't in great shape to begin with and climate change is already fucking with the weather there--in ways that are potentially devastating for humans and wildlife. The rainy seasons are changing as "worldwide precipitation" shifts "away from the equator and toward the poles."

Kenya also has to worry about deforestation and poaching, although poaching is now under better control. Kenya's forests have been reduced from 10 percent of the country's land-mass at the time of its independence in 1963 to 2 percent today, while in the same period its elephant population went from 170,000 to 30,000 and its rhino population went from 20,000 to around 500...

Climate change could worsen this.... Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of global CO2 emissions since 1900, the report noted, yet its 840 million people could suffer enormously from global-warming-induced droughts and floods and have the fewest resources to deal with them.

Sounds pretty grim. It makes a guy think that maybe buying RED t-shirts at the Gap and RED Nokia phones isn't enough to save Africa after all.

Friedman's column focused on the plight of wildlife and humans in Africa, and that struck me. When we talk about "saving Africa" we have two goals--goals that, when you pause to consider them for a moment, are in almost direct conflict. We want to save the wildlide--the elephants, the rhinos, the gorillas in the mist, and all the other endangered species on that continent. And what's wiping them all out? Habitat loss and poaching. Basically, humans--Africans--are wiping them out.

The population of Africa in 1900 was roughly 108 million. Today it's 840 million. If we're concerned about saving the elephants and the rhinos and apes then we need to recognize that one of Africa's chief problems is... well, all those Africans. It's the overpopulation, stupid.

But we want to save the Africans too--from AIDS, from genocide in Darfur, from batshitcrazy Robert Mugabe. And we should not only want to save Africans, we should do something about saving Africans. But saving Africans isn't in the best interests of all that African wildlife, our concurrent concern. They're almost mutually exclusive. So what do we do?

It seems to me that we can save Africans and Africa by... getting Africans the hell out of Africa.

Back to Thomas Friedman:

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just concluded that two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has come--in roughly equal parts--from the U.S. and Western Europe. These countries have the resources to deal with climate change and may even benefit from some warming.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article in April's Atlantic Monthly titled "Global Warming: Who Loses—and Who Wins?" (You have to be a subscriber to read the article on their website, but you can read letters about it here.) Guess what? We win--the northern hemisphere. Canada wins, parts of the United States wins (Alaska wins), northern Europe wins. Freakin' Siberia wins--that frozen wasteland may become the breadbasket of the world.

In a March column in The Nation on how the west is reacting to falling birth rates, Katha Pollit wrote...

If fears of population implosion result in paid parental leave, improved childcare and more support for mothers' careers, it won't be the first time a government has done the right thing for the wrong reason. But isn't it weird to promote population growth while we wring our hands over global warming, environmental damage, species loss and suburban sprawl? The United Nations projects that in 2050 the world's population will reach 9.2 billion...

Getting a better deal for mothers has been at the forefront of the feminist agenda for decades, although you'd never know it from the way the women's movement is always being accused of attacking women with kids. So it's ironic that what is finally driving at least some governments to act is the desire to boost fertility rates. The aim is to breed the next generation of workers--ethnically correct workers, too, not the troublesome immigrant kind.... [Why] not learn to live with [population decline]? Economically, the problem is a coming dearth of young workers to fund social security and care for an aging population. Yet while demographers fret about those unconceived second and third babies, every country on earth throws away plenty of children who are already here. Poor children, for example--why can't they grow up to be those missing skilled, educated people and productive workers? What about the children of France's Arab immigrants... The Gypsies of Eastern Europe... Vladimir Putin bemoans Russia's free-falling population, but babies are still being stashed in his country's appalling orphanages.... Instead of cajoling or bribing women into gestating the home-health attendants of the future, states should start treasuring the people--all the people--they have right now.

That includes immigrants.

Yes. We've got a birth-dearth in the west. The west has made a mess of the planet and the people of Africa in particular are going to suffer for it. And there are too many people in Africa, eating up habitat and poaching wild animals to survive. So why not... open the doors? Without a doubt tens if not hundreds of millions of Africans would welcome the opportunity to immigrate--legally, with dignity--to, say, Canada, Russia, the United States, Northern Europe. We shouldn't force anyone to leave Africa--um, of course not, never again--but it seems pretty clear that, given the opportunity, many millions of Africans would willingly leave Africa.

And that would be good for Africans, good for Africa, and good--good penance, good environmental policy--for us.


Wednesday, April 11, 2007

A Cloud of Words

posted by on April 11 at 2:26 PM

tag cloud.jpg

Just found this on this fascinating blog about the hows, whats, whys, and whatthefucks of online tagging. It may sound boring, but people creating their own taxonomies is pretty radical. You create the hierarchy or refuse to. You ascribe meaning or deny it. You shhh those rowdy kids in the corner or you join them. We're all librarians now.

And as for the Presidential speech tag cloud (what an ingenious visual metaphor, by the way), you can scroll through the years and watch the shifting patterns of light and shade, slavery and territory, war and economy, family and debt, strength and freedom. It's an almost-visceral experience that left me curiously moved.


Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The Shift

posted by on April 10 at 2:42 PM

Not the US but the EU is the terminal of history. Fukuyama:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojčve, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a 'post-historical' world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.
Even Hegel, the inventor of the philosophy of history, thought America would be the place where the end would happen.

Why the confusion and constant adjustments? The problem in all of this is the notion of the end itself. Fukuyama just has to let it go. The adjustments and modifications wont stop until he lets the idea go and comes up with a completely new one. One that begins by seeing there is no end in sight, no end to "the voiceless wailing,/No end to the withering of withered flowers,/To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,/To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage..." Not an end of anything but a constant addition to everything. Jean-Luc Nancy is right to speak of the restlessness of history, rather than its completion, its return home, its end.

Don Imus Meet Don's Teen Town.

posted by on April 10 at 8:09 AM

Don Imus's racist outburst about the Rutgers women's basketball team brings us right back to where we started:

In 1956, the North Alabama Citizens Council—after picketing an integrated concert bill at Birmingham's Municipal Auditorium starring the Platters, Bo Diddley, Clyde McPhatter, and Bill Haley & the Comets (!)—forced Birmingham to pass legislation instructing the venue, "not to book any shows, basketball games, or any other type of event that had mixed races in the personnel."

Although, for once, let's exculpate mid-20th Century Alabama. Last night, I read this excellent story about Bessemer, Alabama: In 1960, when Don's Teen Town announced they were canceling the evening's show because the Ku Klux Klan had threatened to assault that evening's entertainment—local black rock and roll disc jockey, Shelley Stewart— the all-white, teen audience overwhelmed the Klan contingent, beating them up and scaring them away.


Monday, April 9, 2007

Iran and Phenomenology

posted by on April 9 at 3:35 PM

Iran is not only enriching uranium but also Hegelian scholarship:

The Iranian Institute of Philosophy in Tehran will host an international conference on the 19th century German philosopher Hegel to commemorate the influential thinker's 200th birthday.

But we must not be alarmed by the call for this conference. It is a matter of common knowledge among Hegelian scholars that the section on natural religion in Phenomenology of Mind begins with the Zoroastrian idea of "God as light." So falling upon Persia, in the history of Hegel's world, is "the light of sunrise."


Thursday, April 5, 2007

Bad Intelligence?

posted by on April 5 at 10:30 PM

Or willfully distorted b.s.? This MUST. READ. article from the Washington Post reports on a declassified DoD report that shows that Saddam Hussein was never thought to be associated with Al Qaeda by anyone--except Douglas Feith and his Pentagon propaganda office.

The opening salvo:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released [today].

[...]

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

Flabbergasting enough up front--but on the off chance that you you can't get through the entire piece, here's the devastating closing graph:

[Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted [today] as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Race In America

posted by on April 4 at 1:50 PM

Indeed, you the mensch:
will-smith-jerusalem-israel.jpg
First this:

Two-time Academy Award nominee Will Smith is the most powerful actor on the planet, according to an annual list by America's Newsweek magazine. The Independence Day hunk has eclipsed last year's winner Tom Cruise and previous regular winner Tom Hanks. Newsweek spoke to a host of studio chiefs and film producers anonymously for fear of offending other stars. Smith was chosen because of his huge box office success and his ability to tackle any genre - sci-fi I, Robot, action comedy Men In Black or drama The Pursuit Of Happyness. Following behind was Johnny Depp at two, Ben Stiller at three, Brad Pitt at four and Cruise at five.

And then this

:
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) raised at least $25 million for his presidential campaign in the first quarter of the year, putting him just shy of Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, who made a splash with her announcement Sunday that she had drawn a record-breaking $26 million.

Obama appears to have surpassed Clinton in several ways: He reported donations from 100,000 people, double the 50,000 people who gave to the New York senator's campaign. He raised $6.9 million through donations over the Internet, more than the $4.2 million that Clinton raised online.

A black man is the leading figure of America's immense dream machine? A black man is the leading figure of American politics? I admit, it feels like we are entering a new world with completely new rules. I will, however, remain loyal to Marx and the socialist program of the man whose name and fame was robbed by Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace.


Tuesday, March 27, 2007

My New Dwindling Community

posted by on March 27 at 12:18 PM

Last night at around 3 am, I joined the mailing list for the Zimbabwe Jewish Community. Though the present number of Jews in Zimbabwe is extremely small, around 250 (and mostly old people who can't leave the horrible place), not too long ago their number was beyond 7,000 and growing.

This web site aims to celebrate nearly 110 years of Jewish Communities in Zimbabwe and help record the history and details of a unique period for the benefit of both current and future generations. From a peak of some 7,500 Jews in the early 1970s - the total Zimbabwe Jewish community in 2006 is approximately 270 souls (from 294 in 2005). This is the story of a once vibrant community who settled for many different reasons in what was originally Rhodesia - later to become Zimbabwe. Time however, is of the essence as the numbers of those that can "tell the story" and the remaining community dwindle.

The ZJC's remaining mission is "to collect data on the Jewish cemeteries in Zimbabwe [and] have every tombstone photographed, in all the cemeteries of Harare, Bulawayo and the smaller towns."

The website also has great pictures like this one:
smaller-weizman.jpgWhat a lovely bracelet on that wrist.

I did not join the Zimbabwe Jewish Community's website out of boredom brought on by insomnia (I was actually enjoying a book by Jean-Luc Nancy on the subject of restlessness), I joined it because one of the few pleasures left in the mess, misery, and miscarriage that is generally known as Zimbabwe is looking at its history, its hopeful days. When your country is dead in every way--a dead passport, dead dream, dead reality--then its past becomes frozen in time. There is no continuum; no line that stretches from now to then. There is a rupture, a clean break between us and them. The people in these promising pictures exist in a world that we in the infinity of the present know will become nothing else than the history of a community.


Friday, March 23, 2007

Back to The Swan

posted by on March 23 at 11:28 AM

Today the P-I published a rather flat article on the gentrification of the Central District. It offers no new ideas about what has happened in that part of Seattle--how and why it was transformed from a hood to a neighborhood. And the mood of the article--its sense of shock, loss, and saudade (an excellent Portuguese word that needs to be fully adopted by English)--is the same mood of the world's first poem about gentrification, Charles Baudelaire's The Swan, which was published near the middle of the 19th century in response to the Haussmannization of Paris. This passage makes up the poem's end and final meaning:


Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.

New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,

And suburbs old, are symbols all to me

Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.

And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,

The image came of my majestic swan

With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,

As of an exile whom one great desire

Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,

Andromache! torn from your hero's arms;

Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;

Bent o'er an empty tomb in ecstasy;

Widow of Hector -- wife of Helenus!

And of the negress, wan and phthisical,

Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes

Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog

The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;

Of all who lose that which they never find;

Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief

Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;

Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.

And one old Memory like a crying horn

Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost . . .

I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;

Of captives; vanquished . . . and of many more.

Indeed, that lost and consumptive black woman in Haussmannized Paris can be seen even today in the gentrified Central District.


Wednesday, March 21, 2007

(Not So) Pure as the Driven Snow

posted by on March 21 at 11:58 AM

Clicking around this morning I came across this small story:

Procter & Gamble Co. has won a jury award of $19.25 million in a civil lawsuit filed against four former Amway distributors accused of spreading false rumors linking the company to Satanism to advance their own business.

The rumors of Satanism stem from this P&G logo

000000e2.jpg

and date way back to the early-’80s. Just how the rumors got started remains a mystery.

In the suit, P&G alleged that Amway

revived those rumors in 1995, using a voice mail system to tell thousands of customers that part of Procter & Gamble profits went to satanic cults.

The jury evidently agreed. But while P&G may have finally put those ugly Satanism rumors to rest (for now), there's no hiding the company's dirty past. Specifically, the fact that P&G once hired a struggling young actress/model named Marilyn Ann Briggs to pose as the oh-so-wholesome mother on their Ivory Snow boxes.

05ff_12.JPG.jpg

Unfortunately, Ms. Briggs shortly thereafter changed her name to Marilyn Chambers, and would star in such porn "classics" as Behind the Green Door and Insatiable.

marilyn_chambers_ivory_snow_shrunk.jpg

When word reached P&G that the face of one of their best-selling products could be seen in seedy San Francisco theaters having sex with--gasp!--a black man, it quickly dropped the campaign. The company's slogan for Ivory Snow, after all, was "99 and 44/100% pure."

Marilyn Chambers's billing on the poster for Behind the Green Door was immediately changed to "The 99 and 44/100% Pure Girl," the film went on to become one of porn's first "mainstream" successes, and the rest, as they say...


Thursday, March 15, 2007

There Really Aren't Any Pictures of the Guy Smiling

posted by on March 15 at 6:26 PM

I wasn't much into revising King County to mean M.L. King Jr. County. It seemed dishonest and just weird for whitey Seattle.

When the logo hit, I was pleasantly surprised at least that the image of MLK was stern and bad (a nice reality check on the white wash coopt number that's been done on MLK. Yep: A pet peeve of mine is that King's radicalism has been diminished in our contemporary pop culture reading.)

Anyway, when I saw the logo side by side with other local logos at yesterday's County, City, State joint viaduct press conference, I was converted. I love this logo.

josh2.jpg


And I love that I live in Martin Luther King County now. How cool is that?

King County spokesperson Carolyn Duncan from Exec Sims's office tells me the image is not based on any specific photo of King. Getting rights to any specific photo was too complicated, she says. So, the desing firm they hired to come up with the logo, Tony Gable, had to mock up the image from scratch, basically just studying lots of pictures and then drawing their own. The direction they chose was "determination" as opposed to King's other visage: looking "visionary."

I told her I was glad they rejected the touchy feely, soft focus image that King seems to occupy nowadays, and didn't mock him up looking content or happy.

Duncan said that wasn't hard. "There really aren't any pictures of the guy smiling," she said.