Route 7 near Seven Corners has many pedestrians, no sidewalks and no safe crossings
Over the past few weeks, I’ve written about the ambiguity of racism in America, the paranoia regarding Barack Obama and the disrespect paid to this President from folks with questionable motives. America is like the person with a troubled background who refuses to go into analysis and get some help. Every now and then, an issue causes us to talk about our troubled background, our troubled racial history, but the conversation is short lived and ultimately fruitless. We reach no epiphanies that set us straight long term.
From the moment that candidate Barack Obama made the famous “race speech” last year, we should have been able to predict that as long as Obama was an important player on the national scene, race would not go away. Still, I was naive. I thought once he won the election, if for no other reason than political correctness, we’d clean up our act racially. Recent weeks have proved me wrong. The events have escalated. A quick recap:
Shortly after South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie” at the President during a joint session of Congress, a Glenn Beck instigated protest march on Washington took place on September 12. This was a tie-in to Beck’s 9-12 initiative which was designed to bring back the sense of common purpose that we had the day after the 9-11 attack on our country. To say that the demonstration on September 12 was divisive is to put it mildly. Here is a small sampling of signs carried during the gathering:
Editor’s note: The actual images have been removed in response to a copyright challenge. Simple descriptions will have to do. I have linked each description to the original image. These links will work for as long as the folks who posted them keep them public:
Sign 1: “CAP” CONGRESS AND “TRADE” OBAMA BACK TO KENYA
Sign 2: THE ZOO HAS AN AFRICAN LION AND THE WHITE HOUSE HAS A LYIN’ AFRICAN
Sign 3: We came unarmed (this time)
The protest signs became a Rorschach test for America. Where some saw patriotic dissent, others saw blatant racism. Clearly, comparing Obama to an animal is at the very least dehumanizing. It is equally hard to deny that derogatory references to his Kenyan heritage carry a racial overtone. The other disturbing element is the thinly veiled threats of violence (“we came unarmed this time” and “cap congress”). The media latched onto this phenomenon for all it was worth. Republicans cried “race card”. Democrats, for the most part stayed strangely silent and the White House avoided the issue like the plague.
Then a prominent Democrat, humanitarian and former President of the United States weighed in:
The rub here was that this was not some “Northern snob” talking down to Southerners. This was a man raised entirely in the South … some 85 years of experience. Jimmy Carter knows racial bigotry when he sees it and Carter declared without hesitation that racism was stoking some of the 9-12 demonstration. The reaction by defensive conservatives was that Carter was wrong to label the Tea Party/Healthcare protest as racist. But of course that is not what Carter did. He simply pointed out that the folks in the crowd who waddled like ducks and quacked like ducks were indeed ducks. A great many of the folks in the crowd may have had legitimate concerns (too much government, spending out of control, etc.) but they were drowned out by the attention getters and the current climate allowed those folks to get attention in the worst way possible.
When we combine the signage with this new phenomenon of people bringing guns to rallies, sometimes taking place outside of Obama speaking venues, we get a volatile cocktail that finally moved the Speaker of the House to express her concerns:
Pelosi went on to say that incendiary language might provoke unbalanced people to take violent action. Her experience in late 70’s San Francisco, with the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk fueled her concern.
And so here we are, finally dealing with the ultimate question of whether the current climate endangers the life of the President. Whether you view this question as melodrama or not, there is no doubt that America is going through a period of self-examination. Self-examination that I should have known was inevitable when Barack Obama was elected. As I look at the discussions that revolve around this self-analysis, I see everything from confessions to angry denial that there is any problem at all.
America is on the psychiatrist’s couch wrestling with its demons in front of the entire world. Republicans who want to deny there is a problem and Democrats who would rather just see the problem disappear without discussion make it very unlikely that we will find a cure to what ails us. It makes me wonder if we should just bury the wound deep underground again and hope that by ignoring it, we can avoid its consequences. Or should we keep talking with the risk that such talk will only further polarize the nation, sending everyone to their respective corners and increase the climate of danger just over the horizon?
This post is not about conclusions as much as it is about questions. What are we to do? Can our nation ever resolve and repair its birth defect? Will we have to learn through another tragedy to finally abandon old prejudices or will we see the light before harm is done? It is interesting that while Congress debates health care reform, our country is going through an entirely different health care crisis, one involving our mental health.
If our collective mental health fails us, there is no insurance policy that can make it right.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Since my message to you yesterday morning, news on the health care bill has changed almost hourly. Then my phone rang around dinner time Friday evening with the news that the Democrats in the House were meeting behind closed doors with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to try to work a deal to solve “the abortion problem.”
The inside reports we had were that the Speaker was working to craft a deal that she would describe as “pro-life” that would still keep Planned Parenthood happy. No surprise there.
But now, as I write this at 2:41 AM, we’ve received the news that the Democratic leadership WILL ALLOW A VOTE on the pro-life amendment by Bart Stupak (seen right) and Joe Pitts!
Your calls and emails have made the difference.
Because of your efforts, Speaker Pelosi did not have the votes to shut out pro-life concerns and continue to refuse to allow a vote on the Stupak/Pitts amendment.
Now we have to win that vote.
- Please take a moment right now to call your U.S. representative at 202-224-3121 and tell him/her to vote YES on Stupak/Pitts and keep abortion out of health care reform.
If Nancy Pelosi has her way, health care reform will be the LARGEST expansion of taxpayer dollars for abortion in our history.
Be a part of this important moment for the pro-life movement: Please call now. The debate is slated to start at 9am ET! Call now, and then get as many of your friends to call as possible.
Many of you have been writing to say that you’ve already called and want to know what to do next. The BEST thing you can do at this point is to find more people to call: Please forward this email to as many of your friends as you can and ask them to call too. THANK YOU!
The situation will change rapidly, so we will be posting information as we have it on the AUL blog, and on Twitter and Facebook.
Stay hopeful and we will all continue to press in together – we hear that Speaker Pelosi and the abortion lobby do not yet have the votes they need to pass this anti-life health care legislation. Wavering Congressmen need to hear from us. So thank you for standing strong with us today to show Congress that Real Health Care Respects Life!
Dancing Queen Vitamin Case So You Can Keep Your Energy Up
- Image by themaxsons via Flickr
E.M. Forster said, “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.” In adjusting for this with Norman Collins’ 736-page epic London Belongs to Me, now reissued in Penguin Modern Classics, I may overcompensate and end up underpraising it instead. You’ll just have to triangulate your own way with this one. (I see also that, unusually, the cover is emblazoned with a quote of praise. By the standards of this series, that practically constitutes dumbing down. And a prize of nothing but kudos to the first person to name another Penguin Modern Classic that has stooped to having a quote on the cover.)
London Belongs to Me was a massive popular success when first published in 1945, selling not far off a million copies. Publishers now would give their right leg for those kind of sales, even for a rubbish title. But back then, the British public still had a love affair with reading, before entertainments like television were widely available. And who do we have to blame for that? Well, how about Norman Collins – as well as author of 16 novels, he was controller of television at the BBC, and co-founder of independent television in the UK. I suppose he was hedging his bets.
It’s appropriate that a novel by a founding TV executive should be one mammoth soap opera. Collins uses to good effect the old trick of exploring the lives of the people brought together in one residence: for a superlative example, see Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. Here, we are in a lodging-house at 10 Dulcimer Street, owned by the widowed Mrs Vizzard and occupied by a raft of types: the recently retired clerk Mr Josser and his wife; Mrs Boon and her son, petty crook Percy (“‘Only fools carry a gun,’ he said to console himself for not having one”); the Pooterish Mr Puddy (“a man who for years had been plunging in and out of employment like a porpoise”); and Connie, a washed-up actress who provides the most affecting character portrait in the book. Later comes a new lodger, fake psychic Mr Squales (“[palmistry] might have been very paying if only the fat, stupid looking female who pathetically wanted to know about her love chances hadn’t in the end turned out to be a police woman”). Collins sets them in motion and lets us watch.
So much happens – often of a banal but diverting nature – that to reveal some of it would be not so much spoiling as inadequate. The centre of the book is a murder trial, which unfolds brilliantly over just 30 pages but feels much more substantial. It gives the book – particularly what comes after – necessary focus and structure, which was earlier meandering. This looseness comes despite lovely touches such as the sparky dialogue when Percy Boon takes a shine to a girl working at the funfair (“She wasn’t good looking, judged by the top standards. But she was all right. And she looked as if she might be adaptable”):
‘Hallo, beautiful,’ he said. ‘You new here?’
The girl looked at him for a moment before answering.
‘Fresh, aren’t you?’ she answered.
Percy didn’t mind this reply. It was all part of the pattern. And in any case he didn’t like girls who gave themselves away in the first five minutes.
‘I noticed you as soon as I came in,’ he said.
‘I dreamed about you last night,’ the girl told him.
He grinned politely.
‘Ever have any time off?’ he asked.
The girl shook her head.
‘No, I go straight on. All day and all night.’
‘What’s your name?’ Percy asked.
‘Oh, call me Mrs Simpson,’ she replied.
‘Like to come out some time?’
‘Yes, but not with you.’
‘Fond of dancing?’
‘Never heard of it.’
London Belongs to Me runs from 1938 to 1940, and war enters the story gradually and then suddenly. Initially, the only presence is through the character of Otto Hapfel, an incompetent Nazi representative in London, but later, as the Blitz beckons, the war fills every corner of the pages. The blackouts are vividly presented (“it had a sinister, almost solid, quality of its own, this blackout, so that you felt you had to carve your way through it, scraping and scooping out a passage as you went along”) and when Collins emphasises the carry-on attitude of Londoners during the war, it seems not so much heroic as dutiful (“[Mr Josser] had something else to think about. Rent collecting. The Germans unwittingly had chosen a rent-day on which to open their offensive”).
1953 Fontana Edition
Gil Scott-Heron’s Lyrics echoed over the FM airwaves back in 1970:
Back then I was a believer in the “Revolution”. I, like many of my long haired friends, was ready to take over this country, tear it down and start over. We knew we were right and the “Man” was wrong. Gil Scott-Heron was more right then any of us knew at the time. The riots were televised, the protests were televised, the “Love-ins” were televised, But the revolution was not televised because it never happened.
You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.
Obama is the new Revolution and he is being Televised:
Obama Gives “Hope” to Those Who Missed the Revolution. He may be a cleaned up version of the old 60’s radical, but he embodies those old school radical beliefs and many of his supporters are feeling a new vibrancy in life. Like the fun loving old folks who couldn’t wait to jump into the rejuvenating pool in the movie Cocoon, the ancient Radicals are feeling young again and can’t wait to jump into the Obama pool.
His retoric speaks loud and clear the message of the “Revolution”:
“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” (Video)
The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In 4 parts without commercial interruption. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon. Blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised. (Video)
The New Nixon blog posted this thought recently:
Is Obama JFK or Adlai Stevenson? By E. J. Dionne
The result of the 2008 election may come down to how voters decide to define Barack Obama. Is he Adlai Stevenson or John F. Kennedy? Is he a detached former law review editor or a passionate agent of change? Is he an upscale reformer focused on process or a populist who will turn Washington and the country around? (New Nixon)
Michelle Malkin posted this april 23rd:
Barack and Michelle and Bill and Bernardine: The Obama/Weather Underground compendium
By Michelle Malkin • April 23, 2008 10:30 AMJust spotted a cute DIY burlap placemat over at ShelterPop.
This would be cute for Halloween, as well as Thanksgiving…or any fall day for that matter. If you aren’t up to threading the ribbon, use a little fabric glue to speed up the process. I also think it would be cute to add felt leaves in fall colors. If nothing else, this could keep the kids’ hands busy while you are preparing Thanksgiving dinner!
