Tag: history

Mar 21 2011

On Monday Morning Philosophy, Or, Founders Tell America: “You Figure It Out”

In our efforts to form a more perfect Union we look to the Constitution for guidance for how we might shape the form and function of Government; many who seek to interpret that document try to do so by following what they believe is The Original Intent Of The Founders.

Some among us have managed to turn their certainty into something that approaches a reverential calling, and you need look no further than the Supreme Court to find such notables as Cardinals Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia providing “liturgical foundation” to the adherents of the point of view that the Constitution is like The Bible: that it’s somehow immutable, set in stone, and, if we would only listen to the right experts, easily interpreted.

But what if that absolutist point of view is absolutely wrong?

What if the Original Intent Of The Founders, that summer in Philadelphia…was simply to get something passed out of the Constitutional Convention, and the only way that could happen was to leave a lot of the really tough decisions to the future?

What if The Real Original Intent…was that we work it out for ourselves as we go along?

Mar 16 2011

My Little Town 20110315: Elwood Brockman

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, so this installment is about a long dead denizen of Hackett.  This time it is about a teacher of mine, Elwood Brockman.

Mr. Brockman taught high school maths, and was also the grade school principal.  Since the entire school system from grades 1 to 12 (no K at the time), double duty was the norm.

Mar 10 2011

My Little Town 20010309: Dee Kirkendall

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, so this installment is about a long dead denizen of Hackett.  I never learnt what Dee’s real first name was; everyone just called him Dee.

He was a deputy sheriff just about forever.  This was in the mid 1960s to around 1980, give or take.  Here is what I remember about him.

Mar 05 2011

In Memoriam: Chloe Dzubilo

Chloe Dzubilo, artist and AIDS and transgender activist, died February 18 in New York City.  She was fifty years old.   She was apparently over-medicated and fell on subway tracks.

Chloe studied art at the Parsons School of Design and received an associates degree in gender studies from CUNY-City College in 1999.

Originally from Connecticut, Chloe moved the East Village in 1982 and worked Studio 54 before becoming ad director for the art magazine, the East Village Eye.  She wrote plays for and performed with the Blacklips Performance Cult (cofounded by Antony Hegarty) at the Pyramid Club, which had been founded by her partner Bobby Bradley.  She also edited the Blacklips literary ‘zine, Leif Sux.  She also did some modeling.

Feb 22 2011

Making Sense of Revolutions

We are witnessing what may be the birth pangs of nascent democracy in the Middle East.  Or, we may be witnessing something else entirely.  A region which has long trailed the rest of the Western world in basic freedoms for its citizens is in the process of long-needed transition.  What it will be and what form it will eventually take has yet to be established.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t try to transpose our own understanding upon the scene that lies before us.  Especially when we contemplate the unknown, we can fall so easily into dichotomies.  When comparing two things simultaneously, it is easy to believe that everything must belong to one part or the other, or, failing that, nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts. Egypt is not Libya, nor is Tunisia exactly like Egypt.

Feb 22 2011

My Little Town 20110221: Gene and Katy

This is an installment of an extremely irregular series that I write when I begin to remember people from my childhood.  I grew up, for the most part, in Hackett, Arkansas, just about nine miles south of Fort Smith, Arkansas, almost on the border with Oklahoma.  This was quite the “redneck” part of the nation.

Hackett, when I was little, still had a sunset law on the books.  Those of you not from the South may not be familiar with such a law, but they were real (and likely still are on many books, but obviously not enforceable any more).  Essentially, a sunset law dictated that any black person (NOT the term used at the time) could not remain in the town after sunset, to prevent black families from moving into the town.

The penalty was, at least in my town, that being black and there after sunset was not just an offense, but a shooting cause, both by citizens and law enforcement.  I report this not to titillate, but just to illustrate how many southern jurisdictions were run until recently, and some still are.

Feb 16 2011

Book Review: Selfa’s “The Democrats”

 MinistryOfTruth’s recent reclisted diary over at Kos suggests a list of things that a “Democratic Party” ought to offer.  The question this begs, though, is one of whether or not MinistryOfTruth’s expectations of the Democratic Party (“A party that TAXES the richest among us who can most easily afford it/ A party that OPPOSES wars we can NOT win/ A party that PROTECTS consumers and workers over corporate profit”) are things we seriously ought to expect the Democratic Party to do.  

Lance Selfa, in  his somewhat recent (2008) history of the Democratic Party , argues the “no” answer to this question.  In his book, Selfa hoped to “show that the renewed and more confident Democratic Party of 2008 is the latest incarnation of an institution that appeals to ‘the people’ while looking out for the interests of corporations.” (pp. 8-9)  Selfa’s history, then, is a history of betrayals, assuming that the interests of “the people” and the corporations are in conflict.  But the point for our author is not merely to decry this conflict within the Democratic Party, but to expose its dynamic within capitalist society:

The contention of this book is that these Democratic “betrayals” are not primarily the result of unscrupulous politicians or office holders who “sell out” — although there are plenty of each of those in the Democratic Party.  Rather they are the inevitable outcome of a political institution that socialists have long described as a capitalist party that only pretends to be a friend of working people.  (p. 9)

(also available at Kos)  

Feb 06 2011

Dominionism’s Threat Against Indian Country

Religion and state have united to assimilate the American Indian in the past, such as with Ulysses S. Grant’s Peace Policy that created the Indian Boarding Schools, and in more recent times such as  “‘pro-Peabody Western Coal’ Indians and obtaining a false ‘Hopi-Navajo’ Tribal Counsel designation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs…” who were  several First Mesa Hopi who had been converted to Mormonism.  ‘Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them,’ and you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.

Feb 01 2011

Envisioning postcapitalism: Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature

In pressing forward with the “envisioning postcapitalism” series, today I will re-present an earlier review of the second edition of Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature, revised from the first edition which I reviewed back in 2007.  What gives Kovel’s exposition of ecosocialism a special strength is its ability to identify a weakness in the capitalist system which escapes the notice of “traditional” marxism, and its advocacy of a goal-society (ecosocialism) which resolves the problem of capitalism’s fundamental weakness.  To put paid to the notion that Kovel’s version of ecosocialism is a “utopia,” I intend to critique the argument of his book from the perspective of an overview of the history of power.

(crossposted at Wild, Wild Left)

Jan 16 2011

Revisiting The End Of The World

Neither the weary, disciplined […] soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment of slack, this relative calm before the pandemonium to follow, gives us the chance to study the actors on both sides of this river and to look backward on what has been and forward to what will be.

…

[I]ts foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries and more. There was, of course, the prophecy. Someone, usually someone in his cups, could always be counted on to bring up that old saw: the Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century, leaving us with- stubby fingers counting out the decades in a puddle of wine- only seventy years remaining! Give or take a decade! Predictable laughter at the silliness of the whole idea. But in seventy years exactly, the empire would be gone.

[it] hardly foresaw its doom.

…

Jan 16 2011

Action: LONGEST WALK 3 (Reversing Diabetes)

Brenda Golden made a comment in her interview on Red Town Radio with Chris Francisco (Navajo), national coordinator of the Longest Walk III, a couple months ago. “It’ll be hard to get people involved. It’s not something that makes people mad like racism (paraphrasing).” So here’s an email I got with updated links for the fundraiser. After that, I hope I don’t make anyone mad.

Jan 02 2011

Fascinating 1860 Map of the U.S. Slave Population

2011 marks the sesquicentennial of the start of the American Civil War. On New Year’s Day 150 years ago, South Carolina had already seceded from the United States and the next months would see ten more states secede from the Union, the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the formation of the Confederate States of America, and the start of the war.

Historian Susan Schulten wrote about the 1860 Census and map showing American slavery in The New York Times last month. The United States Coast Survey used the 1860 Census data, the last time the federal government counted the slave population, to produce two maps illustrating slave population – one of Virginia and the other of the entire South.

The map depicts each county’s slave population, with “the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves”, which is a “visually arresting way to see the range of slavery across the South without having to read a single data point,” she writes. It was popular with President Lincoln and the American public after its publication. It was sold throughout the war “for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers.”

Load more