Martin Luther King Day

   

   . . . .  Martin Luther King is weeping today, even though he is in heaven.

His mother, Alberta Christine Williams King, was assassinated, by a 23-year-old Black Hebrew Israelite six years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The American Slave Coast - Audio Version

The audio package of The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry is now available.

Cover for the audio cd package of The American Slave Coast

Tantor Media's art department did a nice job adapting Slave's Coast's hardcover cover for the audio package.

We'll listen to at least some of it in the car as we take our long weekend wedding anniversary jaunt down to Thaddeus Stevens and the Gettysburg National Park area of Pennsylvania this coming weekend.  That should be interesting to hear these words in a voice that isn't ours.  The reader for Slave Coast is excellent.

In the meantime the reviews on amazilla for Slave Coast now number 59 -- almost all of them 5 stars.

Villainy vs. Evil + Jazz + Television + Beer

It was Himself's birthday yesterday (the big party is tonight -- a rooftop barbeque in the West Village).  In the natural order of such occasions, we shared dinner with some old friends.*

I had been somewhat concerned about how dinner would go, meaning the emotional tone of it, here at the conclusion of yet another truly awful week of tragic and terrible events. Not least of which bad news is Congress's refusal to fund anything to help pillaged Puerto Rico even to attempt to counter the Zika crisis that has already infected so many expectant Puerto Rican women -- four of the people with whom we were eating are Puerto Rican.

But mostly, as we are indeed all old, trusted and loved friends, we had an enjoyable time and didn't have to put out a lot of energy to keep from things that are depressing and terrifying.  Music, art, travels, friends in common, some television and film discussion, and always back to music and gossip about some of the more bold face names that the talent agency that of the one of our mutual friends owns, manages.


Pedrito Martínez


Chucho Valdés

We did discuss though, the depressing piece in the Guardian yesterday that inquired whether jazz has risen from the grave of irrelevancy and is again hip.  Why was this depressing?  Because anybody who honestly follows contemporary jazz knows that since the 1920's, for the last two decades, jazz is as least as exciting and ground-breaking, because Afro Latin Jazz artists, particularly from Cuba and Puerto Rico have made it so -- they've long been world class, even though so much of the self-defined hipster non-Spanish speaking music establishment refuses to notice. When not crazed with other work, el V himself tends to be out several nights a week, attending great shows of his Afro Latin jazz buddies everywhere from Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Lincoln Ctrs.'s jazz space at Columbus Circle), the Jazz Standard, Sub Rosa, The Blue Note, The Bitter End, etc.  I often go with him. Yet the stupid article never mentioned a single Afro Latin artist, not even any from Cuba. Talk about self-willed ignorance.

In a different conversation last night, vis a vis talking about a Brasilian telenovella from ancient days, El Rey del Ganado, that was very popular with Spanish speaking audiences too, and the ladies had grown up with In Ponce, while el V and I watched it during that long stay, 1999-2000 in Havana -- we asked, what is a real villain?  What makes a person or character an actual evil person, rather than a cartoon Big Bad Guy Villain? Beyond the lazy signals that change to some degree from one decade to another -- now it's pedophiles in particular.  It used to be gay people, but that's pretty much over. (GOOD!) Some of us still watch Got, while some of us had quit -- some of us quit even several seasons ago.

These television / movie eviLes are outsized cartoons -- a big reason those of us who quit watching Got quit, and why none of us go to superhero comics movies. Audiences adore these villains, while often sneering at their victims. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, we thought of, obviously. And for my own first personal experience of this pop culture attitude, the film Bonnie and Clyde. When I protested that the protagonists got what they deserved because they killed innocent people and stole their money, and many of those whose money was stolen from the Depression era beleagured banks were poor farmers, my more "sophisticated' peers sneered -- "They were stupid and deserved to die!" Those who attempt to counter such villains are also sneered at, and often depicted as bumbling idiots -- or more evil than the villains.

Whereas in life villains seem to be usually well-dressed and don't carry weapons and are merely servants of faceless vast corporations (unless police or George Zimmerman -- and whoops, Zimmerman behaves like a cartoon, but he's still evil, he's still a villain. Which led us to contemplate the cartoon horror from our City currently demanding to be POTUS -- is he evil, is he a villain? As we're all NYC residents at least for our entire adult lives, and thus have been inflicted with him all our entire adult lives close-up and personal, we agreed he's both.

Later we progressed to contemplation of what happened in Dallas -- evil? a villain? a black man whose mind snapped after a lifetime of war made on the color of his skin and the awareness that in the U.S. there's been war waged against black people in this country since 1619.

Why then, is it classified as 'race war' by rightwingers, whites, media and so-called experts only when a person of color kills or attacks a white person / a cop, (cops who kill people of color have also been of color, thus the division into white people and cops / police state), whereas the killings are tragic mistakes day after day, year after year of white people / cops killing people of color with impunity and immunity?  Why are flags all over the country hung at half mast and the Empire State Building lit red white and blue (which was directly in our line of sight from our restaurant table) because cops got killed in Texas, but the Empire State Building doesn't get lit up when people of color are killed every day by white people / cops? Why is it that it's demanded that killing of someone in a blue uniform be classed a federal hate crime and that Men in Blue Matter, but that #blacklivesmatter is now responsible for hate crimes and murder, when Black Lives Matter has always been about exactly the opposite?Needless to say, one might hope, is that none of us advocates or wants anybody to shoot anybody -- or be cruel, mean, bullying, exploitive, repressive or oppressive to anybody.

We did not resolve this question of what makes a villain a villain, what makes evil evil, needless to say.  We were also drinking margaritas. Very, very fine margaritas.





As well we had a happy conversation about this development about a beer pipeline in Bruges; the entire table voted in favor of the pipeline -- this subject also came to us thanks to the Guardian.  As everyone at the table, in one way and another, is part of the European music festival circuit, everyone has been to Bruges and certainly has partaken of Belgian beers.

Yah, a hot an humid night, margaritas and cerveza were the Thing.



A conversation not so festive was what Brexit means for artists, entertainers, musicians and so on. Among other things this means that any BBC production will cost more as those terrific location landscapes made such splendid use of in series such as The Musketeers will be more difficult for the production teams and actors to get to and work in; recall Prague and surrounding locations in the Czech Republic stood in for Paris and the French countryside, forests and mountains. This could also affect, even, gasp, Got!

--------------------------* It was beautiful yesterday, as so many friends from all over the City, the country and, yes, the world, reached out by phone, e-mail, snail mail, and other ways, to wish el Vaquero happy returns of His Day.  The esteem, respect, affection, and in many, many cases, love, in which he's held by peers, colleagues and very old friends is something to behold.  It made him (and me too!) so happy.

Dems' Sit-in + White Rage by Carol Anderson + Free State of Jones / NAACP

   It's almost as if we've gone back to the days of John Quincy Adams, when he would speak for hours and hours without a break about the slave markets right outside their Capitol doors in D.C.

A Motion to Censure Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts

Except he didn't have a smart phone and he was usually all alone.  And yah, the Jacksonians and slaveowners instituted gag orders against him.  So will Ryan and Co. against the Dems this go-round, doubtless.

Why did it take the Dems so long to grow this much backbone?

Evidently The Bern has watered and nourished that backbone -- or at least his massively popular campaign events have substantially helped the backbone growth.  Also that the rethuguglies are such a gaggle of blood thirsty, vicious, bullying fools, which the polls show it. Thus the Dems think they've got a realistic shot at keeping the White House, their own seats, and retaking a substantial number of ballot seats.

Not that I know any thing, of course. But I can speculate with the best.

But it does seem odd that Sandy Hook couldn't do it, nor Ferguson, Treyvon Martin, etc. But the martyrdom of nearly a half-hundred gay latino gays has. That's fabulously interesting and revealing in itself, particularly as those deaths in Orlando were only 49 of the over 300 gun related deaths in the U.S. that weekend.

The relentless efforts to arm every single person in America -- except the we know whos don't we -- is joined at the hip with (to mix metaphors) to our national racial divide, and the cycles of repression and roll-back of Civil Rights.  These are the subjects of a new book by Carol Anderson,  White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

Let us never forget that the vaunted 2nd Amendment was inserted into the Constitution by the demands of the southern slaveowners.  Ever since the colonial days it had been mandated that every white man in these colonies and later states own arms to put down African American anti-slavery uprisings -- any action on the part of African Americans from taking off from the coerced slavery to planning organized resistance. This is the meaning of well-regulated militia, not fear of foreign invasion, or at least not until the successful San Domingue slave revolution put an end to San  Domingue slavery and San Domingue became Haiti.  From then on, even into the 1850's, southern slaveowners, and particularly slaveowning politicians drumbeated the ever more draconian black codes by howling about imminent invasion by baby-eating white women raping Haitians.

Very oddly, yesterday during our local NYC public radio prime time talk show discussion about the 2nd amendment, what it means, its constitutional history, this history was entirely ignored by the constitutional law experts, until a caller to the show brought up this history.  The constitutional law history expert admitted this was all true, but "there's no reason to talk about that here and now."  WTF?  If not here and now, when?

Last night in Free State of Jones. we watched the vicious repression of African American rights of every kind, including that of the law of the land which these hypocritical slaveowners had sworn allegiance, emancipation, dramatized.  The vote and education were particularly targeted by these vicious traitors.  By 1876 -- with the beyond shameful collusion by the norther Republican party for political gain -- the black vote in the South was effectively repealed.

There's an excellent a White Rage article about Carol Anderson's new book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, here in the Washington Post.

Quote:

Anderson argues that this pattern of progress followed by retreat has effectively eroded, if not scuttled, every modicum of progress made by African Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation.

Anderson’s book, which began as a 2014 opinion article in The Washington Post, recounts numerous instances when hard-won gains by African Americans have been reversed. For example, in 2008, for the first time in history, the black voter turnout rate nearly equaled that of whites, and the turnout of voters of all races making less than $15,000 nearly doubled. “While the number of whites who voted remained roughly the same as it had been in the 2004 election,” she says, “two million more African Americans, two million additional Hispanics, and 600,000 more Asians cast their ballots in 2008.”

The GOP, “trapped between a demographically declining support base and an ideological straitjacket . . . reached for a tried and true weapon: disfranchisement.” Anderson notes that despite the rarity of voter fraud, state after state began requiring voters to have documents such as bank statements, utility bills and W-2 forms, which African Americans, Latinos, the young and other economically disadvantaged people are less likely than others to possess.

Then, in 2013 the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to strike down a key part of the Voting Rights Act that for decades had protected African Americans from blatant disfranchisement. Since the ruling, 22 states have passed voter-restriction statutes. Anderson also argues that white resistance to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision explains why, six decades later, black children largely remain trapped in segregated and unequal schools.

Anderson singles out President Ronald Reagan for presiding over the rollback of many of the gains blacks made during the civil rights movement. She says that while Reagan “positively oozed racial innocence,” his policies showed a contempt for blacks.

The description of White Rage's historical mile-posting of rolling backpost Reconstruction, post Jim Crow, post Civil Rights gains, is  much longer than this pull. However, any woman of any identity and heritage has to recognize in these tactics of presidents like Reagan and Wilson, that the rollback of women's rights, particularly reproductive rights, are accomplished in the same manner.  So yah, we all need to be deeply concerned.  What affects one part of us affects all of us.

As mentioned in another place, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sponsored the party for Free State of Jones's premiere at the Plaza Hotel (home of Kay Thompson's still famous character, Eloise). This predominately NAACP African American audience watched the film with rapt respect,  attention -- and full historical knowledge and understanding. No one even requested before the lights went out that people shut down their cell phones and refrain from using their phones. During the 2 hours and 19 minutes of the film, no phone rang, no horrible light from a smart phone screen interfered with what we were watching.

However, at the party, there was a great deal of conversation about the relationship between the events depicted in the second section of Free State of Jones that takes place after the war and emancipation and the voting act, and the events of the last years here. People also kept checking in on the Dem sit-in with their phones at the party and commenting on that.

I felt pretty privileged to be in such company.  I kept meeting one brilliant, fascinating, talented person after another.  That's the thing: in the company of interesting, outgoing and friendly people, one also becomes interesting, outgoing and friendly.  The two parts of the Plaza's vaunted and enormous Oak Room and Bar (est. 1907; closed in 2011, and how again revived)  provided a space that was perfect for this.

Yah, this event was a fairly big deal for us this summer, for more than one reason -- the history work I'm doing now, because I've always found Newt Knight and his saga fascinating, because it takes place in Mississippi, and because the guy who was instrumental in getting Free State made is the guy who made the New Orleans Jazz Preservation Hall film, shot in Cuba, for which el Vaquero is associate producer.  We'll see the rough cut of it next week maybe?  The title, at least at the moment is Tuba to Cuba, tubas being so instrumental to New Orleans music,

I do wish I had been able to enjoy it rather more than I was, feeling so poorly as I do from The Coughing . . . .  OTOH, it was a rare opportunity to drink truly fine champers in the historic (in film and deals) Oak Room without paying for it myself.*

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*   Among the films including location shots in the Oak Room are the opening shot with Cary Grant in North By Northwest, Arthur, The Scent of a Woman,  and the 2013 remake of The Great Gatsby.

More Books + Carpetbags

Since turning in the final copy and proofing of The American Slave Coast manuscript it's been such a relief to not be sitting between high columns of research materials.

But having embarked upon another long research and writing project, the columns are returning.

Things are so different from the embarkation of the research reading for The American Slave Coast though, and now, beginning the new project.  Books are harder to get, as the research libraries have moved so many off the shelves to off-site.  One cannot browse any longer, which is an actual drawback for researching no matter what digital advocates think.  Waiting for a book instead of opening it up at the point of catalog placement on the shelves to learn whether it will be useful or not is also a huge drawback -- and truly slows down the work.

Additionally, as the database providers insist on charging a facility by the number of users on top of the quarterly flat fees, there is a corresponding effort, which is truly detrimental to professional  research, of discouraging as much usage of certain of the databases as possible,  This contradiction to the purpose of institution of higher learning boggles.  The institution's accreditation demands providing research materials yet the bean counters don't want the research materials to be accessed. WTF?  Much of the blame of course, accrues to the database providers themselves and their gddmned greed -- and their own desire to restrict access to the content for the sake of profit from other people's work and production.  They don't create a syllable of the content they sell access to for their private profit.

A reconstruction of an 1860's carpetbag, fabricated from the same materials out of which were made carpets of the day..

Returning to my columns of research materials.  This week I scored via inter-library loan and consortium programs a pile of books on "carpetbaggers."  As perhaps others are aware, the stereotype of who the so-called carpetbaggers were does not generally conform to the pattern the Lost Causers created to show themselves as victims by greedy northern jerks.  What almost all of these so-called carpetbaggers were, were people working with the Freedmans' Bureaus, educators, overseers of black voting rights and so on.  Actually, though tragic and sad, this stuff is very interesting reading.

Of course, once again, one sees the same patterns repeated from 1861 through 2016 for voter repression, imprisonment for others' private profit, and all kinds of exploitation and cruelty.

It's Coming Down

That flag.  That flag that used to fly from the South Carolina State House, starting in 1961 in the Civil Rights Struggle, then moved to the grounds next to, in front of, the State House.  That flag.  It's going to be taken down and put away. The South Carolina Senate, and now the South Carolina House, has so voted it done.

I can hardly believe it.

It's long past time. Indeed, the time never was that that flag should be displayed in any honorary, public place.

Greg Grandin has published this month a couple of very thought-provoking essays that examine that flag's continuing relationship with our military, that flag of traitors to the nation.

Here is the one published in the Nation:

What Was the Confederate Flag Doing in Cuba, Vietnam, and Iraq?
The Confederate flag’s military tenure continued long after the Civil War ended.

To that list of places where the flag was displayed, though Greg doesn't mention it, is Haiti, during the U.S. military invasion and occupation, 1915 - 1934, ordered by Woodrow Wilson. The U.S. marines' commander, Colonel Smedley Butler, appears to be a descendant of the infamous Butler who created the largest slave auction in history, selling off long established families from his low country rice plantations to recover a fortune that he'd dissipated in drink and gambling.  Like Cuba, Haiti, was always a preoccupation and obsession of the antebellum southern slave power.  As was, even Central America, where Butler and the U.S. marines were part of many invasions and occupations on behalf of U.S. corporate interests.

In fact the U.S. flag and that other flag went with the U.S. occupation of most of the Spanish Caribbean, Central America and the Philippines. Many of the commanding officers were the sons and grandsons of officers of the Army of Rebellion, who carried their firm conviction of white supremacy with them, and which had strong effect on their decisions and choices.  Recall that Cuba was "won" for democracy by Theodore Roosevelt, whose mother was a planter's daughter from Georgia and whose uncles were infamously deep in the Trent Affair of Mason and Slidell, as well as very successful privateers preying upon Union merchant and naval ships.

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. (1807- 1886)

This is the affair that kept Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams's father, U.S. minister to the Court of St. James awake for many nights -- as well as his son, since he was the minister's private secretary.


The second essay by Greg Grandin   that flag is here:

Greg Grandin

 Greg Grandin, How Endless War Helps Old Dixie Stay New

Union Troops, U.S. Civil War

What else is significant about this decision is that a woman, a Southern woman, a woman who is descended from the Jefferson Davis family, Jenny Horne, was instrumental in getting the vote to haul down that flag.

Southern women have played an enormous role in keeping alive the mythology of the glorious lost cause.

Now a Southern woman's voice, hoarse and broken from hours of debate, has pushed that flag into the past of Southern public, ceremonial, celebratory, political spaces.  Finally.

Tonight - Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at NYC City Center

"The Life of Odetta" is the performance tonight.

Yesterday at least 25,000 peacefully marched and protested here in solidarity with the March in Washington D.C., protesting police brutality and the actions that include results such as unjustified death, executed with impunity, with no consequences to the perpetrators.

Those who demonstrated against this yesterday were surrounded at all times by police in riot gear, carrying the same weapons as the military, surveilled by helicopters and drones.

Yesterday was also NYC's unwelcome situation of hosting the annual Santacon -- thousands of really drunk college revellers who are really obnoxious and badly behaved.  Mostly, need we say, white people.  Not a cop was in sight where they charged and held up traffic, barfing and insulting those around them.  Anyone who objects to these hordes descending upon us the second Saturday in December, making our lives difficult -- we're called grinches and anti-liberty.  Nevertheless, the hipsters of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the organizers wanted these jerks to pee and vomit this year, refused to participate.  Can't have a Santacon without participating bars serving discounted drinks  . . . .

Under these circumstances, an Alvin Ailey (a New York dance company, it was founded in 1958) choreographed dance biography of the performer of "Freedom Trilogy" (1962), in the heart of the Civil Rights era, seems about as appropriate as NYC can be.

RIP - Nelson Mandala

It's impossible not to think about what Michelle and Barack Obama are feeling and thinking tonight.

They must be considering how many shadows and echoes there may be for their own obituaries -- hopefully, far, far, down the timeline -- in seeing, hearing and watching all the memorials to this black man who was a pioneer.

Nelson Mandela  1918- 2013

The Butler - History and Hollywood

Against all Hollywood's expectations, The Butler is this weekend's number one box office draw.  Everyone passed on this Lee Daniel - Danny Strong project about the Civil Rights Movement.  It had to be independently funded.  Today, with the news still so fresh, that their struggle to bring their vision to the theaters was a winning struggle, Daniels and Strong are on the local public radio flag station, on its anchor mid-day variety talk show.

Among what matters the most to them about the success of The Butler is that all sorts of people had said things like, "It's not possible that a black man could be murdered in 1927 and the police, nobody, even bothered to look into it, nobody arrested, nobody going to trial."  They would assure these people that this happened, and happened all the time, and this is why there was a Civil Rights movement.

And this was the response in Hollywood: "That never happened.  I never saw it in a movie." *

So now it's in a movie, a movie made by a black man who lived through the Civil Rights movement.

As I've quoted previously from el V, in the growing up in Louisiana chapters in The Year Before the Flood, "Movies told me lies. Music told me the truth" about the history of the country, of white and black.

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* Rest in Peace, Treyvon Martin.

PBS's *The Abolitionists* Begins Tonight

Tonight PBS’s The American Experience broadcasts the first in a three part series titled “The Abolitionists.” The program will be available for online streaming for about a month, though I’m not sure if that means after each episode or only after all three have been broadcast.

Premiering January 8, 2013. Abolitionist allies Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimké turned a despised fringe movement against chattel slavery into a force that literally changed the nation.

The Characters in “The Abolitionists”

When we first began the task of tackling the history of abolitionism four years ago, we were faced with a daunting task: the movement spanned decades, the leaders were numerous, the history complicated and the scholarly literature voluminous. And yet there was no book that told the overarching story of the abolitionists, and no guide for capturing the courage and struggles of these remarkable civil rights heroes. We decided that the way to grab the attention of a broad television audience was to focus on a handful of key characters -- that is, to create a character-driven mini-series set against the backdrop of a tumultuous time in American history.

So you know how this will work. Very clean impersonators in streets and and paths without mud, manure and expectorate, and in light-filled rooms with billowing curtains, dressed in perfectly tailored period costumes, emoting with every facial muscle, while an authoritative narrator tells us what the character is doing or thinking, followed by another authoritative flat oration voice-over reading the words the characters have written, followed by yet another cut-away to actual authorities – various professors, etc. – sitting in some neutral space, telling us what it all means and how it happened. Alas, boring. But it is cheap.

Several teaching aids that go with the program are accessible online, such as this interactive abolitionists’ location map which is interesting and useful. It should be helpful for the very many middle and high schools whose budgets have been slashed and deboned for teaching an aspect of our history that has been nearly forgotten since the southern coup that ended Reconstruction. There were  abolitionists already active from the colonial era. By the days of manifest destiny the number of abolitionists who made abolition their life’s calling and for which they dedicated everything they had grew constantly in the years between the Mexican American War an the Civil War. Their efforts and effect have been forgotten, elided, or derided as criminal in the long years of revisionism since the Civil War. It’s good to see a focus on them in this era, in which the real truth of these matters is once again coming into public consciousness.

The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke

This is the title of a well-written, carefully thought out essay on the ZunguZungo website. Here is the heart of "The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke":


[ " This is a small point, but still worth making: Rush Limbaugh didn’t attack Sandra Fluke because of her or anyone else’s sexual behavior. Given his personal history — and his more general ideological proclivities — it’s fair to say that he is vigorously protective of behaviors which are, as a function of what they are, fundamentally dependent on women who behave precisely in the manner of the straw-woman he is attacking. That’s not what this is about. Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” because she asserted her right to speak publicly about and make publicly thinkable a set of experiences and problems that he has a very direct and personal interest in excluding from public space



The broader ideological question which Congress was ostensibly discussing — the question of whether a religious institution can object to covering forms of medical care on the basis of religious belief — is also a red herring. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity neither know, nor care, about the intricate and unstable conjunction of government, insurance, and medicine that might make this a tricky debate if grown-ups were ever to debate it. And the fact that Limbaugh doesn’t even understand how female contraception works doesn’t diminish his rhetorical position a whit. On the contrary, he is defending precisely his right not to know how it works (or what things like Ovarian Cysts are), and the right of those for and to whom he speaks to be similarly ignorant. He is defending his right for that to be a woman’s problem, one which he (and a “we” constituted in his image, as his public) doesn’t need to be concerned. And so he needs to attack Sandra Fluke, personally, all the more because she wasn’t even going to talk about herself. By speaking on behalf of “women,” she threatened to render “women” a member of the body politic. Slut-shaming her — making it about her, personally — changes the subject from a generalizable woman’s public concern to a specific set of personal desires (which he can then moralize about, and use to silence her


Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, in short, because her voice threatens to reconstitute the nature of the American public: if she were heard — if the specificity of woman’s health were publicly speakable in the hallowed halls of Congress — then we could no longer pretend that this is simply an abstract and legalistic question of “religion,” “government,” and “medicine.” It would suddenly be apparent that the female public and the male public actually have different interests and concerns when it comes to issues like sex and contraception, that contraception means something different to people with different reproductive organs. The fact that (heterosexual) men’s enjoyment of consequence-free sex is dependent on the privilege of those consequences being borne by someone else might become thinkable, if those “someone else’s” had a public platform to speak about it. " ]

This post, "Won't Anyone Think of the SexBots?!" from Athena Andreadis's Astrogator's Logs, illuminates these issues even more brightly. It's a long essay too, and the discussion that follows must also be read.
Athena Andreadis, a molecular biologist, is very concerned with women as writers and protagonists and characters in Science Fiction. She points out in the response - discussion section about blaming women for the decline of science in Science Fiction, this, which is also how the southern states managed to keep the poor(er) whites aligned with the minority slaveowning wealthy power elite, despite the visible harm this economy did to the poor(er) white worker:
[ " As Francesca points out, the persistence of Michael Flynn, the transhumorists, MRAs and other suchlike on patently self-serving definitions of feminism speaks to a deep-seated and abiding fear of losing unearned perks awarded automatically and collectively to the gender based solely on visual inspection of primary genitalia. If even the worst man (by whatever definition, including resemblance to the local tribal god) is assumed to be better than even the best woman, it’s easy to see why that would be hard to give up. " ]

And then there's this, "Male Hysteria: A Comprehensive Handbook," on the I Am Aware of My Own Hypocrisy blog. The (male) author begins with this:

[ " Caveat: The following PSA can’t be considered sexist or biased against men in any way, shape of form. My male slave said it isn’t sexist*, so it can’t be. Charges and accusations thereof will be ignored or laughed at.


*Granted, I had to adjust the nipple clamps and use the whip a few more times, but he said it. I win!

Hysteria has for centuries been proclaimed a condition that affects only women, but a male version does exist and it is not only a lot more virulent and a lot more common, but also a lot more dangerous. Its correct name is testeria.

CAMaB = coercively assigned male at birth.

Testeria. n. Medical condition that affects only CAMaB, but disproportionately white CAMaB among the 12-48 age group. It involves estrogen levels dropping drastically. As a result, without nothing to stop it, cortisol levels go up. To prevent irreparable damage to the nervous system, the body creates antibodies. These antibodies are so aggressive that they eat brain cells, causing the patient to say and do things that defy common logic and, more often than not, endanger the patient and those around him.

Physical symptoms: excessive sweat, trembling hands, dialted pupils, flustered face, clenched teeth.


Psychological symptoms: persecution complexes, tendency to get defensive, diminished capacity of reasoning, verbosity, tendency to repeat oneself, persistent self-aggrandization, tendency to see the world at large in terms of black and white, solipsism. For some reason, which remains still unexplained, this condition affects disproportionately CAMaB in developed countries. " ]

Does this not describe to the nth degree figures such as Breitbart, Limbaugh, etc.? Not to mention the Apostles of Disunion ....

Remedial Course: How Free Market Capitalism Works

To refresh our memories as to exactly how free markets operate on the level playing field of capitalism and government staying out of these matters, let us enter the Way Back Machine to the 18th century. We shall land in the era of what is popularly known in the history text books as the French and Indian War in the New World, and the Seven Years War in Europe. This is roughly 1754–1763, though the struggle of France and Britain to control North America and various parts of the Caribbean, India, etc. was nearly a century-long conflict all together. We are in 1762, in British occupied Havana. Several times during these wars the British also occupied Martinique and other of the French Antilles.


The British re-made the Cuban economy during the very short time they ran things, turning it into a highly competitive slave plantation agricultural mono-economy of sugar. Martinique, Guadeloupe, San Domingue were already sugar plantation powerhouse suppliers -- indeed, San Domingue was the greatest wealth producer in the New World, funding the excesses of the French royals and nobles until their own revolution.

Now to the government staying O-U-T of the free market. The Jamaican and other British sugar plantation power elites of the Caribbean lobbied with every resource they had the members of both houses of Parliament to force Britain to return these islands to Spain and France. These islands' sugar production was now also being shipped to England, creating such a supply that the price plummeted. This was equally true for rum of course, and on a somewhat smaller scale, for coffee and tobacco. Their quality tended to be higher as well, and this was NOT FAIR to the original English sugar barons of the Caribbean. This competition was eating their fine wines, fine homes, fine paintings, fine horses, fine finer finest everything because the competition made their product so cheap they were no longer achieving the magnificent fortunes they were accustomed to whipping out of the lives of endless coerced labor from Africa to their mostly absentee landlorism-administered Caribbean plantations.

In the Treaty of Paris Cuba was given back to Spain (in exchange for the Floridas -- which Andrew Jackson would take in turn in approximately another four decades), and so were the French Antilles returned to France in exchange for its North American (New France) territories.

That's how government makes an even playing field for the free market to do its business fair and square for the ultimate benefit of the consumer.

This was laid out with such clarity of detail at the New York Historical Society's exhibition, "Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn." We spent most of my birthday afternoon in it, breathless, taking notes like mad, since unlike most museum now, the NYHS still doesn't allow non-flash, digital photography. This exhibit is one of the results we're starting to see of considering the American, the French and the Haitian revolutions as sections of a single wave of historical movement instead of them being considered as separate events with little if anything in common, other than the desire for "liberty" ignited in the "citizens" in France, in an imitation of the real thing that was the "revolution' of the British middle North American Atlantic colonies.

This exhibit has many surprising items that perhaps we might not consider together, at first thought. The second floor galleries of the exhibit proper are many and dense with information and objects. However, there are deeply related off-shoots on the main floor, for instance, including the original written document of the 13th Amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln -- allowing for the final, long-resisted step in the consequences of the San Domingue revolution, recognition of the nation of Haiti by the United States. I admit to feeling a great deal, viewing this actual document on loan from the LOC.

Upstairs the second gallery, "Where the Empires Ended," begins with the various trades going on between the North Americans, particularly those from Rhode Island, with the focus on Paramaribo, Suriname and Haiti, in the late 17th and 18th century. We viewed "Sea Captains Carousing in Suriname," the first genre painting made by a North American, John Greenwood (1727 - 1792). You can take a look at it here.

It was as though we'd gone on vacation, threading our way through these dimly lit galleries, where the real light was focused only on these exceedingly well-chosen objects dramatizing the connections between the slave trade, slavery and trade generally in the New World, colonization and then revolution. Among other things on the main floor were slave badges, that were worn by southern slaves, dating from the 1820's to the latest dated 1860. That says everything about the connections among all these things. We did not have a full revolution here until the Civil War. That was the revolution that changed the way things were done. (Up to a point, at least, and not enough then either, as Slavery By Another Name made so clear.) We felt we'd gone someplace else.

Tired, but exhilarated, we stopped at the NYHS's very nice restaurant and bar (no television! no sports), for wine and appetizers before meeting K and C and P and K for dinner at La Paella. Our barista was very good looking, and an actor, of course, a young fellow born and bred in Yonkers. He asked to be put on da List. He had an audition for another television commercial yesterday -- he's been getting one or two commercials a month lately, so he's a happy man as well as personable, friendly and a very good barista.

It was pouring rain most of the day, but it felt soft -- like a day in the first week of April, thus the silvery rain light of afternoon, the hazy street light of after dark, and the shapes of bare branches of Central Park's trees made it all heart-breakingly lovely.

It was a lovely birthday, one that took us both far away from the classroom. Now, tonight, we all head uptown for salsa in da Bronx.

*Slavery By Another Name* Broadcasts Tomorrow Night On PBS

PBS has an admirably high quality schedule of Black History Month broadcasts this year.
This one surely should not be missed, the screen adaptation of Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name. It's on tomorrow night (Monday, February 13).

What is particularly wonderful is that even those of us without televisions can see these because PBS puts up a feed online after the intitial broadcast. Here's their Black History Month schedule. The first one was The Underground Railroad. Last week's program of Scandinavian footage of the Black Panthers, Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, was wonderful -- and it corrects a lot of false info that's been propagandised about the Black Pathers, who they were and what they did.

Council of Elders dialogue with OWS this Sunday, Nov. 20th

In New York City on November 20^th, members of the Elder Council will spend time with those encamped at Zuccoti Park, beginning at 2:30 PM. They will lead a worship service in front of the “red structure” within Zuccotti Park at 3:30 pm. Elders will then host a dialogue with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and other interested individuals at 5pm, at 74 Trinity Place. Both events are open to the public.

http://www.belovedcommunitycenter.org/

Veterans of America’s 20^th Century civil rights movement will enter the 21^st Century Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles on Sunday, November 20.

Known as the “Council of Elders,” they will step inside the nationwide encampments to symbolically share the torch of hope and justice and engage the Occupiers in dialogue about defining movements of the past. “We want to contribute to this intergenerational movement,” says Dr. Vincent Harding, activist and writer in the civil rights movement. “We are thankful for the efforts of Occupy Wall Street to unite the 99% and bring the many gifts and great energy of millions into effective action to transform our nation.”
The Council of Elders is an independent group of leaders from the farm workers, sanctuary and human rights movements that shook the nation’s conscience with public protests over the past 50 years.
“We see Occupy Wall Street as a continuation, a deepening and expansion of the determination of the diverse peoples of our nation to transform our country into a more democratic, equitable, just, and compassionate society,” excerpt from the statement of solidarity by the Council of Elders to be read at each of the Occupy encampments.

By bringing their voices to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the elders are addressing a litany of social grievances, including poverty, mass incarceration, and what they call a culture of war and violence. Dolores Huerta, activist with Cesar Chavez and the farm-workers movement, believes today’s conditions create bitter divisions among peoples across the United States and throughout the world.
“We applaud the miraculous extent to which the Occupy initiative around the nation has been non-violent and democratic, especially in light of the weight of the systematic violence under which the great majority of people are forced to live,” says Rev. James Lawson, leading theoretician, tactician and theologian of the civil rights movement.

The economic crisis which sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement also motivated the veteran protesters. They cite soaring unemployment rates, home foreclosures, and inadequate health care as issues that require public outcries.
The Council of Elders promotes compassion and non-violent action as the highest values to reverse trends that put profits ahead of people in its quest to contribute to the much-needed movement for a more just society and a more peaceful world.
The council members are urging elders from around the nation to join the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In New York City on November 20^th, members of the Elder Council will spend time with those encamped at Zuccoti Park, beginning at 2:30 PM. They will lead a worship service in front of the “red structure” within Zuccotti Park at 3:30 pm. Elders will then host a dialogue with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and other interested individuals at 5pm, at 74 Trinity Place. Both events are open to the public.

Click here to download press release

U.S. and the Struggle for Civil Rights

The national commemoration of Martin Luther King's birthday is looming, along with the month of February, which is 'black history month," (about which Spike Lee has been attributed as observing something like, "You know they'd give us the coldest month," but if that is true or not I don't know.)

Reading about this new book, published, of course, at this time of the calendar, brings the sober realization that in the U.S. the struggle for civil rights has been going on so long that it can now be studied as an historical movement of 'longue durée" ("a term used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history"):

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore.

[ Forgotten Revolutionaries

How Southern communists, socialists and expatriates paved the way for civil rights.

Willful amnesia has been a chronic problem in American historical thought. Many of us, it seems, have preferred a simplified and sanitized version of national history, one that smooths out the rough edges that might complicate comforting visions of harmony and progress. This mythic approach to the past was especially popular during the two decades following World War II, when patterns of violence, extremism and political discord were either ignored or discounted. Politics, in the two-party context of American exceptionalism, had been reduced to a mere quibbling over details. In this fulsome view of the great American success story, there was no room for radical dissent, no place for systemic failure.

Recent decades, of course, have witnessed a withering assault on this attitude by an increasingly diverse cadre of professional historians, many of whom have shown a special interest in the evolution of social and political movements and the history of marginalized groups such as African Americans, women and the poor. Shining a light on the darkest recesses of U.S. history, revisionist scholars have challenged the presumptions of American exceptionalism. In the process, they have fostered a greater appreciation for the power of dissent and disorder, uncovering the radical roots of everything from the American Revolution and abolitionism to populism and organized labor. In the burgeoning field of civil rights studies, such an appreciation has been an important undercurrent for at least a decade. But with the publication of Glenda Gilmore's remarkable new book, Defying Dixie, the left-wing origins of the civil rights movement have risen to the surface of historical debate.

Gilmore, a North Carolina native and Yale history professor, transformed our understanding of the Southern progressive movement with her first book, Gender and Jim Crow, published in 1996. Defying Dixie promises to do the same for the emerging freedom struggle of the post-World War I era. The early stages of what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has aptly labeled "the long Civil Rights Movement" have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, so much so that most historians no longer feel comfortable with accounts of the movement that begin in the mid-1950s with the Brown decision or the Montgomery bus boycott. But even the most enlightened civil rights historians will find new material and much to ponder in Gilmore's richly textured study of the Southern communists, socialists and expatriates who challenged Jim Crow during the three decades following the Bolshevik Revolution. ]

My o my, isn't Senator Obama a long duration away from all this!

But -- and this is a most significant qualifier -- how much further away than this is Hillary Clinton's latest denial scramble re Martin Luther King and his effect upon the Civil Rights Movement. Just like her scramble that insists she thought she was voting for something other than the specifically titled, "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002." Feh.