"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
A joint project by a friend, Chicago artist MK Czerwiec, and me: “Great Moments in Inaugural Address History.” Let me explain about joint project: I suggested the idea and did some research; MK did all the heavy lifting of making the art happen. (Click for larger view.)
Copyright 2009 MK Czerwiec. All rights reserved.
Some people who would have loved to see this day: Mom and her brothers, all of them. South Side Irish, acutely aware that there was something wrong in the racial situation around them and all determined to a greater or lesser extent to do something about it. Bill — Bill Hogan — gave his life to the cause, Mom found a purpose in the civil rights struggle at moments when her own life was nearly unbearably difficult, and the rest gave what they could. They would be thrilled today. And one other person I'm thinking about: my mentor and our old family friend Max McCrohon. He would have loved this, too.
Dueling ministers: Rick Warren, the Southern California evangelical who gave the inaugural invocation, cut right to the heart of what makes my skin crawl about conservative Christians. His first words: "Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone." I guess if you're in the god business, that's the position you've got to take. And Warren himself, may the fairy sprites and trickster spirits of the world bless him, talks about the need to build bridges rather than walls with faith. But this particular brand of straight-laced "our way is The Way" preaching, this sort of Christian certainty, bespeaks an openness that's only open as long as you embrace it. Much more to my taste was the Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction, which began with lyrics from the hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing" [not "Lift Every Voice and Thing," as I earlier wrote] and ended:
"Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen. And Amen."
More later, maybe.
All American Freedom cookies (or “cookies” — closer inspection reveals they’re actually graham crackers, which ain’t cookies in my book, no way, no how). Not to be confused with American Spirit cigarettes or Freedom of Choice maxithins.
My first thought upon looking at the packaging, early this morning before my first cup of coffee, was, “Do kids still march around with the American flag like that?” Maybe — but only in the Wii All American Freedom Cookie game from Nintendo.
A subsequent thought was prompted by inspection of the back of the package, where I read, “Provides one bread for NSLP.” In other words, this counts as a serving of bread in the National School Lunch Program. Odd phrasing: “Ms. Lunch Lady, may I please have one bread?” I don’t think so.
What is “one bread”? I turn to an under-appreciated work of modern American literature, “Subchapter A–Child Nutrition Programs: Part 210–National School Lunch Program,” a 65-page PDF document. Still haven’t found the chapter on bread.
Oh, sure: You, wherever you are to the north or east of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, you have your cold snaps, your big old snowstorms, and your drifts. All that’s enough to make you forget how the cold season started some frosty morning a few months ago. Here on the Bay, frost happens every so often in the dead of winter, on some clear morning after a storm has passed. This morning was one of those frosty mornings for us to come out of our uninsulated bungalows and think that we’re in some kind of wintry solidarity with folks on the Columbia, near the East River, or on the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie.
In the newsroom, I don’t
believe in pet peeves. Way too many things nettle me to name just one as a
favorite. And face it: most pet peeves, including the ones I don't have, arise from some point of arbitrary wisdom elevated to a principle that's really just an excuse to vent about how no one does things the right way anymore.
But if I ever let myself indulge in the pet peeve thing, one of mine would be the use
of murder rate when one means murder toll. This is of particular concern now when cities are toting up the body count for the past year and feeding it to reporters who repeat the numbers (without thinking much about what they may or may not mean; most of thinking isn't a part of the exercise). The murder toll is the simple count
of murders in a particular place in a particular year. The rate is
typically an assessment of the number of homicides per capita (typically
expressed as the number of killings per 100,000 population). That way you can
compare places like Richmond, East Palo Alto and Oakland with
It’s OK but contrived
to use rate as a way of extrapolating or equating the number of murders in one
period of time to another period – “Pleasantville police say there have been
100 murders in the first six months of 2008; at that rate, the city will break
its yearly record of 190, set in 2007.” Personally, I’d stay away from this use
of rate because in the Bay Area, anyway, the ebb and flow of murder stats do
not seem to follow any rhyme or reason summed up by such simple arithmetic. Better
to apply this sense of rate in retrospect: “Police say 130 people were murdered
in Pleasantville in 2008. That’s one of the highest tolls on record, but police
note that the rate of killings dropped markedly after the bloody first six
months of the year, when 100 homicides were reported.”
Like I said: If I were to have a pet peeve, I could get some mileage out of this one.
The first of January has always felt to me more like the end of something than a beginning. From childhood, I have always had the feeling that New Year marked the close of everything I looked forward to at Christmas. New Year’s Day meant it was almost time to go back to school. It began a bleak stretch of winter with only the weak promise of Lincoln’s Birthday (this was an Illinois upbringing, after all, and Presidents Day came along after I was done with school) to get me out of class. The all-day football was a diversion, but hardly satisfying except that as long as that last game was still on — and it would be the Orange Bowl, playing long into the Central Time night — the holidays weren’t really over. Then time would finally run out, and you’d be facing January with nothing to take the edge off the fact the season had turned to cold, hard winter. Holiday lights and Christmas trees? They stayed up for a while, sometimes for weeks, but overnight turned into a reminder of the last pang-inducing and overdue holiday chore.
The first of the year? I’ll take the second, when I feel like I’m already sledding down the course of something new.
(And not — not! — that this is a comment on this year’s New Year’s Day, which was marked by taking down the luminaria this morning; seeing the wonderful documentary “Man on Wire” over in San Francisco with Kate, Eamon, and Sakura; having a repast of pizza and beer over at Lanesplitter, the Oakland restaurant where Thom works, and then going over to Thom and Elle’s place to check out some new electronics and the beginning, anyway, of “Iron Man.” It was a great day. But as a holiday, I’m not sure that I get it.)
Does this happen where you live? You see or hear a helicopter in the distance. You watch for a few seconds and realize it’s not going anywhere. It’s just hovering. And then you know something like news is happening nearby. Much of the summer, the appearance of helicopters over the UC-Berkeley campus signaled some new hijinks related to a group of tree-sitters trying to stop a construction project at the football stadium. Last spring, a chopper appeared in the dawn skies just a few blocks east of us and just sat there. Turned out a local guy had committed suicide by ramming his car into a line of parked vehicles at 100 mph.
This morning’s case in point this morning: While walking The Dog, we spotted a helicopter just hanging up there to the west, near I-80, the Eastshore Freeway. Two possibilities: a horrific traffic jam, possibly involving major roadway carnage, or some other photogenic event. When we got back to the house, we turned on KCBS, the AM all-“news” channel. The first traffic report comes on. No, nothing about a backup on the freeway down there. What then? During the local news segment, there’s an item about a body discovered burning on the frontage road adjacent to the freeway. Police are investigating. Choppers are hovering.
A friend points out a piece in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times Magazine. It’s the annual “The Lives They Lived” issue marking the passage of remarkable people. The story to which I was directed is titled, “Mildred.” It’s the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, the black woman and white man whose marriage in the late 1950s led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down state laws that prohibited interracial marriage.
Of course, one reason the remembrance of Mildred Loving strikes with particular poignancy is its appearance in the midst of the battle over gay marriage. Sure enough, the story touches on that fact, explaining that late in her life, activists approached Mildred Loving (her husband died decades ago) to see if she would endorse the gay-marriage cause. The story recounts:
“ ‘I just don’t know,” Loving told them. She hadn’t given it much thought. She listened sympathetically, a worn Bible on her end table, as the group’s founder, the furniture entrepreneur Mitchell Gold, told her of his own struggles as a teenager to accept that society would never let him marry someone he loved. She was undecided when the group left a few hours later, but told Ashley Etienne, a young woman who consulted for the group, that they could continue to chat about the subject over the phone.”
Eventually, Loving did make a statement. She wrote, in part: “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe that all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.”
She mentions “religious beliefs,” which also play such a big part in the fight over gay marriage. Why? To get a hint, it’s helpful to take a look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia. In summarizing the facts, Chief Justice Earl Warren noted the trial court’s sentence against the Lovings for violating Virginia’s laws against race-mixing–a year in jail suspended on condition the Lovings not visit Virginia together for 25 years–and quoted Judge Leon M. Bazile’s opinion in the case:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Mind you, that’s a statement from the bench, not from the pulpit (though based on this, I’m guessing the judge, who served 24 years in his circuit court seat, didn’t make too fine a distinction between one and the other.) Lest one think we’re dealing with a rogue jurist with some fringe, antique beliefs, consider the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals’ explanation of why it was ruling against the Lovings: “the State’s legitimate purposes were ‘to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,’ and to prevent ‘the corruption of blood,’ ‘a mongrel breed of citizens,’ and ‘the obliteration of racial pride.’ ” The religious language has been replaced by what the plaintiffs’ attorneys called “ludicrous” arguments in support of “odious” laws that had just one object: white supremacy. (Audio of the oral arguments, all two hours and 15 minutes’ worth, is at Oyez.org.)
“Odious” and “ludicrous,” yes. They were also the law in Virginia and 15 other states at the time Loving was argued. The United States was still emerging — not in some ancient time filled with Civil War battle smoke, but within many of our own lifetimes — from a regime in which is was thought proper for the state to subject part of its population to systematic humiliation, to rob citizens of their dignity by erecting daily reminders of their legal inferiority and otherness.
That brings me to Proposition 8 and all the other campaigns to “safeguard traditional marriage.” At bottom, they come back to the same effort to impose a certain religious and cultural viewpoint and to maintain a sense of superiority among one group — we straights, who are free to enjoy the privileges and rights attendant to marriage — over the other and to maintain the distinctions between the privileged and the other. The Prop. 8 proponents teach that God’s law proscribes marriage between members of the same sex; what’s more, if the alleged divine injunction is ignored, the collapse of society looms.
Perhaps the most impressive words in Earl Warren’s opinion in Loving v. Virginia are the final ones: “These convictions must be reversed,” he wrote. “It is so ordered.”
If only prejudice were so easily abolished.
NPR broadcast a story this morning reporting that retailers will “pull out all the stops” to move merchandise in this doleful shopping season. The report also assured us that sellers “aren’t pulling any punches” in their attempts to unload inventory.
What sort of stunt is NPR pulling here? The story could have gone much further:
–Merchants will not pull a fast one on customers.
–They are trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Or maybe a hippopotamus.
–They are not, however, pulling our leg. Times are tough.
–We’re all pulling for nour favorite shops to make it through the downturn. Wal-mart does not count as “a shop.”
–They will not pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. Except maybe in the hat and scarf department.
–They are trying their hardest to pull this shopping season out of the fire. Those Christmas chestnuts are getting charred.
–You don’t need to have any pull with store employees to get a good deal. Although when did it ever hurt?
–Who can resist the pull of a good sale? I’m stocking up on the buy-one, get-one-free lard bricks.
–Maybe the president will pull rank and order us all to shop. That made our problems go away after 9/11.
Pull yourself together. And once you’ve done that, remember we need to pull. Together. To help the economy pull through.
Keep spending!
From The Council on Foreign Relations:
“What is the doctrine of proportionality?
“The doctrine originated with the 1907 Hague Conventions, which govern the laws of war, and was later codified in Article 49 of the International Law Commission’s 1980 Draft Articles on State Responsibility (PDF). The doctrine is also referred to indirectly in the 1977 Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of whether states are party to the treaties above, experts say the principle is part of what is known as customary international law. According to the doctrine, a state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered. The response must also be immediate and necessary, refrain from targeting civilians, and require only enough force to reinstate the status quo ante. That said, experts say the proportionality principle is open to interpretation and depends on the context. ‘It’s always a subjective test,’ says Michael Newton, associate clinical professor of law at Vanderbilt University Law School. ‘But if someone punches you in the nose, you don’t burn their house down.’ ”
From The New York Times:
Israeli Gaza Strikes Kill More Than 200
GAZA — Waves of Israeli aircraft swooped over the Gaza Strip on Saturday, firing missiles at Hamas’s security headquarters and killing more than 200 people, bringing the highest death toll in Gaza in years in a crushing response to rocket fire by Hamas against Israeli towns.
After the initial airstrikes, which also wounded about 600 Palestinians, dozens of rockets struck southern Israel. Thousands of Israelis hurried into bomb shelters amid the hail of rockets, including some longer-range models that reached farther north than ever before. One Israeli man was killed in the town of Netivot and four were wounded, one seriously.
A military operation against Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, had been forecast and demanded by Israeli officials for weeks, ever since a rocky cease-fire between Israel and Hamas broke down completely in early November and rocket attacks began in large numbers against Israel. Still, there was a shocking quality to Saturday’s attacks, in broad daylight on about 100 sites, as police cadets were graduating, women were shopping at the outdoor market and children were emerging from school.
The center of Gaza City instantly became a scene of chaotic horror, with rubble everywhere, sirens wailing, and women shrieking as dozens of mutilated bodies were laid out on the pavement and in the lobby of Shifa Hospital so that family members could identify them. The vast majority of those killed were Hamas police officers and security men, including two senior commanders, but the dead included several construction workers and at least two children in school uniforms.
