Old Time Snowball Fight

When's the last time you were involved in a good old fashioned snowball fight? Sometimes there's nothing better as this recently colorized video from 1897 Lyon, France shows. This short film was shot by the Lumiere Brothers, who despite being among the very first filmmakers in the world, thought that the film business was a novelty game that would never go anywhere. So they got out of it about a decade after they shot this footage. Although they couldn't predict the future, as indeed none of us can, this film they left behind is another demonstration of the fact that regardless of differences in time, culture, and nation, humans are more alike than different. I liked how dude on the bicycle almost made it through the gauntlet. 

Book Reviews: A Dark History: The Kings and Queens of England

A Dark History: The Kings and Queens of England
by Brenda Ralph Lewis

This coffee table styled hardcover book details the histories of the English Royal Family, or rather the English Royal Families, from the 1066 Norman invasion to the present day. Human nature hasn't changed. It will be obvious upon reading this, not that he's ever denied it, just how much this history influenced the writer George R.R. Martin, as well as many other speculative fiction or historical fiction authors. 

Although we consider kinslaying as morally disgusting, when people are vying for power they often reject any standards. If your second cousin once removed gathers an army to support her claim that she's the rightful ruler, a recurring issue in England, you might find yourself doing shifty things. 

Some Kings and Queens refused to carry out the ultimate sanction against wayward relatives, often forgiving them, fining them, exiling them, or even imprisoning them instead. Other rulers, though, had no qualms about chopping heads at the first sign of problems, blood relative or not.

King Henry I, who was present at the "accidental" death of his older brother Rufus, cultivated a reputation as a hard unforgiving man. However, he liked his treasurer Herbert. So when the king discovered that Herbert had been involved in a plot against him, the King cancelled the normal punishment for treason: hanging, drawing, and quartering. In what the King considered to be an act of mercy, he instead ordered that Herbert be blinded and castrated. 

Nice guy, King Henry. 

Hagia Sophia Becomes A Mosque

Something that remains near constant across time and cultures is that when one group of people successfully invades, dominates, displaces, or conquers another group of people, members of the victorious group often, not always but often, decide to build their important political, social, or religious buildings and monuments on top of those of the defeated peoples, change the functions of those older buildings to something more in line with the values of the winning side, or just gleefully destroy the older structures altogether. 

It's a spike of the ball in the end zone complete with touchdown dance. It's hanging on the basketball rim after a particularly vicious dunk. It's watching the baseball soar out of the stadium, glaring at the pitcher, flipping the bat and taking a slow jaunt around the bases. In other words, it's something specifically designed to let the other group know that they lost and there's not a damn thing they can do about it. It's not a very nice thing to do. And that's the entire point. 

It's not often remarked upon or noted but Islam like Christianity, has its own history of invasion, conquest and imperialism. The Turks, who are originally from Central Asia, not only conquered the region known as Anatolia, now modern Turkey, but also much of Eastern Europe, including the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine), Constantinople, renamed Istanbul. 

William Rufus: The Scarlet King

In the book series A Song of Ice and Fire and its televised adaptation HBO's "Game of Thrones" The King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon, has a fatal hunting accident which is rather ineptly arranged by his disloyal and adulterous wife Cersei Lannister.

Cersei grew tired of the marriage and wanted to pass on formal rule to her son (though not her husband's). Cersei also needed to get rid of the hopelessly honest Prime Minister who made the mistake of informing her he intended to tell the King of her adultery and incest.

Although in the long run things didn't work out for Cersei and her family, in the short run they do. No one is ever punished for the hunting accident; Cersei and company jack the throne and keep it for most of the story.

In real life, hunting accidents during the Middle Ages were one of the normal explanations used to cover up rather obvious assassinations. William Rufus, King of England from 1087-1100, was the third son of William the Conqueror. So he wasn't expected to inherit very much. But life has a funny way of unfolding. Richard, one of William's elder brothers, died in what was evidently a legitimate hunting accident. 

Shortly after that William Rufus and his younger brother Henry decided it would be amusing to play a joke on their oldest brother Robert, who was William the Conqueror's presumptive heir. The two young men emptied a full chamberpot on Robert's head. 

The Benin Bronzes and Colonial Theft

In the movie Black Panther, Killmonger talks to a British museum curator, testing her expertise on various African artwork and artifacts. When Killmonger finds the item he's looking for and not so coincidentally tells the curator that she is incorrect about its origin, he informs her that she need not worry about such things any more as he is going to take it off her hands. 

She haughtily tells him that the item is not for sale. Killmonger asks her how does she think her ancestors obtained these items in the first place? Did they pay a fair price for them? Or did they, secure in their greater capacity for violence and total contempt for anyone not white, just take them. It's a powerful scene.

People, unfortunately especially people who are descended from colonizers and imperialists, often forget that much of the world's greatest art is in European museums not because of honest trade but because of violence and theft. I was reminded of this because of a recent NY Times article that detailed the halting and slow efforts of two people to convince European museums (in this case a British one) to do the right thing and return stolen art (in this case masks from Benin in what is now Nigeria).

In 2004, Steve Dunstone and Timothy Awoyemi stood on a boat on the bank of the River Niger. In the back of the crowd, Mr. Awoyemi, who was born in Britain and grew up in Nigeria, noticed two men holding what looked like political placards. They didn’t come forward, he said. But just as the boat was about to push off, one of the men suddenly clambered down toward it. “He had a mustache, scruffy stubble, about 38 to 40, thin build,” Mr. Dunstone recalled recently. “He was wearing a white vest,” he added. The man reached out his arm across the water and handed Mr. Dunstone a note, then hurried off with barely a word. 

That night, Mr. Dunstone pulled the note from his pocket. Written on it were just six words: “Please help return the Benin Bronzes.” At the time, he didn’t know what it meant. But that note was the beginning of a 10-year mission that would take Mr. Dunstone and Mr. Awoyemi from Nigeria to Britain and back again, involve the grandson of one of the British soldiers responsible for the looting, and see the pair embroiled in a debate about how to right the wrongs of the colonial past that has drawn in politicians, diplomats, historians and even a royal family. 

Daenerys Targaryen: Crazy Capricious Killer or Misunderstood Matriarch???

The Daenerys heel turn of burning King's Landing down and deliberately incinerating untold numbers of civilians caused a great deal of agita among some Game of Thrones fans.
Some people think that this is either Benioff's and Weiss's or even GRRM's commentary that strong women are always crazy women. I don't think that argument is worth discussing. FWIW, GRRM describes himself as a feminist. GRRM created many characters of different genders and sexualities, all of whom are varying mixes of good and evil, intelligence and stupidity, competence and ineptitude. It is almost certainly not a meta-commentary by  GRRM or show creators on the danger of female leadership to have Daenerys burn down King's Landing. The fact that so many people joyously read Daenerys as avenging feminist Messiah is a testament to GRRM's creative abilities, nothing else.

The second, more numerous and to my mind more legitimate detractors are not necessarily THAT bothered by Daenerys going Mad Queen but think that it wasn't earned in the show. The show is all we can go on here as these events have not taken place in the books. On a private board I frequent, and on quora too I might add, this last episode caused heated discussion. As one show watcher pointed out on this blog:  

This made no sense for her character as depicted in the show. Just last season she literally rebutted that she is "not here to be the queen of the ashes" when Yara and the Queen of the Sandsnakes urged her to burn King's Landing. That was 1 season ago. 1!!! Now all of a sudden she's the mad queen? Not buying it.

We must remember that unless and until Benioff ,Weiss and GRRM give us a detailed look at what were GRRM's contributions and what were Benioff's and Weiss' we may never know what events were GRRM's "true" ideas. For all we know GRRM might be reviewing screen events and decide to alter or more deeply explain story events. Still, for something this big and character defining as the near total destruction of King's Landing my money is on it being GRRM's intent all along. So Daenerys was always going to go bad.

Queen Fredegund

Didn't I tell you no back talk?

Dark Ages Europe was no place for shrinking violets. Every five minutes or so Europe experienced a barbarian invasion, peasant revolt, plague outbreak, religious war, an ambitious uncle making a power play, or a new fancy pants declaring himself the local ruler and ordering all partisans of the previous administration to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at the new Disneyland opening. With a few exceptions nice rulers finished last. Whether in fiction or reality, it's hard for a king or queen to be good.

But even by 6th Century standards, the Frankish Queen Fredegund stood out as a take no prisoners take no s*** kind of woman who never hesitated to lay hands on people who did her wrong, who might be thinking about doing her wrong, who were related to people who did her wrong, or who just happened to cross her path when she was in a vindictive mood, which by general accounts, was most of the time. Fredegund was quite possibly the earliest archetype for the abusive stepmother/wicked Queen found in Western European folktales later collated by the Grimm Brothers.

Fredegund began her rise to power as a lady-in-waiting for a Frankish Queen. You know the thing that Kings like to do with their Queen's ladies-in-waiting? Fredegund was apparently very skilled at that, soon becoming the number one concubine. Fredegund convinced King Chilperic to divorce his wife and put her in a convent. The King assented to Fredegund's wish, but married someone else. Fredegund bided her time. Not even a year had passed before the King's new wife, Galswintha, was found strangled to death. Possibly realizing that it wasn't particularly healthy to upset Fredegund, King Chilperic finally married her. Galswintha's relatives weren't thrilled with this turn of events. They wanted to kill Fredegund and King Chilperic several times over.

Einstein, Politics and Art

There have been many situations in which artists of varying talent levels have been accused of committing or proven to have committed nasty acts, often criminal, often against women. Others have been accused of saying or believing foul things about women or people of different races, religions or nationalities.. Recently this has led to many people claiming that in order to show our disdain for the artist and his bad actions or thoughts and support for his alleged or actual victims we should remove the artist's works from our playlists, cd players, theater stages, movie and tv screens, galleries, or bookshelves. Other critics of an even more puritanical bent, or perhaps just jealous, have argued that the artist's work itself is hopelessly flawed because of his bad thoughts/actions and thus must be completely expunged from existence and memory. They have argued that by definition anyone who believes or behaves a certain way can not produce work that is worth anything.

I've written before on how I find these approaches short sighted and limiting. But it's of course ultimately a personal and rather arbitrary decision as to which art you patronize. There are artists whose works I don't appreciate because I was exposed to something ugly they said or did before I was exposed to their creative work. And there are artists whose work I appreciate even though were we ever to meet there would likely be nothing but mutual disdain if not hatred. So it goes. But even in the case where I dislike an artist for whatever non-art related reason I have, I still believe that the value of their work stands apart from my subjective response to them. A non-art example of this recently popped up with the reveal of Einstein's travel diaries.

Brooklyn Museum Hiring Fracas

The Brooklyn Museum recently hired a white woman to be its curator of African Art. Some people didn't like this hiring decision, to put it mildly. 

A recent decision by the Brooklyn Museum to hire a white person as an African art consulting curator has prompted opposition on social media and from an anti-gentrification activist group that argues the selection perpetuated “ongoing legacies of oppression.” In response to a letter from the group that stated its concerns, Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, said in a statement on Friday that the museum “unequivocally” stood by its selection of Kristen Windmuller-Luna for the position. “We were deeply dismayed when the conversation about this appointment turned to personal attacks on this individual,” Ms. Pasternak said. 

She also extolled the expertise of Dr. Windmuller-Luna, calling her an “extraordinary candidate with stellar qualifications.” Dr. Windmuller-Luna, 31, has Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Princeton, and a bachelor’s degree in the history of art from Yale. She has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. Her appointment to the Brooklyn Museum was announced late last month.

In its letter earlier this week, the activist group Decolonize This Place called the museum’s selection of Dr. Windmuller-Luna “tone-deaf” and said that “no matter how one parses it, the appointment is simply not a good look in this day and age.”

“Seriously, @brooklynmuseum? There goes the neighborhood for good,” opined Philadelphia journalist Ernest Owens on Twitter.

Columbus Day

1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them..

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world and they were meaner than anybody else and they had gunpowder...The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their ability to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were."-Kurt Vonnegut
This past Monday, October 9th was Columbus Day. It's a federal holiday but many people do not receive the day off. Increasingly Columbus Day has become a flashpoint between people who would like to bring to light that Columbus wasn't really a good man as the term is understood today or in 1492 and between those who see any attempt to revise bad history as a simplistic attack on whites, Italians, or Western Civilization. I was reminded of how the second group thinks when I was listening to a local white (supposedly liberal) radio host bemoan the city of Detroit's planned renaming of Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day. The radio host and most of his callers were of the opinion that everyone (by which they meant non-whites) was just too sensitive these days. They said that well sure maybe Columbus did some bad things but Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't perfect either. 

And in their view because America existed now that made everything okay. The radio host closed out with what he thought was the devastating conclusion that Columbus was good because "our European ancestors never would have made it here were it not for Columbus".  Wow. How can anyone argue with that logic.

Historical Narratives, Namibia and Self-Respect

Can you imagine a statute honoring SS boss Heinrich Himmler being erected in Tel Aviv, Israel? No?
Do you think that current day residents of Nanjing, China would support a monument to the bravery of WW2 Japanese General (and Prince) Asaka, who oversaw the horrific Nanking Massacre? That probably wouldn't go over too well either. Well would modern day citizens of Bulgaria be in favor of a monument to the Ottoman Turkish general who ordered the Batak Massacre? Perhaps not. Presumably locals would be unmoved by callous arguments that these men were trying to bring civilization to recalcitrant ungrateful hardheaded backwards savages or that whatever atrocities occurred were regrettable, rare and overstated or that hey you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs or the old standby that it was a different time and place so we shouldn't judge those brave men by our current moral standards. It has always been a bad thing to rape and murder people. It has always been a bad thing to deliberately target non-combatants. It has always been a bad thing to attempt to wipe out entire groups of people. The problem is that humans are as a species very tribalistic. We often have difficulty applying the moral standards that we know are true to people who are not part of our tribe. And the greater difference that someone shows in behavior or looks from us the more trouble we can have accepting that this person has the exact same moral claims to life, liberty and happiness that we do. So even though we know that certain actions are wrong often times it doesn't hit home that those things are wrong until someone does them to someone who either looks like you or someone that you care about. 

The Kiss: V-J Day

Just about everyone in the US has seen this photo. It's probably the best known symbol of the end of World War Two. It's also in some cases been seen as an snapshot memory of a better time, when America unambiguously won conflicts. For some people this photo is the pictorial paragon of a time where optimism was in the air and there was nothing that this country could not do. The photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt took this picture in Times Square of a sailor kissing a nurse shortly after the announcement of the Japanese unconditional surrender and end of the war. Growing up I naively thought that both of the people were either married to each other or were dating. That wasn't the case. The sailor and nurse were strangers to each other. That nurse, Greta Friedman (Zimmer) recently passed away. Greta Friedman, who said she was grabbed and kissed by a sailor in a euphoric moment that made for one of the most defining American photos of the 20th century, died on Thursday in Richmond, Va. She was 92. The cause was pneumonia, her son, Joshua Friedman, said. In 2012, a writer on the website Crates and Ribbons argued that the picture depicted not a moment of romance, but a “sexual assault by modern standards,” pointing to Ms. Friedman’s description of the kiss during her interview with the Veterans History Project. “I felt that he was very strong. He was just holding me tight. I’m not sure about the kiss,” Ms. Friedman said. “It was just somebody celebrating. It wasn’t a romantic event.” In an article in 2014 about the photo, Time, whose parent company discontinued the monthly publication of Life magazine in 2000, noted that “many people view the photo as little more than the documentation of a very public sexual assault, and not something to be celebrated.” Ms. Friedman did not shy away from the photo or her role in it, her son said. Mr. Friedman said he believed she understood the argument that it was an assault but did not necessarily view it that way.
LINK

Standards and mores change of course. There probably aren't too many people today who would venture to grab someone and plant one on their lips without prior consent, some sort of signal or an ongoing relationship. That said though when once in a life time events occur people do feel emboldened to do or say things they otherwise wouldn't attempt. By today's standards this would be some sort of assault but even then there are people who wouldn't feel that way if it happened to them. Knowing the story behind this photo I just think it's a Rorschach test on how our concepts of masculinity, femininity and consent have mutated over the years.

Hiroshima: War, Peace and Memory

"When you got an all out prize fight, you wait until the fight is over, one guy is left standing and that's how you know who won." -Al Capone from The Untouchables.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. A few days later will see the 70th anniversary of the subsequent atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Each bombing immediately killed as many as 80,000 people in each city by most estimates. There would be many other people who would die later from wounds, radiation and cancers. The bombings finally convinced the Japanese Emperor Hirohito to drop most of his terms for surrender (over the vociferous objection of the military although like most so-called royalty being self-serving Hirohito requested to retain royal prerogatives). The other three conditions for surrender which the Emperor and the military leadership had previously insisted upon were (1) no military occupation of Japan (2) Japan would try its own war criminals (3) Japan would disarm itself. These conditions were obvious non-starters to the US though I would argue that the ensuing occupation was much easier than Japan had any reason to expect.

In any event the idea that one bomb could destroy one city made a huge impact at the time and obviously in the decades since then. There were some people at the time of the atomic bombings who thought that they were unnecessary if not criminal in nature. These weren't just people outside of the military either. Whether for moral or other reasons some leaders within the military and political establishment weren't sure that the use of the atomic bombs was justified. Others saw no problem with using the new weapon. Surely it was no different than the first person using a gun against an overconfident swordsman. If you're at war and have superior technology you use it. The Japanese surrender made a US invasion unnecessary and thus saved American lives. Before the atomic bombings, the Battle of Okinawa lasted almost 90 days and saw unbelievably vicious fighting and atrocities by both sides, including rape and deliberate targeting of civilians. The US lost around 14,000 marines and soldiers while the Japanese lost at least 77,000 troops. From this battle, both sides took the lesson that the invasion of Japan would be something close to an exterminationist undertaking. Now counterfactuals are always just that. No one can say for sure what would have happened. Some people have accepted the narrative that the atomic bombings were war crimes for which the US should be ashamed. Others say that we must work to rid the world of all nuclear weapons.

A very very very long time ago I used to think that the atom bombs were indeed criminal and likely racist in their application. But that was before I read Slaughterhouse-Five and researched the firebombing of Dresden. And later on (in my dissolute youth I was a WW2 buff) I learned all about the firebombing of Tokyo. More people died in the Tokyo bombing than died in Hiroshima. Does it really make a moral difference if someone is immediately turned to ash by a nuclear device or is incinerated or suffocated by a non-nuclear bomb? I don't see that it does. And certainly a nation that committed the Nanking Massacre has no room to point fingers about civilian casualties. The decision of moral import is whether or not to bomb a largely civilian area (though there were a high number of soldiers in Hiroshima). Once that decision has been made, everything else is just details. War, particularly total war, can and does often devolve to starkly utilitarian considerations. If you can break the enemy's morale and destroy his industry you can prevent well armed and supplied motivated soldiers from showing up at the front. If the enemy has no vehicles or communication or oil or gasoline then he can't effectively fight. More of his soldiers die or surrender and more of yours stay alive. That's the theory anyway. After the war it was discovered that aerial bombing of civilians had less of an strategic impact than many people had assumed. It just terrorized people and made them angrier. Nevertheless the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been the exception that proved the rule. Fear broke through the insane Japanese military code. Hirohito finally saw reason and surrendered, thus saving countless lives. 

The atom bombs were horrible events. We should work to make nuclear weapons unthinkable. The US needs to stop its addiction to war and cease its arms exports. Everyone on this planet should work for peace whenever possible. But in 2015 the US has no reason to think of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as criminal actions. Japan started it; the US finished it.

Phil Robertson, Justine Sacco and Free Speech

I didn't want to write about this until it had reached some level of closure and now that A&E has rescinded its non-suspension suspension of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson I'd like to discuss a few things.
We've talked about this before here and here and here. People should understand what free speech means. With a few exceptions the government, (state, federal, municipal) can't physically prevent you from expressing or sharing your opinion, fine you or put you behind bars for your thoughts, pass laws to make your opinion illegal, or require you to get permission from the government before expressing your opinion. There are increasing attempts by governments at all levels to undermine these protections. The First Amendment limits government actions. Private actors are far different entities. The blog lawyers could detail the case histories but corporations and individuals often have the right to hire and fire as they see fit and associate with whom they want. Their money, their company, their rules. If you don't like it well go find another outlet that more closely approximates your belief system. So when Phil Robertson said: 

"Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers -- they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right" 

and 

"I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person," Robertson is quoted in GQ. "Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” 

It was no violation of his free speech rights for A&E to have suspended him from Duck Dynasty (which was just PR as the new season was already filmed) or for other groups to have criticized him.

When  PR exec Justine Sacco sent out her joking tweet about AIDS and her employer decided that it could continue to make money and thrive without her contributions, again, there was no threat to her free speech. No one put her in jail. She is free to make all the jokes about AIDS and Africans that she wants to make. Go for it I say. At least for now she can make such statements without being encumbered by such constraints as gainful employment. But I'm sure she'll land on her feet eventually. She must find an employer with different values than her previous company, one that understands and accepts her odd (racist) sense of humor. I doubt that will take too long.

Those doggone white people

You would think that conservatives, who at least when it comes to contraception, abortion and racist speech, champion the rights of corporations and individuals to exercise freedoms of speech, religion and association, would understand that the door swings both ways. These freedoms apply to everyone, not just conservatives. Regarding the content of Robertson's statements I'll echo what most intelligent people already pointed out. Robertson was born in 1946. He was a boy when some of the first court decisions opposing segregation came down and a young adult by the time the South was forced, kicking and screaming, to allow desegregation. When Robertson says he didn't know any black people that were saying "those doggone white people" he might have considered the fact that many black people in 1950s and 1960s Louisiana would have thought twice before expressing their honest opinions to any white person, self-described "white trash" or not. It was after all often the "white trash" who were burning buses, beating sit-in protesters, and committing other violent acts. Robertson doesn't say if he or his family members were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. If he had been perhaps he would learned people's true thoughts. Or Robertson might have, if he were so inclined, when he was 18, travelled to Jonesboro, Louisiana and talked to the Deacons of Defense, a group of armed black men, who intended to protect themselves and their community from conservative violence both official and non-official. The Deacons shot back when they were shot at, something which infuriated racist whites. 

In fact given Louisiana's vicious history of segregation and violence, you have to wonder what planet Robertson was living on if he thought black people were happy with their lot in Louisiana or anywhere else in the Jim Crow South. I wish the GQ interview had delved a little more deeply into the difference between Robertson's claimed experiences and the reality of what was going on. Why the hell does Robertson think Nina Simone wrote Mississippi Goddamn?  Because that's not a very happy song. No it's not a happy song at all. Since I do happen to know and be related to black people who lived under Jim Crow I can safely say that Robertson doesn't know the whole story. "Welfare and entitlements" don't have anything to do with being harassed or murdered because you opposed the Southern terror state.

There is actually scripture that would seem to condemn gays. AFAIK there's next to nothing in the Bible that would seem to condone a GLAAD approved positive view about homosexuality. However there is also scripture that would seem to condemn just about anyone. Although Paul condemns homosexuality, Jesus doesn't speak on it. Theologians can argue but people tend to pick and choose which sins they condemn. Jesus talked about this hypocrisy in his Sermon on The Mount but apparently no one listened. When you set yourself up to judge, well that's not really a believer's job, according to Jesus. If you don't adhere to Robertson's views on gays, find a different Christian interpretation that's more to your liking. There's no shortage of sects. But this whole discussion about Biblical injunctions presumes that the Bible should be the basis of secular law or morality. Unless and until you're ready to start stoning disobedient children or allowing men who rape unmarried virgins to make amends by marrying them and paying their father fifty shekels, you might have to admit that the Bible might not always be the best basis for a modern legal or moral system. 

Robertson's comments bothered me less than the hypocrisy of conservatives who sought to cast him as a free speech martyr even as many of the same conservatives did their best to harm the careers of other people with whom they disagreed. Do you remember the conservative rush to protect the free speech rights of Lupe Fiasco, Ward Churchill, The Dixie Chicks, Martin Bashir, Louis Farrakhan, Van Jones and Reverend Wright to say what they wanted without criticism or danger to their careers. Of course you don't. 

Free speech is an endangered species. Those “intolerants” hatin’ and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.

-Palin speaking of Phil Robertson

"Those with that platform, with a microphone, a camera in their face, they have to have some more responsibility taken," she said on Fox & Friends.

-Palin speaking of Martin Bashir

All we learned from the Robertson and Sacco incidents is that money talks and bs walks.
Robertson is an integral part of cable's top show. His family backed him up. A&E and its advertisers, business partners and other corporations made the financial decision that they didn't want to lose millions in revenue. Sacco was not that valuable to her employer so they let her go and kept it moving. So if you're going to say something controversial or even outright vile, make sure you either work for yourself or are extremely valuable to your employer.

Thoughts?

Chris Rock, Melissa Harris-Perry, Conservatives, Racism and Patriotism

You may have missed it but Chris Rock had a tweet on the Fourth of July that sent some easily and perpetually outraged conservatives off the deep end.

Happy white peoples Independence Day the slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks.

Additionally Professor Melissa Harris-Perry had a piece about what the Fourth of July meant to her. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This also sent many of the same (mostly white) conservatives into fits of rage. Actually the points made by Chris Rock and Professor Melissa Harris-Perry weren't really all that different from the points made by our very own Janitor in his Independence Day post.

One thing which is important to remember is that the people who define themselves as Black and/or are defined by others as Black in the American context generally have ancestors that arrived on these shores before 1820 and in many cases as early as the 1700's or before. And even if they don't have those particular ancestors, as long as they LOOK like they do, they will be treated as if they do. So even if you're a recent Somalian or Malian immigrant who just got off the boat or plane, even if you lack certain cultural heritages shared by other Black Americans you're gonna get the same treatment.

Now I just want you to imagine something. Let's say that Black people had deliberately and despite everyone begging them not to do so, started the bloodiest and most destructive war this country had ever seen, one that divided families and pitted fathers against their sons, brothers against brothers. Let's say that Black people specifically and proudly rejected the United States government and said they wanted a nation based on the age old principles of Black supremacy, which should be obvious to anyone who is intelligent, by which they primarily meant other Black people. Now imagine that even after Black people badly lost this war, they never really admitted to themselves that they lost or that their cause was wrong. Instead they worked overtime to alter the historical record so that the cause of the war was not actually their ownership of a despised minority and their eagerness to split the nation, but instead the war was all a tragic misunderstanding caused by among other things big government racial egalitarians.  And let's say that over time this attitude seeped into the Black media, which did all it could to portray the fighters as noble though tragically outnumbered warriors. And finally let's stipulate that far from reaching some sort of understanding that the revolt was wrong, Black people put up statues and monuments to those who led the revolt, spoke fondly of the revolt and every chance they could waved revolt battle flags. Do you think that if Black people had done and were doing this, that they would be accepted as patriots by conservatives or shunned as single minded bigots with dangerous revanchist fantasies?

Well we know the answers to that don't we?  Conservatism has many strains but since the sixties or so, conservatism has increasingly worn a Southern racist face. Think about this. The same people who are attempting to chastise Chris Rock or Professor Perry as insufficiently patriotic or horribly ungrateful never ever ever have an unkind word to say about Confederate memorials, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Daughters of the Confederacy, Southern Partisan, Secession Memorial balls and parties, and any other host of mainstream organizations, events, literature, parties, books and other media designed to remember and celebrate the people who started the ugliest and bloodiest war in American history, primarily because they believed in white supremacy and wanted to ensure their right to hold slaves and expand slavery. No that's all ok.

But let a Black person point out that prior to 1865 most Black people were slaves and those that weren't were often at a very real risk of becoming a slave and suddenly that's the crime of the century. No, apparently Black people, alone among humans, should have a memory that eliminates all the bad things. In fact some conservatives, such as Michael Medved, think that slavery wasn't that bad and Black Americans are better off for it  while others, such as Mark Krikorian argue that Haiti would have been better off with more, not less, colonialism and slavery.

Again, let's try this argument out in some different historical contexts. The modern state of Israel would probably not have come to exist without Hitler. His genocide of six million Jews and weakening of the British Empire gave the Jewish groups in Palestine both moral suasion over the Western powers as well an opportunity to create facts on the ground. Does anyone in their right mind really think that Israelis should weigh the lives of their ancestors against their modern state and say, "Yes, too bad about them but what the heck it was worth it?". Uh no.

Similarly does anyone go to the Lakota Sioux and say "Why don't you stop talking about Wounded Knee. After all some of you people got casinos out of it?" Probably not.

Finally if you went to Germany and everywhere you looked you saw Nazi flags, Iron Crosses, streets and monuments named after prominent Nazis and local "Nazi Veterans Day celebrations" wouldn't you think that some Germans had some issues on which they needed help?

People remember. They remember the good and the bad. And it is pointless to try to make them do otherwise. And frankly it is somewhat insulting. Many people on this planet organize their lives on what some people consider to be completely mythical events that happened 2000-4000 years ago. So it is rather silly to suggest that people forget about things that happened just a mere 200-300 years ago or in some cases in living memory.  America is a great country. But it also has committed multiple sins. America is the freedom to live as you want AND it is also the rubbing of salt into a slave's wounds after whipping for purely sadistic reasons.

Jackson begins his narrative with several instances of harsh treatment he received and witnessed during his time as a slave, including the role of women in the horrors of slavery.  He says of the slave owner’s wife, “The sight which most delighted her eyes was to see a slave whipped,” and one of her daughters grew up to murder Jackson’s sister by having her whipped to death.

If we intend to tell the truth and be honest we have to remember both sides. We should remember for example that some Black people fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War. Why? Because the British offered freedom and some of the would be Americans did not. Were they bad people? No they weren't. They were doing what it took to secure their freedom.

We have got to stop whitewashing things. Tell the truth and let people make up their own minds. The controversy over statements by Professor Perry and Rock show that history is not really about happened. It's more about how we intend to shape the story of what happened for current day political reasons. It's often propaganda.
h/t Harvey's Global Politics

Thoughts?
Should black people just forget the uglier parts of history?
Do conservatives secretly feel guilty about the American history of slavery? After all it wasn't conservatives who were agitating for abolition.

Why do conservatives freak out anytime someone mentions the bad parts of American history?

Book Reviews-Alien Invasions, Black Heroes and Dangerous Women

Infected by Scott Sigler.

The typical alien invasion book features squirmy octopus looking beings that arrive on Earth and start shooting everyone with plasma beams.  There’s also normally a dastardly effete scientist or politician who either wants to learn from these invaders or worse, sell out humanity to the aliens. In the end the good guys win.  They are led to victory by a team that includes a tall square jawed hero, his take-no-nonsense girl Friday, a plucky sidekick and maybe a dog.

Infected, by Scott Sigler is not that book.

The immediate difference is the scale of Sigler’s invasion. What if the alien invasion is not on the macro level but on the micro level? The human body is home to a multitude of viruses, bacteria and parasites. There are over 1000 different sorts of parasites that can live in humans. Some of these are relatively benign but many are quite disgusting and dangerous. Most are invisible to the human eye.  

Infected examines what happens when an alien bioengineered parasite infects humans, turning some of them into lunatic killing machines while making others behave in even more disturbing ways. The parasites have a greater purpose besides just killing other people.  This was a really disturbing book and I mean that as the highest of compliments to the author. I liked it a lot!!! I liked that the author is a Michigan native and sets most of the story in my college town, Ann Arbor and its bedroom communities. 

Most of the story is told thru the POV of one Perry Dawsey-a former U-M linebacker who now works in a dead-end IT job. Formerly known as “Scary Perry” because of his unrestrained brutality on the field, Dawsey blew out his knee and lost any chance at an NFL career.  One day before work he notices a few discolorations on his body. He thinks nothing of it until a few days later he realizes the spots not only aren’t going away but they’re also growing and changing in texture.  These growths are immune to such things as calamine lotion, alcohol, fungicides or skin creams.  A little later Dawsey thinks he’s going crazy because these things seem to be talking to him.  Unknown to him, Perry is also being frantically sought after by both a CIA agent (Dew Phillips) assigned to a new federal agency which officially doesn’t exist and by a CDC epidemiologist  (Margaret Montoya), who has made some discoveries she doesn’t want to accept.  Perry has the sort of nature that will not allow him to lay down to anyone without a fight-no matter the cost. Battle is joined.

This is great biological sci-fi horror.  It captures the anger and fear we have about disease.  This is based in hard science. There is nothing supernatural in the story.  I can’t over emphasize how unnerving this book is. A great deal of it takes place in Dawsey’s apartment.  We get the POV of the parasites. Through the book we learn more about what they want and what they are. Sigler has modeled this on some real-life entities. This is Stephen King’s “I am the Doorway” on steroids.  If you don’t like gleefully detailed descriptions of exactly how the human body and parasites work and to what extremes Scary Perry will go to in an attempt to save himself, let this pass you by. This is first in a trilogy.

Standing at the Scratch Line by Guy Johnson.

This is the debut novel by Guy Johnson, who is the son of Maya Angelou.  This novel shows that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree when it comes to talent. It’s hard to describe this book because it touches on so many different topics. The short description is that it tells the story of one LeRoi “King” Tremain , a black man with a quick temper and an even quicker mind who leaves early 20^th century Louisiana after disputes with a rival Black-Creole criminally minded family lead Tremain to murder two white deputies.

Fleeing North, Tremain winds up in the segregated Army during WWI in which he finds himself in combat with racist white soldiers as much as he is with the Germans.  He joins the all Black 369^th Battalion. Many of King’s army exploits are based on the very real Henry Lincoln Johnson. 

In the army he makes connections and allies that will serve him for the rest of his life.  Upon his return to the states King embarks upon several adventures which add to his reputation as that crazy Bad N**** that doesn’t take any stuff off of anyone and especially not racist whites. This includes run-ins with the Klan, various political leaders and the Mob in Chicago and New York.  King is often a brutal character and is something of an antihero. But he is always an engaging one and has what might be considered a fairly strict code of honor. He has a very strong appreciation for his own self-interest but he doesn’t lie or cheat. Deal with him honestly and he will do the same. Do otherwise and run the risk of coming up missing.  It’s said in his home bayous that supposedly every 30-40 years the Tremain family produces a child that will terrorize those around him; King is that man.

This entire story is not quite as anachronistic as one might think. Amoral and occasionally criminally minded though he may be, King represents a paragon of Black resistance to white racism that was always there in American life, though it was obviously not celebrated. Whether it be the mythical Stagolee , the very real African Blood Brotherhood  or David Walker  people like King existed and still exist. In the book’s afterword, Johnson says that some of the story is based on things he heard about his own grandfather as well as the fact that there were black people who had no choice but to defend themselves with violence or otherwise own nothing within the Deep South. Johnson says that a strong Black male character like King may be an anomaly within fiction but not in real life. 

I also want to make two things clear. 1) King is not a superman. He pays a price for some of the wrong he does. Occasionally he is overmatched. 2) This is most definitely not “thug lit”. In both skill and style I would compare this to Dickens. There are far too many characters to describe here but they are all well drawn and have complex motivations. The women in King's life have interests of their own.

The title of the book refers to the practice common in bare knuckle fights.  Before a fight began, a line was drawn in the dirt between the two fighters. The fight would begin and the line would be crossed. If a man was knocked down, his opponent had to return to his side of the scratch line. The other man had to get up and walk to the line if he wanted to continue. Otherwise the man standing at the line was the winner. By hook or by crook, King is the one standing at the scratch line more often than not.

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie.
I loved Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy (FLT). It was a corrective to the more insipid high fantasy which infests bookstores.  Abercrombie writes in an unabashedly adult and quite profane style. So I had high expectations for his novel Best Served Cold (BSC).

BSC is quite similar to FLT. It’s set in the same world. Many minor characters from FLT show up in BSC. BSC shares themes with FLT; what does revenge really profit someone, how can you be good in an evil world, are men and women really all that different, and does what anyone does in life really matter in the long term. After all good or bad, we all end up "back in the mud" as one warrior reasons.

It is a stand-alone book. You can read it and enjoy it without having read FLT. Reading BSC will not spoil FLT.
The story opens with the mercenary leader Monza Murcatto and her brother Benna being invited to an honorary event by her employer, the Grand Duke Orso. It is no spoiler to reveal that Orso has decided that he can't trust either of the Murcattos any longer and has them both murdered. Or so he thinks. Monza, who is also known as “The Butcher of Caprile” and “The Snake of Tallins” for her brutal style of warfare, improbably survives and swears to kill Orso, Orso's sons and everyone else who was in the room when her brother was murdered and she was scarred for life.

We have a revenge obsessed woman, her motley crew of quirky psychopaths and money hungry killers who will either assist her or betray her, old lovers or would-be lovers showing up and of course an ice cold murderer who is dispatched to eliminate her. In short, although the ride is exciting, it's not exactly a new story. There are more than a few shout outs to "Kill Bill" and "The Princess Bride".

Abercrombie gets a little lazier about national stereotypes. Styria, where all of the action takes place, is so much of a stand-in for Renaissance Italy that one wonders why Abercrombie didn't just set his tale in 15th century Italy. It would have read exactly the same. Murcatto is somewhat based on the real life terror Caterina Sforza. Many of the names Abercrombie uses are either real life Italian names or sound as if they could have been- Vinari, Nicomo Cosmo, Grand Duke Orso, etc.

Women have several key roles in the book, besides the lead. This is not done in any sort of self-consciously feminist style but realistically. Abercrombie's female characters are just as self-centered, morally vacuous, flawed and dangerous as his male ones. Abercrombie maintains a sharp ear for dialogue.  No one stops in the middle of a fight to say something snarky.  Survival is not guaranteed.  People actually get tired and make mistakes. Lovers quarrel and cheat, etc. Murcatto's quest for revenge leads her to some places she'd rather not visit.
I would like to see what Abercrombie could do with characters who are not 100% selfish, twisted, sadistic and cynical. Cynicism is his defining motif.
There is not much of a positive character arc for anyone.  Those who are openly evil remain so. Some people that appear to be decent are revealed to be evil. And even those few people that try to be good eventually decide that being good doesn't work and become as evil as anyone. As one person says repeatedly "Mercy and cowardice are the same thing". Just to make this point crystal clear the author opens chapters with quotes from Machiavelli and various Borgias.
There is one depressed, socially maladroit, and verbose poisoner-very reminiscent of the Tom Hanks' role in The Ladykillers who was in some respects the closest thing the book had to a voice of reason. The book is otherwise EXTREMELY nihilistic. Consider it "fantasy noir".

Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy it -just not as much as FLT. FLT actually did have a few people try (and usually fail) to do the heroic thing. FLT had better misdirection and slower reveals. There is a twist at the end of BSC which was pretty good. There are more than a few moments of humor in this book-mostly centered around the aforementioned gabby poisoner.