Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
From Powerline comes a nugget that is worded so tightly and efficiently that I see no way to “tease” it, so I’ll just quote it in full…
One of the several reasons why the mainstream media have consistently underestimated the significance of the Trinity/Wright/Pfleger story is that, to a considerable degree, conventional reporters and editors tend to agree with Rev. Wright’s critique of America. When Wright said, “God damn America,” reporters thought he’d gone a little too far but didn’t necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment.
A good illustration of this was the New York Times’s article on black liberation theology in which the paper endorsed as true Wright’s claim that the United States has used biological warfare against other nations. (This was cited to explain that the idea of the federal government inventing the AIDS virus in order to exterminate African-Americans was not so far-fetched.)
What on earth could the Times reporter have had in mind? Maybe the old canard about smallpox and the Indians; I can’t think of any other candidates. In any event, this morning’s Times corrects the error:
An article on May 4 about black liberation theology and the debate surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Senator Barack Obama’s former minister, erroneously confirmed a statement by Mr. Wright that the United States has used biological weapons against other countries. There is no evidence that the United States ever did so.
Note, though, that the paper is keeping its options open. Who knows, maybe the evidence will turn up someday.
This usually-unacknowledged sympathy with Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism is, I think, part of the reason why the mainstream press misreported the Wright controversy from the beginning.
I remember the last time I had occasion to think about this. It was…a day and a half ago, Thursday evening, cleaning out my son’s end-of-school homework folder. I found an essay about the Santa Ines Mission. I remember helping him with the photographs & illustrations involved in this, but this was the first time I saw the core thesis. I sent it along to his mother, and didn’t copy it, but I remember about forty percent of the way through it makes brief mention of the fact that the Indians burned down the Mission in 1824. It had been rebuilt since then but did not resume it’s missionary functions after that.
The punch in the gut was the very last sentence, something about how “the white settlers were mean to them [the Indians].” I thought for the briefest moment of jotting in something smarmy at the bottom, like, “So the moral of the story is you shouldn’t burn down peoples’ buildings or they might be mean to you?” I thought a little while longer about having a chat with the boy about it. I decided both actions promised inadequate return; my son’s already been counseled against absorbing politically correct nonsense, and the truth of it is — hey, yeah, the white settlers were pretty mean to the Indians.
But I’m not going to pretend to deny what’s going on here. You’re supposed to attach little “down with whitey” trailers on the ends of your essays — if you do that, you’re much more likely to get an A+. That’s the way it worked in my day. We used the word “education” to describe what was taking place there. To borrow a phrase from Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what they think it means.
But the sin committed here, is not so much with regard to truth, as with regard to relevance. The subject is the Santa Ines Mission. What’s that got to do with white guys being mean to the Indians? Not an awful lot…on the other hand, Powerline’s example from the NYT has to do with truth. It made the white guys look like a bunch of Dirty Rotten Creepy Jerks (DRCJs), and we’re the New York Times so hey, we like that a lot. Let’s run with it.
After all, we’re the “Paper Of Record.”
Update: This passage from the original New York Times article, also, hit me sort of like a pillowcase full of dead batteries:
“Most black church members want to see their ministers involved in defending the race and improving civil rights,” [Bishop Harry] Jackson said. “The anger and bitterness that bleeds through in Reverend Wright’s comments are something that many blacks can sympathize with, even if they don’t want to hear it in the pulpit.” [emphasis mine]
May I suggest a stronger identification of what exactly it is we’re trying to do as we tinker with something called “race relations.” We’ve been making it a social project for a very long time now, kind of a heavy-handed one at that. Do we want the races to come closer together, or grow further apart?
Because if we don’t want them to grow further apart, it hardly seems productive to me for anyone to be spewing a lot of bile from the pulpit, just because there are some blacks somewhere who “sympathize with” the “anger and bitterness.”
That strikes me as a case of, with friends like these, who needs enemies.
And this white straight middle-aged guy, if nobody else, is pretty sick and tired of seeing Reverend Wright defended this way. In what universe do these apologists live, in which you can spout such acrimonious and unsubstantiated hateful rhetoric, and it’s somehow copacetic if it brings legions of bigots to their feet with cheers of rah rah rah…because they can “sympathize with” it?
This doesn’t impress me as productive — not even potentially. Let’s try the Spock approach for a little while — putting a stop to the emotionalism, and use logic instead. Emotion has been our hydraulic fluid of choice in normalizing race relations, for over forty years. That’s a long time. I keep hearing “we still have a long way to go” so it’s effectiveness as said hydraulic fluid ought, by now, be called into question. One cannot help but wonder, if we channeled logic in this endeavor instead of emotion, how far forty years would have brought us.
The New York Times would certainly not have been just caught with it’s tail in a crack. Because they would have been more vigorously motivated to do their jobs — print up facts, and things those facts support, rather than whatever feels good at the moment.
And, of course, if we went that route Barack Obama would not be a good candidate for any office this year.
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