Lawrence Levine was a giant in the field of African American History. His book Black Culture and Consciousness was written over twenty (almost THIRTY!) years ago, but is still one of the best in its field, and required reading. He passed away of cancer this week. He will be missed.
You know what? I was reading about my Tigers (yeah, after 19 years I’m claiming them again) and got this instead. Looks like an invisibility cloak will soon be reality. First there will be military applications. Then police and surveillance applications. I’m thinking this won’t make it into YOUR hands.
Over at Cobb, my boy Mike is arguing that Conservatism may be the saving grace of America and the West. I don’t expect to get a response from him because he’s got a job to do…but while conservatism very well may be the saving grace of the North (not the west), it’ll be because of its identity politics rather than because of its support for democracy, reason, and modernity. Quiet as its kept, conservatism as a philosophy stands against each of these. Political equality? Nope. Reason? Nope. Modernity? Nope.
Now I guess I could be persuaded to believe otherwise. But then again if you pressed hard enough you could convince me that the tigers lost last night.
I watched the documentary Paper Clips on my palm pilot over the last week while waiting for the bus. I’ve been meaning to check it out since I heard about it, and since I would always have time to kill waiting for the bus I thought I’d spread it out over a couple of days.
I figured I’d have some problems with aspects of it, and I did.
Take the setting–20 miles outside of Chattanooga. If the students really wanted to see evil close up, all they had to do was a little bit of digging down the street. Even looking at the Jewish Holocaust their focus on prejudice and hatred rather than on more systemic questions troubled me. Where’d they get their stuff from (hint: the Nazis sent people here because they believed the reservation represented a workable model they could use)? Where’d they get the training (hint: check out the backgrounds of Goebbels and the rest…how many of them spent time “honing their craft” in German colonies in Africa and abroad?)?
Where did the philosophy undergirding the attempted extermination come from?
But these are questions we shouldn’t necessarily expect 8th grade teachers to ask, much less 8th grade teachers in suburban Tennessee. And I know that for most whites racism is solved by getting people to like one another or at least be tolerant. I shouldn’t hate on little steps.
But what impressed me more than anything else was Linda Hooper. She was the one who came up with the idea, and at every step she upped the ante. Referring to her power as an organizer one of the teachers said, “God created the world in seven days but that’s because he didn’t have Linda Hooper!” Her story was the most moving story of the documentary.
I wonder how long it’d take to get 100 million paper clips?
Ok. So about ten days or so ago, my Ipod died on me. I had planned to begin podcasting my lectures for my black politics class, among other things. All for naught. I took it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store, and the assistant charged it, listened to it…and told me the bad news.
“Your hard drive is fried.”
At that point I had a couple of options. I could get it replaced–if I had a warranty–or I could go through a third party vendor to get it repaired…and this would probably cost more money than I paid for it in the first place. So I ordered another one, and stewed because I never got around to buying that warranty.
Then, running a google search on “do it yourself ipod repair” I came across this post. I didn’t have to fork out an arm and a leg…all I had to do was spend a little bit of loot to get a new hard drive.
But in reading the responses to the post, one comment popped up over and over again.
“All you had to do was smack it.”
Now at first I thought these commenters were just clowning. Yeah. Smack an Ipod and it’ll get better. Sounds like SERIOUS issues doesn’t it? But after reading several more like them I began to think that maybe there was something to it.
So I pulled my IPod out, attached it to the charger so i could turn it on….and I gave it a nice whack.
At first? Nothing.
But I’ll be damned if the IPod didn’t start working on the second go round.
Talking to one of my boys about it he said “So basically what you’re telling me is that your Ipod went soft and you had to bitch-slap it to make it better.”
Um…yeah.
One of the reasons I haven’t been posting as often is because I’ve begun teaching. After two years off I was literally dying to get into the classroom…and for good reason. My two classes (Black Politics–primarily for undergrads, Comparative Racial Politics–my team taught grad level course) are going extremely well, and my students are a joy to teach. (more…)
I was going to call this post “the best argument for conservatism I can think of” but the thing is that conservatism really isn’t about small government, it’s about small government for interests conservatives don’t support. Hence the change…
But anyway, the problems with Iraq, with Foley, with Afghanistan, all point to gross negligence, incompetence, and (in the Foley case) a crass desire for power that knows no end.
(An aside on the Foley issue. The Nation has an excellent piece on Foley arguing that if he would have been able to come out of the closet and be who he was then perhaps this would not have happened. For what it is worth I believe them to be right.)
Anyway. Let’s say that the entire political landscape was different, and the political interests that you as a voter prefer run the entire government…and that government does exactly what you want it to. If you knew that this government would not only be replaced by that of your political opponents, but they would be TOTALLY INCOMPETENT…how big would you want your government to be? The Republican Administration is the worst administration I have ever seen from top to bottom. They are incompetent, corrupt, and millenial. Not to mention classist, racist, sexist, etc. etc.
I believe in a government large enough to counter private corporate interests. But times like this? I want government to be small enough that these people (and those that voted for them) can’t do any more damage.
