Thought for the Day

If religion is the opiate of the masses, then race is their crack.

Race; a huge bamboozle to keep people divided and powerless since it was invented in the 18th century West.

The Parkland Massacre One Year Later

Anthony Borges photographed by Richard Avedon

The Massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida happened a year ago. Nikolas Cruz, a former student at the school, arrived with an AR-15 and shot seventeen students and staff dead and injured another seventeen people. This was the largest school massacre (so far) in American history. Anthony Borges saved the lives of 20 people by blocking the door to a classroom with his body preventing Cruz from getting in. He was shot 5 times and lived to tell about it. Anthony Borges posed shirtless for photographer Richard Avedon showing his surgery scars and colostomy bag.

 We decided over 5 years ago with the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that keeping our rights to guns, violence, and mayhem was worth the sacrifice of other people’s children. Despite all the government teevee propaganda about menacing hordes of brown people, Muslim terrorists, and thuggish black folk, almost all the mass shooters since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 were young white men (and straight white men). Nikolas Cruz who shot Borges identifies as white. I can think of only one exception, and that was the Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho who was Korean. The Las Vegas killer Stephen Paddock was a rich white man. Some of these white men massacred people to start a “race war” or to make a point about white supremacy; Dylan Roof, Wade Michael Page, and Robert Gregory Bowers come to mind. Racist mass murder to provoke “race war” is Charles Manson’s grotesque legacy to our time. Anthony Borges and the people he saved are miraculous living testimony to courage and basic decency that knows no borders.

In Florida and in most of the rest of the country, it’s still easier and more legal for an 18 year old to buy an AR-15 -- the mass killer’s weapon of choice – than it is to buy beer or vote. The world would have been a lot happier if Nikolas Cruz decided to drown his anger and sorrow in an illegal six pack of beer instead of taking it out on everyone with a legal AR-15.

12 of the 17 who died that day

Abraham Lincoln

The last photograph of Abraham Lincoln made by Alexander Gardner in 1865 a few weeks before Lincoln's assassination.

Happy Birthday Mr. Lincoln!

He would be an impossible figure today. He was born and raised in wretched poverty, a manic depressive who used séances to try to talk to his dead sons. He was largely self taught. His favorite books were Shakespeare’s plays (he could recite most of the soliloquies from memory) and Euclid’s Geometry. This self taught man from a poor and broken home became one of the greatest orators of the 19th century. He was a very strange looking man, six feet four inches tall, gangly with big ears and hollow cheeks; not at all telegenic even by the standards of his own day. He led the USA through the bloodiest war in its history, a civil war over slavery that cost the lives of around 750,000 people in combat and twice that number to disease and accident.

Lincoln saw as few others at the time did that the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the union of the states were closely bound up together. The Union would not be preserved without finally abolishing slavery, and slavery would not finally be abolished from North America without preserving the Union. He could be dictatorial, suspending the right of habeas corpus during the war, imprisoning people whose loyalties were suspect. He concentrated power in the executive in ways that were unprecedented and continue to the present day. And yet, he insisted that the normal functions of government continued despite the emergency. Construction of the new capitol dome continued despite the sight of Confederate camp fires across the Potomac river. Courts and legislatures continued to meet regularly. The Civil War Congress was among the most productive ever passing the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and the Transcontinental Railroad Act, all of them long opposed by Southern states who were now in rebellion. The scheduled Election of 1864 took place despite mounting casualties on the battlefield. Throughout the war, Lincoln refused to wear military uniform setting the precedent for later Presidents; a symbol that the military remains subordinate to civilian authority even in times of war.

Frederick Douglass the great Abolitionist leader criticized Lincoln ferociously – and rightly – over the President’s ambivalence toward the humanity and rights of African American slaves and free people, and over his willingness to trade away their rights when it was politically expedient. And yet, as early as the 1850s, Lincoln read Douglass’ writings and incorporated many of his arguments into his own anti-slavery speeches. Douglass was among the first Abolitionist leaders to notice that Lincoln’s views on slavery and African Americans evolved, and that the nature of the war evolved, after the Emancipation Proclamation. The war to preserve the Union became a crusade to abolish slavery and a second American Revolution, “a new birth of freedom.” Even more remarkable, Lincoln persuaded an always reluctant and hostile northern white population to support this new revolution to liberate and enfranchise African Americans. In the end, Lincoln paid for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery with his own life, one of the last casualties of the war.

Alexander Gardner, Battlefield Dead, Gettysburg, 1863

Futures

The future I want is something like Star Trek where poverty and bigotry are things of the past and people work together to explore the universe.

The future I'll probably get is Bladerunner, only without the replicants and everything run by white evangelicals.

The future I expected when I was little was The Jetsons.

Another future I don't want, but still might get is Mad Max; shortages, chaos, and everyone looking out only for themselves.

The future that the white evangelicals want; everything familiar to them, antiseptic, homogenous, and above all, safe for white people.

The future that the MAGA hats want; chaos, revenge, and reveling in the destruction.

The future Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Richard Spencer want; One People, One Empire, One Leader.

The future that the plutocrats want; a world that they can buy and play with as they please.

Stravinsky

The Nightingale

A short opera sung in Russian and here translated into French.  Alas, I don't have an English version, but the nightingale saves the Emperor's life with her song.

Alexander Benois' set design for the original 1914 production.

Fundamentalists

Being an American fundamentalist Christian means using words like "nation," heritage," and "dominion" a lot.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means being so assured of your dominance that you can trash other people's beliefs and treat them like dirt.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means being so sure of the literal certainty of your guiding narrative that you can regard all evidence to the contrary no matter how obvious and compelling -- up to and including all empirical reality -- with sovereign contempt.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means thinking that you and your kind are the only people who really matter, and that you can sacrifice other people to advance your goals.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means that you must always be in charge, that you are divinely mandated to write the rules for everyone else.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means that you count on holding that winning lottery ticket when the world ends, that your greatest joy will be to see all the skeptics and mockers who make your life so miserable get what's coming to them.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means finding no peace in your beliefs, but always fighting off doubt and doubters, always being angry at the bewildered skepticism of your neighbors, and always worried that you can still earn God's love.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means ignoring the four Gospels and spending all your time combing through Leviticus and Deuteronomy looking for legal clauses encouraging you to condemn other people while ignoring the laws mandating fairness and hospitality to others.  It means ignoring Jesus' teaching and turning him into a passive sacrificial victim.  It means ignoring the Gospel command to love neighbor as self in order to make elaborate concordances between Revelations, Daniel, Ezekiel, and the headlines to see if you are still winning.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means remaking the cosmos in the image of a domineering and vindictive father.
Being an American fundamentalist Christian means infantilizing adults through fear and shame, and reducing them to servile obedience in a world ruled by corporate, religious, and political autocrats.

Happy Year of the Pig!

The annual lion dance:

A terra cotta pig from the Han Dynasty

Auspicious Cranes by the Emperor Huizong, 12th century