From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Quote of the Day June 10, 2007
Commencement address at Grinnell College 'I hope that you will treasure the approaches and ways of thinking that you have learned more than the facts you have accumulated. For you will never discover a scarcity of facts, and these facts will be presented in such a way as to veil the ways of thinking embedded in them. And so to reveal these hidden ways of thinking, to suggest alternate frameworks, to imagine better ways of living in evolving worlds, to imagine new human relations that are freed from persisting hierarchies, whether they be racial or sexual or geopolitical - yes, I think this is the work of educated beings. I might then ask you to think about education as the practice of freedom. ' Angela Davis Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz *** http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/opinion/11krugman.html?th&emc=th Authentic? - Never Mind By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: June 11, 2007 Rich liberals who claim they'll help America's less fortunate are phonies. Let me give you one example - a Democrat who said he'd work on behalf of workers and the poor. He even said he'd take on Big Business. But the truth is that while he was saying those things, he was living in a big house and had a pretty lavish summer home too. His favorite recreation, sailing, was incredibly elitist. And he didn't talk like a regular guy. Clearly, this politician wasn't authentic. His name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Luckily, that's not how the political game was played 70 years ago. F.D.R. wasn't accused of being a phony; he was accused of being a "traitor to his class." But today, it seems, politics is all about seeming authentic. A recent Associated Press analysis of the political scene asked: "Can you fake authenticity? Probably not, but it might be worth a try." What does authenticity mean? Supposedly it means not pretending to be who you aren't. But that definition doesn't seem to fit the way the term is actually used in political reporting. For example, the case of F.D.R. shows that there's nothing inauthentic, in the normal sense of the word, about calling for higher taxes on the rich while being rich yourself. If anything, it's to your credit if you advocate policies that will hurt your own financial position. But the news media seem to find it deeply disturbing that John Edwards talks about fighting poverty while living in a big house. On the other hand, consider the case of Fred Thompson. He spent 18 years working as a highly paid lobbyist, wore well-tailored suits and drove a black Lincoln Continental. When he ran for the Senate, however, his campaign reinvented him as a good old boy: it leased a used red pickup truck for him to drive, dressed up in jeans and a work shirt, with a can of Red Man chewing tobacco on the front seat. But Mr. Thompson's strength, says Lanny Davis in The Hill, is that he's "authentic." Oh, and as a candidate George W. Bush was praised as being more authentic than Al Gore. As late as November 2005, MSNBC's chief political correspondent declared that Mr. Bush's authenticity was his remaining source of strength. But now The A.P. says that Mr. Bush's lack of credibility is the reason his would-be successors need to seem, yes, authentic. Talk of authenticity, it seems, lets commentators and journalists put down politicians they don't like or praise politicians they like, with no relationship to what the politicians actually say or do. Here's a suggestion: Why not evaluate candidates' policy proposals, rather than their authenticity? And if there are reasons to doubt a candidate's sincerity, spell them out. For example, Hillary Clinton's credibility as a friend of labor is called into question, not by her biography or life style, but by the fact that, as The Nation recently reported, her chief strategist - a man Al Gore fired in 2000 because he didn't trust him - heads a public relations company that helps corporations fight union organizing drives. And where do you start with Rudy Giuliani? We keep being told that he has credibility on national security, because he seemed so reassuring on 9/11. (Some firefighters have condemned his actual performance that day, saying that rescue efforts were uncoordinated and that firemen died because he provided them with faulty radios. "All he did was give information on the TV," said a deputy fire chief whose son died at the World Trade Center. "He did nothing." And the nation's largest firefighters' union has condemned his handling of recovery efforts in the weeks following 9/11.) But he's spent the years since then cashing in on terrorism, and his decisions about Giuliani Partners' personnel and clients raise real questions about his seriousness. His partners, as The Washington Post pointed out, included "a former police commissioner later convicted of corruption, a former F.B.I. executive who admitted taking artifacts from ground zero and a former Roman Catholic priest accused of covering up sexual abuse in the church." The point is that questions about a candidate shouldn't be whether he or she is "authentic." They should be about motives: whose interests would the candidate serve if elected? And think how much better shape the nation would be in if enough people had asked that question seven years ago. *** http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/opinion/11kristof.html?th&emc=th The Poets of War By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: June 11, 2007 Last month I invited readers to send in poems for my second Iraq Poetry Contest. (These excerpts don't do the poems justice - please read the full versions on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.) More than 500 poems poured in, and one of those that moved me most was from Frances Richey of New York City. Her son, Ben, had been deployed in Iraq. Ben always sent a gift for Mother's Day, but this time nothing arrived and he was unreachable. "I was terrified," she told me, and she wrote a poem about what happened: Last Mother's Day, when he was incommunicado, nothing came. Three days later, a message in my box; a package, the mail room closed. I went out into the lobby, banged my fist against the desk. When they gave it to me, I clutched it to my chest, sobbing like an animal. I spoke to no one, did not apologize ... Susan Donnelly, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., and has written several books of poetry, wrote this poem after seeing photos from Iraq: These figures stand the way we humans do always: one covering his face, another looking to heaven. But it is the gesture of the third, perhaps a brother, who has placed his open palm, protective, firm, on the chest of a dead man there you can go now that makes me, miles away and in the wrong country, cover my face with my hands. In April, The Times published an article about Sam Ross, who had been welcomed as a hero in his Appalachian town when he returned blinded and disabled from the war - but whose life then spiraled downward and out of control, leaving him in prison and then a psychiatric hospital. Gordon Fain, a U.C.L.A. professor, wrote a ballad about him: Just a coin toss, Heads it was someone else, tails it was Ross A volunteer Who went to Iraq, was helping to clear Mines to a pit Then heard a discharge, felt the metal hit His legs and face, The fragments finding every open place Of flesh and bone; And when he woke, he lay in bed alone Amazed to find That he had one leg cut off and was blind. The whole town made Sam Ross a hero: bagpipes, a parade A home they set On top of a hill, but he could not forget ... Insistent dreams Of floating, in which his whole body seems In peaceful flight To burst apart in searing flames of light ... So he began To drink, and young men took him in a van >From his house, down To every bar and strip club within town. ... Then a fourth-grade student in the South Bronx, Raphael Sosa, submitted this: I feel sad. my friends are angry; I'm scared. how did my father die? who killed him? my father has died. the tv tells me we won but my father died. my father is dead. A lump in my throat, I checked with Raphael's teacher. He assured me that the poem was only a product of the boy's imagination. These excerpts don't do the poems justice - please read the full versions on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. Throughout history, the most memorable accounts of war - from Homer to Wilfred Owen - haven't been journalistic or historical, but poetic. For whatever reason, the ugliest of human pursuits generates some of the most beautiful human handiwork. So let's add these poems, as one more monument to the folly of this war - and one more memorial to those who will never rejoin their families. You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof's blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. Next Article in Opinion (5 of 17) ยป --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
