26/05: Memorial Day
Category: American Culture
Posted by: an okie gardener
The Wizbang site now has a section up for Memorial Day Weekend with links to various sites honoring our heroes. BosqueBoys have this essay, and this movie list.
Category: American Culture
Posted by: an okie gardener
In honor of the Memorial Day Weekend, I am once again posting my earlier essay on the funeral of a hometown Marine killed in Iraq.
Written Saturday, Nov. 26
This morning I attended the funeral of a young Marine from Apache, Oklahoma, killed in combat in Iraq. His name was Josh Ware. You may have seen him along with 5 or 6 other marines on the cover of Time magazine during the battle of Fallujah. He was killed by hostile small arms fire last week during operation Steel Curtain. Josh was of Kiowa and Comanche descent, and registered with the Kiowa tribe. He was 20 years old.
(cont.)
Written Saturday, Nov. 26
This morning I attended the funeral of a young Marine from Apache, Oklahoma, killed in combat in Iraq. His name was Josh Ware. You may have seen him along with 5 or 6 other marines on the cover of Time magazine during the battle of Fallujah. He was killed by hostile small arms fire last week during operation Steel Curtain. Josh was of Kiowa and Comanche descent, and registered with the Kiowa tribe. He was 20 years old.
(cont.)
Category: Media and Politics
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
The best three hours of television of any given week are usually Friday mornings, 6:00 to 9:00 CST, on C-SPAN when Brian runs the early-bird call-in show, "Washington Journal" (click on the link for 5/26 for an archive of the program).
Today Brian held two separate hour-long chats with "gonzo" historian Douglas Brinkley and NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert (ironically, both guests were the subject of recent Bosque Boys posts and discussion, follow the links above). Is Brian a fan of the BB? Not likely, but I can hope. Something to work toward...One of these days, maybe.
The Brinkley interview was pretty standard. Brinkley is a regular contributor to C-SPAN. What does Brian think of Brinkley? Impossible to say. Brian gives no clues.
Brian's genius is his ability to let guests be themselves. He is the virtuoso of distributing rope. Brinkley was Brinkley, and, at times, his self-inflicted unintentional indictments were devastating. Brian just watched impassively.
In minute 54 of the sixty-minute exchange, Brian asked nonchalantly how does one go about writing a 755-page work of history in only nine months? He added: doesn't the editing process alone on a work that size take about nine months?
Doug Brinkley credited his passion and work ethic and associated himself with literary greats of the past who understood that writing was a matter of putting your seat in the seat of your chair. Lamb followed-up with: were you angry?
One last point (from me not Brian; I do not have his gift for subtlety): What do you call a history that is written in the midst of a critical event, penned by an author who has lost all historical objectivity and then rushed to press? Journalism.
Tim Russert followed. Maybe I am a fool for his working-class persona, but I cannot see how people can generate hatred for Russert. He tells great unassuming stories about being a kid from Buffalo who made good. He offered a meaningful account of how and why his father recently opted for a Ford Crown Vic over a Mercedes, Lexus or Caddy. He read a moving letter attacking the New York Times Magazine for their sloppy journalism in re a feature that dealt with his personal memories of his mom.
Later, a passionate caller castigated Russert for being in the tank for the Bush administration. Ironically, the indignant caller provided an almost inverse interpretation of the Condi Rice interview from David Limbaugh. Why weren't you as rough on Rice as you were on Nancy Pelosi last week? She accused him of letting his corporate bias cloud his news judgment (FYI: the corporate news conspiracy: all the news orgs are owned by a few corporations who filter and water down the news).
This morning reaffirms my C-SPAN thesis: if you watched all three channels of C-SPAN twenty-four hours per day, you would know everything that is going on in American politics.
Today Brian held two separate hour-long chats with "gonzo" historian Douglas Brinkley and NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert (ironically, both guests were the subject of recent Bosque Boys posts and discussion, follow the links above). Is Brian a fan of the BB? Not likely, but I can hope. Something to work toward...One of these days, maybe.
The Brinkley interview was pretty standard. Brinkley is a regular contributor to C-SPAN. What does Brian think of Brinkley? Impossible to say. Brian gives no clues.
Brian's genius is his ability to let guests be themselves. He is the virtuoso of distributing rope. Brinkley was Brinkley, and, at times, his self-inflicted unintentional indictments were devastating. Brian just watched impassively.
In minute 54 of the sixty-minute exchange, Brian asked nonchalantly how does one go about writing a 755-page work of history in only nine months? He added: doesn't the editing process alone on a work that size take about nine months?
Doug Brinkley credited his passion and work ethic and associated himself with literary greats of the past who understood that writing was a matter of putting your seat in the seat of your chair. Lamb followed-up with: were you angry?
One last point (from me not Brian; I do not have his gift for subtlety): What do you call a history that is written in the midst of a critical event, penned by an author who has lost all historical objectivity and then rushed to press? Journalism.
Tim Russert followed. Maybe I am a fool for his working-class persona, but I cannot see how people can generate hatred for Russert. He tells great unassuming stories about being a kid from Buffalo who made good. He offered a meaningful account of how and why his father recently opted for a Ford Crown Vic over a Mercedes, Lexus or Caddy. He read a moving letter attacking the New York Times Magazine for their sloppy journalism in re a feature that dealt with his personal memories of his mom.
Later, a passionate caller castigated Russert for being in the tank for the Bush administration. Ironically, the indignant caller provided an almost inverse interpretation of the Condi Rice interview from David Limbaugh. Why weren't you as rough on Rice as you were on Nancy Pelosi last week? She accused him of letting his corporate bias cloud his news judgment (FYI: the corporate news conspiracy: all the news orgs are owned by a few corporations who filter and water down the news).
This morning reaffirms my C-SPAN thesis: if you watched all three channels of C-SPAN twenty-four hours per day, you would know everything that is going on in American politics.
Some weeks ago I was asked to give my reasoning for opposing same-sex marriage. Sometimes procrastination can turn out for the best. As I mentioned in my ealier post on the One-China policy, I am a member of the Reformed Church in America (website link) and a delegate to this summer's annual meeting which we call General Synod. At this meeting we will be asked to approve a resolution to send the study guide "Human Sexuality and Marriage" to our congregations. I think it is a fantastic document. In this post I will give a few paragraphs as "teasers" to encourage you to read the whole thing. Then I will summarize the argument. Finally, I'll give the link to the document.
(cont.)
(cont.)
This weekend, remember to honor the brave dead who have given us freedom. Fly your flag. Go to the cemetary. Probably you will not spend the entire weekend outdoors, so rent a movie that reminds us of the cost of freedom.
A Waco Farmer is the real movie guy of this blog, so I invite him to add movies to this post that I have overlooked. Here's my suggested list. (cont.)
A Waco Farmer is the real movie guy of this blog, so I invite him to add movies to this post that I have overlooked. Here's my suggested list. (cont.)
The Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal feature Best of the Web Today by James Taranto links to this story from the New York Post in which Hillary Clinton is reported to have called for a return to a national speed limit of 55 mph.
Well, even Hillary can't be wrong about everything. In this case I agree with her. A 55 mph speed limit may well be a needed step at this time, for the following reasons. (cont.)
Well, even Hillary can't be wrong about everything. In this case I agree with her. A 55 mph speed limit may well be a needed step at this time, for the following reasons. (cont.)
Category: American History and Politics
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
On May 15, 1916, a frenzied crowd of white Waco citizens surged into the 54th District Court and seized Jesse Washington. Moments earlier, a jury had convicted the seventeen-year-old African American male of murdering a white Robinson woman, Lucy Fryer. The mob, convinced that Washington had also raped Fryer, tortured, hanged, burned him alive and then dragged his mutilated corpse through town. A huge crowd of spectators (15,000 by some estimates) looked on with glee, while storied local photographer, Fred Gildersleeve, recorded the event in gruesome detail.
We note that the brutal murder of Mrs. Fryer was a tragic event for her family, and we are mindful that the slaying lingers as a painful legacy for her descendants.
Washington had confessed to the crime. The prosecution presented evidence. After four minutes of deliberation, seven days after his arrest, the jury of twelve white men found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
Notwithstanding, based on the trial record and what we know about justice for African Americans in the Jim-Crow South, we cannot make a conclusive finding of guilt or innocence in this 90-year-old case.
Wholly apart from that unanswerable question, clearly the community of Waco, Texas, grievously violated Jesse Washington's fundamental rights to due process under the Constitution of the United States. The preemptive actions of the mob, and their exhorters, clearly deprived an American citizen of his right to appeal to a higher court and short-circuited the legal process. The events of May 15, 1916 sting with inequity and disgrace.
Even worse, we know that the grotesque inhumanity of the Washington lynching was emblematic of a period in which our community regularly denied our African American neighbors basic human rights. The "Waco Horror," as it came to be known to the world, was not an isolated case; egregious abuses and humiliations were far too prevalent in Central Texas and throughout the South during our long, dark period of racial segregation and mistreatment.
Inarguably, we are the product of our collective past. We are a people, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “connected by the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart” and home in our community. We do well to celebrate the blessings we inherited from our ancestors, who lived in a time that we cannot fully comprehend.
However, we do ourselves a grave disservice when we attempt to evade or ignore the less than heroic chapters in our history. Wacoans of 1916 committed a gross act of barbarity. As a result of that heinous act, and many others, present Waco inherited a history laden with exploitation and mined with racial mistrust.
The present-day community of Waco, Texas, and McLennan County profoundly regrets and fervently renounces the Jesse Washington atrocity. Our community extends our deepest sympathies to the myriad victims of those tragically dehumanizing times. While we cannot change the past, we find it absolutely necessary to confront and condemn our reprehensible heritage of racial inequality and brutality.
We also believe that it is appropriate for us to extend forgiveness to our ancestral community.
We forgive those who have failed us, just as we seek forgiveness for our failures. We come together, preserving a painful communal memory, in order to commit ourselves to justice. Learning from our past and calling upon the better angels of our nature, we dedicate ourselves to fostering a community at peace with itself.
We note that the brutal murder of Mrs. Fryer was a tragic event for her family, and we are mindful that the slaying lingers as a painful legacy for her descendants.
Washington had confessed to the crime. The prosecution presented evidence. After four minutes of deliberation, seven days after his arrest, the jury of twelve white men found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
Notwithstanding, based on the trial record and what we know about justice for African Americans in the Jim-Crow South, we cannot make a conclusive finding of guilt or innocence in this 90-year-old case.
Wholly apart from that unanswerable question, clearly the community of Waco, Texas, grievously violated Jesse Washington's fundamental rights to due process under the Constitution of the United States. The preemptive actions of the mob, and their exhorters, clearly deprived an American citizen of his right to appeal to a higher court and short-circuited the legal process. The events of May 15, 1916 sting with inequity and disgrace.
Even worse, we know that the grotesque inhumanity of the Washington lynching was emblematic of a period in which our community regularly denied our African American neighbors basic human rights. The "Waco Horror," as it came to be known to the world, was not an isolated case; egregious abuses and humiliations were far too prevalent in Central Texas and throughout the South during our long, dark period of racial segregation and mistreatment.
Inarguably, we are the product of our collective past. We are a people, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “connected by the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart” and home in our community. We do well to celebrate the blessings we inherited from our ancestors, who lived in a time that we cannot fully comprehend.
However, we do ourselves a grave disservice when we attempt to evade or ignore the less than heroic chapters in our history. Wacoans of 1916 committed a gross act of barbarity. As a result of that heinous act, and many others, present Waco inherited a history laden with exploitation and mined with racial mistrust.
The present-day community of Waco, Texas, and McLennan County profoundly regrets and fervently renounces the Jesse Washington atrocity. Our community extends our deepest sympathies to the myriad victims of those tragically dehumanizing times. While we cannot change the past, we find it absolutely necessary to confront and condemn our reprehensible heritage of racial inequality and brutality.
We also believe that it is appropriate for us to extend forgiveness to our ancestral community.
We forgive those who have failed us, just as we seek forgiveness for our failures. We come together, preserving a painful communal memory, in order to commit ourselves to justice. Learning from our past and calling upon the better angels of our nature, we dedicate ourselves to fostering a community at peace with itself.
One of my new intellectual heroes is Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sidney. In an address given a couple of years ago, he reminds us that democracy is not necessarily good in itself, but is only an instrument for meeting goals which may be good or not. He also asks us to consider different kinds of “democracies." The following few paragraphs are from his address.
"The purpose of my observations about television standards, and the past and present situation on contraception and abortion, is to highlight the point that for secular militants today democracy, more than anything else, means that anything is possible. Freedom today, in its everyday sense, means the limitlessness of possibility: whatever you want, whatever you like, you can do it. This is nonsense, of course. A moment’s reflection on any number of “possibilities” reminds us that they are impossibilities. The American sociologist Philip Rieff has written of the important part that culture plays in creating a basic resistance to possibility, something within us that can give a compelling answer when our desires and will ask us the question “why not?” [8] Compelling answers to this need for self-restraint, for delayed gratification, are in short supply. The resources secular democracy has for this purpose seem to be exhausted, in a sea of rhetoric about individual rights.
I use the term “secular democracy” deliberately, because democracy is never unqualified. We are used to speaking of “liberal democracy”, which as currently understood is a synonym for secular democracy; in Europe there are (or were) parties advocating “Christian democracy”; lately there has been much interest in the possibility of “Islamic democracy”, and the shape it might take. These descriptors do not simply refer to how democracy might be constituted, but to the moral vision democracy is intended to serve. This is true even, or especially, in the case of secular democracy, which some commentators—John Rawls, for example—insist is intended to serve no moral vision at all. In his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II makes just this point when he argues that democracy “is a means and not an end. Its ‘moral’ value is not automatic”, but depends on “the ends which it pursues and the means which it employs. . . . [T]he value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes”. [9] Democracy is not a good in itself. Its value is instrumental and depends on the vision it serves. "
(cont.)
"The purpose of my observations about television standards, and the past and present situation on contraception and abortion, is to highlight the point that for secular militants today democracy, more than anything else, means that anything is possible. Freedom today, in its everyday sense, means the limitlessness of possibility: whatever you want, whatever you like, you can do it. This is nonsense, of course. A moment’s reflection on any number of “possibilities” reminds us that they are impossibilities. The American sociologist Philip Rieff has written of the important part that culture plays in creating a basic resistance to possibility, something within us that can give a compelling answer when our desires and will ask us the question “why not?” [8] Compelling answers to this need for self-restraint, for delayed gratification, are in short supply. The resources secular democracy has for this purpose seem to be exhausted, in a sea of rhetoric about individual rights.
I use the term “secular democracy” deliberately, because democracy is never unqualified. We are used to speaking of “liberal democracy”, which as currently understood is a synonym for secular democracy; in Europe there are (or were) parties advocating “Christian democracy”; lately there has been much interest in the possibility of “Islamic democracy”, and the shape it might take. These descriptors do not simply refer to how democracy might be constituted, but to the moral vision democracy is intended to serve. This is true even, or especially, in the case of secular democracy, which some commentators—John Rawls, for example—insist is intended to serve no moral vision at all. In his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II makes just this point when he argues that democracy “is a means and not an end. Its ‘moral’ value is not automatic”, but depends on “the ends which it pursues and the means which it employs. . . . [T]he value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes”. [9] Democracy is not a good in itself. Its value is instrumental and depends on the vision it serves. "
(cont.)
23/05: Media Bias
Wizbang this morning links to an analysis by David Limbaugh of the Tim Russert interview with Condi Rice. David Limbaugh shines a devastating light into the dark corner of media bias and the way popular opinion is shaped through manipulation. A must read.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I would like to think that certain newsmedia figures do not intend to be biased, but are simply shallow thinkers, or unaware of their own biases, or repeating media cliches. But over the last few years it has become impossible for me to give the benefit of the doubt any longer. I think some of these folks must be aware of what they are doing.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I would like to think that certain newsmedia figures do not intend to be biased, but are simply shallow thinkers, or unaware of their own biases, or repeating media cliches. But over the last few years it has become impossible for me to give the benefit of the doubt any longer. I think some of these folks must be aware of what they are doing.
22/05: The Future of Islam
Category: America and the World
Posted by: an okie gardener
It may be that the resurgent radical Islam engaging in terrorism world-wide is the last-gasp of the Muslim religion and culture as a powerful force in the modern world. As we enter the 21st century, traditional Islam is under siege from two sources.
On the one side is the attractive power of Western consumer society in all its decadence--modern television programming, movies, music videos, pornography, fashion, consumer geegaws. In sum: the exaltation of the individual as hedonistic consumer. Enough anecdotal evidence can be found in media reports over the last decade to verify that many, many young Muslims have felt this attractive power, even in the Middle East.
On the other side is the attractive power of Christianity. While not widely reported in the MSM, Muslims are converting to Christianity at a rate probably not seen before in history. This is true not only for Africa, but there is even a growing movement of underground house-churches in Iran. Many of these conversions are the results of missionary radio with clandestine follow-up by local believers.
Not only is the future of the West at stake; the future of Islam is also.
On the one side is the attractive power of Western consumer society in all its decadence--modern television programming, movies, music videos, pornography, fashion, consumer geegaws. In sum: the exaltation of the individual as hedonistic consumer. Enough anecdotal evidence can be found in media reports over the last decade to verify that many, many young Muslims have felt this attractive power, even in the Middle East.
On the other side is the attractive power of Christianity. While not widely reported in the MSM, Muslims are converting to Christianity at a rate probably not seen before in history. This is true not only for Africa, but there is even a growing movement of underground house-churches in Iran. Many of these conversions are the results of missionary radio with clandestine follow-up by local believers.
Not only is the future of the West at stake; the future of Islam is also.
