Category Archives: History

February 6, 2011 · 10:36 am

Bush’s Swiss visit off after complaints on torture | Reuters

This man is a war criminal. I would love to see someone hold him accountable-for the first time in his privileged life.

It sure won’t happen here…

(Reuters) – Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday.

Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod’s annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say.

Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned.

Leftist groups had also called for a protest on the day of his visit next Saturday, leading Keren Hayesod’s organizers to announce that they were cancelling Bush’s participation on security grounds — not because of the criminal complaints.

But groups including the New York-based Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) said the cancellation was linked to growing moves to hold Bush accountable for torture, including waterboarding. He has admitted in his memoirs and television interviews to ordering use of the interrogation technique that simulates drowning.

“He’s avoiding the handcuffs,” Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

via Bush’s Swiss visit off after complaints on torture | Reuters.

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Filed under History, Justice System, Politics

February 6, 2011 · 12:26 am

South of the Border, Down Mexico Way…

It’s been an interesting week…

I left last Sunday for Mexico City- with a great deal of trepidation.  I’ve been to Mexico twice before this trip and, no matter how careful I was, I became deathly ill both times.

This time I survived with my health intact and that gave me a better chance to focus and process Mexico City.

I stayed at the W Hotel.  I’ve never seen a hotel anywhere work so hard to be hip.  It was all done in a very modern design in all black, white  and red.  Mostly Black and Red. The hallways were all black.  Walls, floor, ceiling.  All Black.  With a thin line of red neon like a chair rail.  The room numbers were spray painted on the floor in front of your room in white.  German techno music blasting everywhere.  It was not conducive to  peaceful slumber.  I felt like I was trapped in a horror whorehouse when I got off the elevator on my floor…

The bathroom was the real trip.  It was gigantic.  It took up about a third of the room.  It had one of those showers that were like rain from above and two other jets shooting at you mid body and face level.  You couldn’t turn them off.  Most inconvenient in a city where you can’t drink the water or get it in your mouth while showering…

And the bathroom had a hammock in it.  Yes, a hammock.  I’m still trying to figure that one out….

But I must say the service was fabulous.  They never missed my wake up call and gladly followed up with a second call 15 minutes later.  By a real person.  As soon as I hung up the phone from the second call, the waiter always knocked at my door with my English Breakfast Tea and fresh, hot croissant.  Free of charge.  Try getting that kind of punctual, free, gracious service at an American hotel.  The first night back in the States in Phoenix, they lost my room service order and it took over an hour to get my meal.  That would never have happened in Mexico.  Or probably anywhere else.

One of the things that struck me was how friendly and nice everyone was.  And warm.  Everywhere we went, the service was impeccable.  And this was in a poor country under siege by drug wars.

At the office I heard people speaking of robbery, kidnapping and murder as just an everyday fact of life.  But they didn’t want pity or let it interfere with going on with their lives.  It was just a part of their lives they had adjusted to….

What struck me most was the gap between the rich and the poor.  We were definitely in the best part of town.  There was a Hugo Boss store right across from the hotel.  And a Porsche dealership.  But there were armed guards and gates everywhere.  They always have at least one guard with a submachine gun at our office there.  Other armed guards patrolled both the office and the hotel.

We had our own van transportation as the cabs and public transportation aren’t safe in Mexico City.  Especially for foreigners.  Too much chance of getting kidnapped and held for ransom or being robbed.

I guess my thought- and fear- was how long before this comes to the USA?  This fear is not based on fear of immigration.  I welcome immigrants.

My fear is that it will be driven by the growing divide between the Rich and the Poor.  I can see it happening here.

When a few have so much, but most have so little, no one is really safe.

That’s the thought I brought back from Mexico this time….

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Filed under History, Politics, Scott's Commentary, Travel

February 5, 2011 · 11:51 pm

Wallflowers at the Revolution

Another insightful column by Frank Rich in the Sunday New York Times:

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.

This week brings the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. The eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is to follow. As we took in last week’s fiery video from Cairo — mesmerizing and yet populated by mostly anonymous extras we don’t understand and don’t know — it was hard not to flash back to those glory days of “Shock and Awe.” Those bombardments too were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.

More: Wallflowers at the Revolution – NYTimes.com.

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Filed under History, Media, Politics, Religion, Television

February 5, 2011 · 11:06 pm

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady from Rwanda

 

Just a reminder, my partner Steve Willis returns to the stage as an actor this week in “I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me By a Young Lady from Rwanda.”

I say this play in Chapel Hill and would recommend it even without the special connection.

Details below:

 

 

 

Time
Thursday, February 10 at 7:30pm – February 13 at 3:00pm
Location The Little Theatre, Bennett College for Women
More Info
The Bennett Players present the Triad premiere of I HAVE BEFORE ME A REMARKABLE DOCUMENT GIVEN TO ME BY A YOUNG LADY FROM RWANDA, a play by Sonja Linden, Thursday through Saturday, February 10-12, at 7:30pm; and Sunday, February 13, at 3pm.

Advance reservatrions are not required. Tickets will be sold at the door: $10 (Adults), $5 (Bennett employees, alumnae, and non-Bennett students), and $2 (Bennett students).

The play is directed by Beth Ritson, Assistant Professor of Theatre and Speech at Bennett and features senior Theatre major, Tarshai Peterson (from Washington, DC), and Steve Willis, Associate Professor of Theatre and Speech and Chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Bennett.

Simon, a British poet (played by Willis) meets a young Rwandan woman, Juliette, (played by Peterson) who has survived the 1994 genocide. As Juliette struggles to write a first-hand account of her tragic experience, the play becomes a story about the healing power of writing and friendship that crosses cultural barriers.

 

 

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Filed under Entertainment, Greensboro, History, North Carolina, Politics, Theatre

January 30, 2011 · 12:12 am

Don’t Know Much About History – NYTimes.com

Great Op-ed from Gail Collins in the New York Times…

I’m afraid the media is about to make Michelle Bachmann a Super Star.

They know Sarah Palin’s days are limited- and that she sold well to the Tea Party crowd.  Michelle Bachmann is the sequel…

And do we really need a new Sarah Palin? Shouldn’t the first one be made to go away before we start considering replacements?

Bachmann, the superconservative member of Congress from Minnesota, made a big splash on Tuesday night with her Tea Party response to the State of the Union address. True, the placement of the cameras made her look as if she was talking to an invisible friend, and her eye makeup had a peculiar zombie aspect to it. But the next day all the attention was on her and not the official Republican response by Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman.

And the Republicans were afraid to complain! One congressman from Utah told Politico that he thought “to try to upend Paul Ryan was just wrong.” Hours later he issued a retraction — through Bachmann’s office.

AND:

Bushes aside, Bachmann is a much more serious person than Palin, whose response to the State of the Union address was to focus on the title, “Winning the Future.” (“There were a lot of W.T.F. moments throughout that speech.”) If Palin and Bachmann were your co-workers, Palin would be the one sneaking out early to go bowling, while Bachmann would stay late to reorganize the office seating chart to reflect her own personal opinion of who most deserves to be near the water cooler.

Finally:

Bachmann is not a zealous fact-checker, as we learned when she claimed the president’s trip to India would cost the taxpayers $200 million a day, based on an Indian newspaper report quoting an unnamed provincial official. In the real world, many founders, like Thomas Jefferson, expressed reservations about slavery but still kept hundreds of slaves, who were the basis of their personal wealth. Others, like John Adams, never owned slaves and opposed the institution but compromised on the matter of all men actually being created equal in order to bring the southern states into the union. And not a single one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence envisioned in any way, shape or form a democracy in which people of Michele Bachmann’s gender would sit in the halls of Congress.

But Bachmann was speaking to the lore of the far right, which strips the founding fathers of their raw, fallible humanity and ignores the fact that, in some ways, we’re wiser.

Maybe she’ll make Sarah Palin look good.

via Don’t Know Much About History – NYTimes.com.

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Filed under History, Politics, Tea Party, Uncategorized

January 28, 2011 · 5:49 pm

Federal Taxes Lowest Since 1950

Interesting…

Taxes are the lowest since 1950 and people are talking about cutting Social Security?

And some people still think President Obama raised, instead of cut, taxes?

Renewing the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy was really a bad decision…

From Daily Kos:

No doubt most of the chatter about the new projections of a $1.5 trillion deficit will focus on spending. But spending is just one side of the equation. The other side, of course, is revenue, and any honest debate over the deficit needs to take that into account, especially in light of this:

Tax revenues are projected to drop to their lowest levels since 1950, when measured against the size of the economy.

In the short-term, the best thing we can do to reduce the deficit is to increase economic growth, not reduce spending. Long-run we need to bring down the cost of health care and retarget war expenditures on domestic investments. But we also can’t ignore that current tax policy — in particular, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy — have brought tax revenue to their lowest levels in six decades.

via Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

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Filed under History, Politics, The Economy

January 27, 2011 · 8:35 pm

The Lion in Winter

I love this movie…

I usually watch it about once a year or so…

Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn at their peak.

Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton in their first films…

English history….

And one of the wittiest screenplays from one of the wittiest plays…

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Filed under Entertainment, History, Movies

January 26, 2011 · 8:34 pm

Revisiting The Renaissance In ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’ : NPR

This sounds fascinating…

Also from NPR:

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has had Harlem on her mind since she was a high school student in Houston reading the work of Jean Toomer, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and others. In 2002, a recent Harvard graduate, she moved into an apartment without a kitchen on 130th near Lenox. Her first book, Harlem Is Nowhere, is a tender, improvisational memoir of several years spent exploring the myths of this capital of African America and the realities of its 21st-century incarnation.

Rhodes-Pitts spends hours in a branch library on 135th Street, reading of the beginnings of Harlem as a farm suburb settled in the 1880s, its transformation in 1905 when the black migrations from the South began to fill its borders, and the point in 1925 when Alain Locke defined Harlem as a physical center that “focuses a people,” and set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance. She goes on a walking tour with tourists, attends community meetings about rezoning and muses on African street vendors, empty lots, chalk messages scribbled on sidewalks and relics of times past, like James Van Der Zee’s formal Depression-era photographs and the overstuffed scrapbooks of the early 20th-century eccentric Alexander Gumby.

From an older woman named Ms. Minnie, who lives in her building, she learns how to be a caring neighbor. Ms. Minnie is from a black town in South Carolina and at one point confides that her maiden name was Sojourner. “She looked me squarely in the eye before continuing,” Rhodes-Pitts writes. “That’s not a slave name.”

The author borrows her title from Ralph Ellison’s essay about post World War II Harlem as a metaphoric space in which “the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustration of social discrimination.”

More:   Revisiting The Renaissance In ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’ : NPR.

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Filed under Books, History, New York, Race, Social Commentary

January 26, 2011 · 8:18 pm

Gypsy Rose Lee & Burlesque’s Allure

Fascinating article about Gypsy, the inspiration for “Gypsy, ” from NPR:

Gypsy Rose Lee was hitting vaudeville stages across the country when she was four years old. By fifteen, she was headlining as a burlesque performer.

Eventually, she became beloved by Eleanor Roosevelt, the New York literati and longshoremen alike. She was described, in that day, as the only woman in the world “with a public body and a private mind, both equally exciting.”

The legend of her life is the stuff of Broadway show and film, in “Gypsy.”

Her patter to the audience as the clothes came off was of sociology, ballet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Puritans and Noel Coward.

“If Lady Gaga and Dorothy Parker had a secret love child it would have been Gypsy Rose Lee,” says Karen Abbott, author of the new book, American Rose – A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee. “The woman knew how to make a dramatic entrance. She would arrive at opening nights at the Met wearing a full length cape made entirely of orchids.”

But the reality of who Gypsy — born Louise Hovick — was can be as hard to get at, as tantalizing concealed, as the end of her dance.

“Gypsy Rose Lee was a brand before branding existed,” Abbott says. “And part of that brand was to laugh at herself. It was a bit of a self defense mechanism but it was also the way she connected with the audience and the idea that if she laughs first nobody else will be laughing at her.  And she wanted the audience to be just as culpable for watching her disrobing as she was for disrobing.”

via Gypsy Rose Lee & Burlesque’s Allure | WBUR and NPR – On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

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Filed under Broadway, Entertainment, History, Style

January 17, 2011 · 8:34 am

Chapter 46: The Evolution of One Southern Liberal or Some Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day | My Southern Gothic Life

I have a new post up on my other blog.

Here’s an excerpt and a link to the full post…

As we approach the Holiday recognizing the contributions of Dr. King, I always tend to think about where we were, where we are and where we have yet to go.  To me, this is a day to stop and think. And remember.

As a Southerner of a certain age, I just can’t let this day pass without comment.  I don’t see how anyone of my generation can.

I grew up in the South before integration and during the Civil Rights Movement.  I’m not sure if I even spoke to a black person, other than our maid, before the schools were integrated when I was in the 5th grade.  People seem to forget the South in the early 1960′s was like South Africa under apartheid.  It was a very separate and scary place.  Everyone–and I mean everyone– had their place and society tried to keep them in it.

I think the late, great Molly Ivins said it best.  Molly once wrote:  ”I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point — race.  Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.”

via Chapter 46: The Evolution of One Southern Liberal or Some Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day | My Southern Gothic Life.

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Filed under Danville, History, Holidays, My Journey, Politics, Race, Social Commentary

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