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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Saturday, June 7, 2008

America: At the edge of history once again?

AP Photo

One day this past January, Mary Kim Titla's parents left their home on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona and drove across the desert to Phoenix with a single purpose in mind - getting an up-close glimpse of a long shot named Barack Obama.

With them they brought two things: handmade signs that said "Apaches for Obama" and their grandson, Titla's nephew, a third grader. Carefully, they told him why he was there that day.

"This man," they told the little boy, "is going to make history."

Across the republic, we're hearing it everywhere in recent months, weeks and particularly in the days since Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee: In America, people say, the winds of history are blowing. And many are excited.

Last week, history became a buzzword. Jon Stewart mashed up clips of pundits rhapsodizing about history lessons. "Historic Choice: Obama," trumpeted the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one of many. "Barack Obama enters the history books," enthused CNN anchor Tony Harris.

"This is one of the most significant moments in American history," says Francine Childs, who in July 1956, at 14, sat at a Dairy Queen window every day for 30 days until she was served ice cream at the whites-only counter.

Obama is the most obvious historical figure. But he, John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton have each spent months vehemently rejecting the old ways, promising that change is at hand. Each has professed to be the one to maneuver us through what they all call a pivot point in history.

"America, this is our moment," Obama said last week as his winning delegate count became apparent. "This is our time - our time to turn the page on the policies of the past."

But historic moments have everything to do with history - both what has happened in the past, and the instant or era when things change. And each of the major candidates this year is deeply connected with some unhappy aspect of our past, and the urge to move on.

For Barack Obama, it is the American tradition of racial discrimination - and finally hurdling it. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, it has been gender inequity - and the promise of a woman in the White House. For John McCain, it is the legacy of Vietnam.

In American history, certain years - 1776, 1865 and 2001 among them - have revealed themselves as obvious crossroads. But not since 1968 have we had a presidential campaign and candidates that summon so many of the fundamental tensions of our history.

So it's worth asking amid the sense of wonder: Is this election year a pivot point? When we talk about making history, can we really ever learn from our yesterdays? Are there lessons from the past for the candidates to carry into the fall campaign and the administration beyond?

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner, one of America's greatest writers, once wrote. "It's not even past."

And so it is in America in 2008. We are riding history's unpredictable currents - no matter how passionately we want to move on, no matter how much control we think we have, no matter how loudly our would-be leaders insist that tomorrow is where our priorities lie.

___

TRIUMPHANT HISTORY

What is happening in American politics this year is linked, in the oddest of ways, with Commonwealth of Kentucky Death Certificate No. 26469, a bare-bones account of the Nov. 4, 1930, gunshot murder of a 60-year-old "colored" carpenter named Ed Doneghy.

"Ed Doneghy Killed at Louisville Polls," the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, reported a couple of days later.

Today, the Rev. Martin McMickle, 59, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, cannot stop looking at the smeared ink of the words on that death certificate. When McMickle was doing his family history several months ago, he learned of his link to Doneghy and followed up. He found out that the man was killed for trying to register to vote.

And in August, 78 years after a lethal gunshot at a Kentucky poll felled a man who wanted to vote, Doneghy's relative, Martin McMickle - minister, teacher, civil rights activist - will travel to Denver as a delegate to cast a vote for Obama as the Democratic nominee for president.

A pivot point in history? You bet. And not just because of Obama's triumph, either. To McMickle, this is a historic moment because of Clinton and McCain, too.

On Clinton: "I'm also mindful that my mother, who was born in 1914, was born into a country where women did not have the right to vote."

On McCain: "The whole idea that a person who is a senior citizen but has the energy and the vigor to sustain so far the primary campaign and is on the verge of beginning the general campaign says an awful lot about senior citizens and about when people ought to consider their active life has ended."

"So," McMickle says, "I think there's a wonderful biography in all three of them that can be instructive for the broader public: voting rights for African Americans, voting rights for women in America, and the importance of people continuing to live long beyond the artificial time lines of 65 or 70."

This sense of something special afoot - with Obama emerging last week as the most visible engine, but also including the other firsts of this unusual primary season - is part of why people who have had their own brushes with history feel a sense of it right now.

"We have had candidates who are not well known. We've had candidates who are African-American. We have had women. We have had a public which is disaffected from politics. But we've never had them all together. And in that sense, I think that makes it historic," says Natalie Davis, a political scientist who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996.

Paul J. Matthews, a retired pharmaceuticals executive in Houston, has seen history and studied it. And he puts Obama's achievement in a very personal context.

In 1967, Matthews was a college student, a black man marching in a green ROTC uniform on a Prairie View A&M campus fired up by the battle for civil rights. He began to wonder about his choice to serve a nation that continued to treat blacks like second-class citizens.

He resolved his doubt by combing through books on military history. There, he found two paragraphs about the famed Buffalo Soldiers - the black regiments formed in the wake of the Civil War, comprised of men determined to show their worth as Americans.

It changed his attitude, and Matthews shipped off to Vietnam two years later. He logged 11 months, 29 days in a medical battalion, where he tagged the bodies of war dead and wrote notification letters to their families back home.

Today, Matthews runs the institution he founded: the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, a place where people discuss not only blacks' experience in that war but the larger issue - how American blacks over the centuries have served a system that scorned them. And now ...

"I'm so elated that starting from a situation where blacks couldn't serve in the military to the possibility of having a black man as commander in chief. ... That's quite a leap," he says. "If that's not a teachable moment, we'll never have one."

That's what history provides, says David Anderson: tangible, valuable tools for us all. It offers reserves of strength for a candidate, particularly one like Obama, who owes it to America to be a man of color rather than downplaying his race, Anderson says.

Anderson, 78, the great-grandson of an Alabama slave, spends his days portraying Frederick Douglass, the iconic 19th-century abolitionist, in Rochester, N.Y. History, insists Anderson, is not a burden. Just the opposite.

"You don't leave it behind," Anderson says. "It is NOT baggage. It is strength and it is essential knowledge. And the more you have of it, the better you can understand who you are and what you're capable of."

After visiting West Africa several years ago, Anderson decided to add something to his name - "Sankofa," a word from the Akan language that translates loosely to "go back and take." Anderson interprets it to mean this: "Retrieve from the past that which you can use to frame the future."

Learning from history, in other words.

___

UNEASY HISTORY

History, of course, can be a burden. Because the past is not even past. It's still with us.

Most prominently, Barack Obama faces the heritage of three torturous centuries of racial unease and injustice - and continuing racism in some quarters.

For months, Hillary Clinton grappled with the benefits and detriments of being a female front-runner. John McCain faces a nation increasingly obsessed with youth and detached from military culture that wonders whether, at 71, he can govern robustly - and how relevant his Vietnam POW experience is to today's discourse.

More generally, America and its past have always had an uneasy relationship.

We fashion elegies to a simpler, more unified and politically pure past yet often brush our real history aside in the name of an optimistic, forward trajectory that is part of the basic American DNA. We are quick with the word "historic," using it for everything from celebrity trials to new-and-improved snack foods, but rarely do we pause to consider what something historic really is.

The candidates don't always help, either.

"You see history abused so much in the political process," says Seth Masket, who spent part of the Clinton administration answering letters sent to the president and fashioning his written communication - the written equivalent of a speech writer.

"A lot of these historical metaphors are strained, a lot are inaccurate," says Masket, who now teaches political science at the University of Denver. People's relationship to history, he says, is visceral: "It's an exciting time to be alive, but it's also very scary. People who like the idea of tradition aren't sure what to cling onto anymore."

Then, there is the uncomfortable feeling that no matter what we do, we can't quite shake off the past. Andreas Killen, for example, surveys 2008 and sees 1973, all over again.

The themes in Killen's 2006 book, "1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America," sound familiar today: an unpopular president presiding over a divisive war; a country full of malaise and nervous energy trying to make sense of the civil rights and women's movements; rising gas prices, a faltering economy and an expanding unease about the government and the American message.

A generation later, every single item in that list weighs upon Barack Obama and John McCain.

"There have been many moments over the past few years when I've felt like we were reliving the early 1970s," Killen says.

The heritage of the early 1970s - war, malaise - could hamper the next administration "no matter how much of a mandate for change that president has," Killen says. History isn't always willing to let go.

Sometimes the intricacies of history can be summed up succinctly. Consider Mary Ann Vecchio, 52, who earned a place in the national consciousness at age 14 in 1970 when her cry of anguish during the National Guard shootings at Kent State was captured by a photographer's lens.

Her message to the candidates of 2008 is brief. And potent, too.

"What can they learn from the past?" she says. "Don't repeat it. Don't repeat it."

___

OPPORTUNITIES FROM HISTORY?

In the end, there is this, too: We are raising a generation less mindful of the American past and its messages than any that came before.

According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, students can graduate from the nation's top 50 colleges and universities without ever taking a course in U.S. history. And the National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy found in 2006 that only 37 percent of young Americans can find Iraq on a map. A recent national news broadcast, showing a screen on the famed 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen Douglas, put up photos of Lincoln and ... Frederick Douglass.

"The Baby Boomers were forced as college students to take Western Civilization or to take American history. This new generation never had to do any of that," says Davis, who teaches undergraduates at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama.

"These folks are in the moment. They cannot line up three presidents in the 20th century in terms of order," she says. "They are absolutely a-historical. .... It's about them - the world that surrounds them at that moment. And there's no looking back because they don't know what to be looking for."

And of course there is that niggling thing Americans have to deal with every day - the ravenous beast called the present.

"We care about politics. On the other hand, we're not going to spend that much time worrying about it," says John Hinshaw, a historian at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. "We're worried about $4 a gallon gas and what's going on in our kids' lives. It's intensely interesting to certain groups, but a lot of it is just not what we do all the time."

And yet ... there are times when Americans make history, or at least appreciate that they are witnesses to it. Times like 2008.

"The United States of America is an extraordinary country," Condoleezza Rice said at the State Department the other day, reacting to the flurry of Obama news. "It is a country that has overcome many, many, now years, decades, actually a couple of centuries of trying to make good on its principles. And I think what we are seeing is an extraordinary expression of the fact that 'We the people' is beginning to mean all of us."

That means the Rev. Martin McMickle, staring at a death certificate that chronicles an injustice and preparing to rectify it in some small way. It means Paul J. Matthews and David Anderson, preserving parts of the American past that they believe must be remembered.

It means Mary Kim Titla, whose parents journeyed from the reservation to see Obama. Two decades ago, she became the first American Indian TV reporter on the air in Arizona. This year, she is campaigning to be the first American Indian woman ever elected to Congress.

It means Marshall Trimble, a cowboy poet who is also Arizona's state historian. "Young black people or young women, young girls, young boys who say, `Hey, there's hope now. It can actually happen. It just isn't something that my parents talked about or that my school teacher said might happen. It did happen. It actually happened in America.' Think how that's going to provide inspiration to so many people."

And it means Francine Childs, the black girl at the Dairy Queen counter who grew up into a student activist, professor, author, world traveler. "Did I ever think this would happen?" she says. "It was something I'd always dreamed about, but (I was) never sure I would see that dream fulfilled."

Is 2008 shaping up to be a historic crossroads? It's always difficult to judge from within; in presidential election years, history is never far away and "historic" flows easily from the lips.

But this is, most certainly, a teachable moment - for the candidates and for the people they presume to lead.

In a country defined by fast-forward but never all that adept with rewind, it's a chance to move ahead with real change - not merely to leave our national scars behind but to fashion ways to carry them with us. An opportunity to show that we can do more than lose ourselves in our own history; we can find ourselves there, too.

Word that!

This is NOT Cool

US reportedly withdraws from UN Human Rights Council

The Human Rights Tribune is reporting that the US has pulled out of the United Nations' Human Rights Council, "an international body within the United Nations System. Its stated purpose is to address human rights violations."
The news that the US has completely withdrawn from the Human Rights Council spread like wildfire Friday afternoon (June 6) through the corridors of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. There was general consternation amongst diplomats and NGOS. Reached by phone, the American mission in Geneva neither confirmed nor denied the report. Although unofficial, the news comes at a time of long opposition by the Bush administration to the reforms which created the Human Rights Council in June 2006. Washington announced from the beginning that the US would not be an active member but its observer status would mean that it could intervene during the sessions. To date even this has rarely happened.

One Hundred Ninety Five

As of 6PM today:

Carolina Naturally is read in all 195 countries on the planet!

Who would have thought this little old blog would be a must read for so many.

Thanks.

Wildfire keeps burning NC wildlife refuge

AP Photo

A wildfire that has burned 30,000 acres in eastern North Carolina may smolder for months as it burns decayed vegetation that makes up the soil in the area, North Carolina Forest Service spokesman Bill Swartley said Saturday.

The fire, which was about 30 percent contained, continues to burn in the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, about 70 miles south of Norfolk, Va. The spread of the fire has slowed over the past few days and winds remain light, but it continues to threaten about 80 homes and businesses.

No injuries or structure damage has been reported.

Swartley warned that forecast temperatures near 100 degrees this weekend keep conditions ripe for the blaze, Swartley said. "When the fire comes near, the vegetation is that much more ignitable because they are already warm," Swartley said.

Gov. Mike Easley has declared a state of emergency in three counties. He warned that driving could be difficult with smoke-filled roads, but officials said none were expected to be closed.

For the past few days, smoke from the fire has blown north into heavily populated areas along Virginia's coast. But the winds have shifted, and forecasters expect the smoke to blow east toward the Outer Banks on Saturday.

Fire officials told residents that smoke from the blaze could linger in the area for months because the fire may smolder in the decayed vegetation that makes up the peat-filled soil. Peat is flammable, and over millions of years turns into coal, Swartley said.

"You won't see open flame. The ground is just really hot - you can't walk on it," Swartley said.

The only way to stop the fire from burning in the soil is to flood it. Firefighters are pumping water from nearby Phelps Lake to extinguish the ground fire in some areas. However, the only thing that will put all of it out for good would be several inches of rain at one time, like from a tropical storm, Swartley said.

The fire was sparked by lightning a week ago.

In California, a wildfire that briefly threatened 50 homes in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles pass was contained early Saturday. The blaze in the Grapevine area along Interstate 5 in the Tehachapi Mountains had charred about 500 acres - less than a square mile - of grass and brush by the time it was declared surrounded.

Residents of about 50 homes in Digier Canyon were advised to leave but the threat ended and the fire basically had stopped growing by Friday evening.

Damp weather during the night helped keep the fire down.

The cause of that fire had not been determined.

Not A Pretty Picture ...

AP Photo


Caribbean monk seal becomes extinct!

Federal officials have confirmed what biologists have long thought: The Caribbean monk seal has gone the way of the dodo.

Humans hunting the docile creatures for research, food and blubber left the population unsustainable, say biologists who warn that Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals could be the next to go.

The last confirmed sighting of a Caribbean monk seal was in 1952 between Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service confirmed Friday that the species is extinct.

Kyle Baker, a biologist for NOAA's Fisheries Service southeast region, said the species is the only seal to become extinct from human causes.

The seals were first classified as endangered in 1967, and wildlife experts investigated several reported sightings over the past few decades. But officials determined they were other seal types.

The federal agency says there are fewer than 1,200 Hawaiian and 500 Mediterranean monk seals remaining, and their populations are declining.

"We hope we've learned from the extinction of Caribbean monk seals, and can provide stronger protection for their Hawaiian and Mediterranean relatives," Baker said.

The Hawaiian monk seal population, protected by NOAA, is declining at a rate of about 4 percent annually, according to NOAA. The agency predicts the population could fall below 1,000 in the next three to four years, placing the mammal among the world's most endangered marine species.

"When populations get very small, they become very unstable," Baker said. "They become more vulnerable to threats like disease and predation by sharks."

Vicki Cornish, a wildlife expert at the Ocean Conservancy, said the fate of the Caribbean monk seal is a "wake-up call" to protect the remaining seal populations.

"We must act now to reduce threats to existing monk seal populations before it's too late," she said. "These animals are important to the balance and health of the ocean. We can't afford to wait."

Monk seals are particularly sensitive to human disturbance. And the sea creatures have been losing their food supply and beaches, officials say.

"Once Hawaii, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean were teeming with fish, but these are areas under severe fishing pressure," Cornish said. "They'll eat almost anything - shellfish or finned fish - but their food supply is waning and they're in competition with man."

The Caribbean monk seal, first discovered during Christopher Columbus' second voyage in 1494, once had a population of more than 250,000. But they became easy game for hunters because they often rested, gave birth or nursed their pups on beaches.

From the 1700s to 1900s, the seals were killed mainly for their blubber, which was processed into oils, used for lubrication and coating the bottom of boats. Their skins were used for trunk linings, clothing, straps and bags.

The endangered Hawaiian monk seals face different types of challenges, including entanglement in marine debris, climate change and coastal development.

About 80 to 100 live in the main Hawaiian Islands and 1,100 in the largely uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a marine national monument.

Biologist Bud Antonelis said NOAA's Fisheries Service has developed a monk seal recovery plan for the Hawaiian monk seals.

"But we need continued support from organizations and the public if we are to have a chance at saving it from extinction," he said. "Time is running out."

As for the Caribbean monk seal, NOAA said it is working to have them removed from the endangered species list. Species are removed from the list when their populations are no longer threatened or endangered, or when they are declared extinct.

Turkish speaker wants new constitution after ruling

How typical: Fundies are wrong and try to force their wrong on everyone else and the fundies in Turkey are still trying to do just that ...

Turkey's parliamentary speaker has proposed a new constitution and the re-establishment of an upper house of parliament to reduce the power of the country's top court.

Koksal Toptan's suggestions come after the Constitutional Court on Thursday rebuffed an attempt by the Islamic-oriented government to lift a ban on Muslim head scarves in universities.

Toptan's suggestions appear to be aimed at rearranging the sharing of power between the judiciary and the Parliament and immediately drew the ire of the main secular opposition party.

Toptan accuses the Constitutional Court of "overstepping its power and seizing the power of the Parliament," in remarks on Saturday. The government leveled similar accusations against the court on Friday night.

There was no immediate comment from the government to Toptan's suggestions.

It will never happen the way the fundies want as long as the military supports the majority of the non-fundies of Turkey so the better get used to the idea.

And I Quote

Life is tough. Life is tougher when you are stupid.

~ John Wayne

Wonder Woman actress finds body on river in D.C.

The actress who played Wonder Woman on TV in the 1970s says she didn't do anything extraordinary when she discovered a body this week on the Potomac River in Washington.

Lynda Carter tells The Washington Post she was alone in a boat when she saw the body Wednesday. She says she didn't have a cell phone with her, so she yelled to some fishermen and asked them to call police. Carter waited until rescuers arrived and directed them to the body.

District of Columbia police say the body of 47-year-old Helen Johnstone of Washington was found floating on the river Wednesday. The medical examiner's office has not declared an official cause of death.

Carter says she "did what anybody would have done."

Way to go Wonder Woman!