Two bicycle tires flat, at two different times, a scooter throttle malfunctioning.
And the dogs ate our homework – after our grandmothers died.
More blogging tomorrow. Unless a meteor hits.
The written responses to Ted Kennedy’s life – from newspaper obits and considerations to blog posts and tweets – have spanned a range. They’ve produced some good writing too.
From James Fallows at The Atlantic:
The most impressive and winning aspect of his personality was the way he kept on going, with good humor, despite defeats and tragedies of all sorts and vanished ambitions. With his physical bulk he made me think of some big, proud, beautiful animal — a bull in the ring with lances hanging out of its neck, a lion or elephant that has been tattered or wounded but not brought down. As everyone has noted, his most impressive and dignified period was after he realized he would never be president but would still bring campaign-scale passion and charisma (overused term, but right in this case) to causes he cared about….
A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life — the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick — but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul. And his big, open heart. A powerful, brave, often-wounded animal at last brought down.
From John M. Broder’s New York Times obit:
He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy.
And then, of course, there have been the dissenters, less enamored of the redemptive tale, for whom Kennedy’s privileged life, his weaknesses of nature, the central sin of Chappaquiddick, and the politics themselves bore a hole to somewhere far from heaven out from which he could never be raised. Most extreme were the Andrew Breitbarts, people whose idea of political contestation is removed from the vulgar nature and crude insult of frat-jockery only in that they now persuade themselves they engage in the serious work of grownups. Grant could raise his hat to Lee at Appomattox, but for Breitbart an imperfect fellow citizen with a lifetime of public service, but different views on health care and the minimum wage, remained, upon his death, a “pile of human excrement.”
It may be that the first nobility of the truly good people who pursue a public life lies in the good they pursue for all. Surely the second is that they accept to live in a world broad in the array of its strong opinion but narrow in the range of its human empathy. The political fray, we are always told, and can clearly see if we watch at all, is not for the weak of heart or stomach, or those who are prone to cut. But neither is real war, and many a warrior has felt the human nature of his enemy even as he killed him. The shame of Achilles was not in that he slew Hector, but that he disgraced him.
When I teach novice students of literature, the very first tendency invariably to be dealt with is their eagerness to judge. All the grand display of character weakness for review in the great narratives of our cultures – the committed and omitted sins, the violence, the infidelities, the lies and mental reservations – occur to the students at first as offered to us only for the comforts of our condemnation. Somehow – and we can all speculate how – they naively perceive the flaws of others as they have been told in story by writers of talent as Sunday school sermons of the wrong life, without regard to the grays of their own matter.
The life of literature, however (not the academic study of it, in which, as the modern joke goes, Emma Bovary is “just another trope”) offers up a more expansive vision, of our human failings, a sharper view of our surprising graces. This kind of insight might inform our public life. What true value would literature have if it couldn’t actually deepen our humanity – just as religion does at its best? And, of course, there are people who enter that life who are schooled in the “humanities” in their truest sense. But a lot of people who participate in public life – from loud town meetings to quiet legislative chambers – have fled those fields of understanding and are not seeking such insights, and all the fighting ends up fitting them with protective armor, including visors, so they might not be truly touched in the melee.
So we end up distorting the measure of man, and woman. Public figures who pretend to more in their service than the common and the functional – those who reach for greatness – begin in our imagination with unsoiled souls they can never maintain. A Martin Luther King Jr. is discovered to have perhaps plagiarized elements of his doctoral dissertation, and desired women other than his wife, and those who wished him ill to begin, pygmies in the comparison, reach quickly for the rope with which to topple him. In contrast, the seventeenth century French essayist Jean de La Bruyère observed, “The nearer we approach great men, the clearer we see that they are men.” There are many variations on this idea from many sources, the most routinely offered being “No man is a hero to his valet.” Less well known is the follow up: “This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.” What we miss in the hypocritical insistence on saintliness is that the achievement of a King is all the greater in that, yes, he was human, just a man, a frail vessel like all around him – and still he did what he did.
Even before the moving eulogies of yesterday – Ted Kennedy Jr., President Obama, more human and filled with emotion than we have ever seen him – I had watched the memorial at the Kennedy School of Government the night before. But I had missed some, and so I caught up with some of what I missed online. I began to watch the video of Joe Kennedy III’s testament of love to his uncle, of the senator’s indomitable spirit, but my connection was slow. Not to waste time I began to read in other windows as the stream stopped and started. I found Joyce Carol Oates’s piece in England’s Guardian newspaper, an article with themes not unlike those here. She pursues the theme of the “fortunate fall,” as we encounter it, for instance, in Conrad’s Lord Jim, in which Jim spends his life attempting to expiate a great sin.
Oates, of course, some years ago, wrote a fictionalized version of the Chappaquiddick incident, and she does not skimp, in the Guardian, in her brute presentation of what occurred and of how Mary Jo Kopechne died. Whenever the video stream restarted, I would quickly return to it before its stopping again. When it did stop, I would return to reading Oates. What I experienced, then, back and forth, many times, was a kind of impromptu moment of whole and simultaneous vision, a balancing of a life: the worst a man had ever done unfolding in time beside the stories of his virtues. Or as the Roman Triumph had it, the conquering hero rode through the city on a chariot, hailed by the citizens, a slave holding a laurel crown above his head and murmuring in his ear, “Memento homo” – “Remember, you are mortal.”
I read that a week before he died, the family took Ted Kennedy for a final sailboat ride. On a route and in a location that evaded prying eyes and paparazzi, they brought him to the boat, lifted him up in his wheel chair, and set sail, as he had done so many times, into the Atlantic waters off Cape Cod. In art, one has to choose, one gets to, where to end a life. Kennedy lived a while longer, and I don’t know, but it may be that little followed in those final days but drugged insensibility or unconsciousness. I have seen this twice myself.
So I imagine Kennedy’s chair set toward the bow, his face into the wind. He is weak and death is near. He is surrounded, as some fortunate among us are, by family and love – as Mary Jo Kopechne was not. The white caps of the steel gray waters heave. The dome of sky is marbled with ocean cumulus. The boat sails finely over the sea. And the visions come. The parents. The brothers. The shallow, muddy waters. The thread of loss through a lifetime. The great labors, great achievements. The bonhomie. Late love. Faith. Loyalty. The imperfect self. The ebbing tide.
Soon, because I make it so, and it might have been, the sound begins to fade. The voices of those around him recede into a trickle, into nothing. His eyes rest on the seam of sea and sky and on the infinite where they meet. Over his face, in time, has come not a smile, but a final, complete, and ultimate recognition. The wind flits across his cheeks. It flaps in the sails.
AJA
Israeli Journalist Adi Schwartz offers a particularly cogent response to Sweden’s anti-Semitic tabloid trash. I wrote about that here.
AJA
Into the Light; Mobile, AL
Portal Me; Mobile, AL
Phaeton; Red Bay, AL
trees, not trees; Hardeeville, SC
water light; Hilton Head, SC
Photos by Julia Dean
We are seeing many rich encomia to Ted Kennedy upon his death, and one of the many themes being pursued – the strain began even over the past year, after his illness was known – was his ability to “cross the aisle” and work in a bipartisan manner with strong political opposites. It is true, and striking, because for forty or so years Ted Kennedy was the liberal conservatives loved to hate. To have fulfilled both roles – emblematic ideological target and pragmatic partner – is a remarkable achievement, among many others.
Neither aspect of Kennedy should obscure the other. The mental and spiritual youth of the man was demonstrated by his championing of the aspirant, new wave Obama over the established, calculating Clintons. But no one could have doubted that he would bork a well-deserving Bork again.
The successful politician of ideals – a rare oxymoron thrice-named – lives out a contradictorily pendulous tension in his or her productive working life: choosing when to stand and be reviled, in victory or defeat, by the opposing side, and when not to permit the best to be the enemy of the good. In the latter there is always the danger that true believers will perceive betrayal, a fate that never befell Kennedy, another outstanding achievement.
Collegiality, as they call it in the senate (and, laughably, in the academy, where the stakes are so much higher) can be abused. We’ve seen that recently in Charles Grassley’s genial,
halting rope-a-dope with Democrats, pretending to be an honest interlocutor in pursuing health care reform. We see it, in a rather unctuously repellant way, in Kennedy’s Republican pal Orrin Hatch, who has been fatefully AWOL on the issue, pretending to enshrine in testimonial the Democrat’s bipartisanship, by offering earnestly that if only Teddy had been able to participate in the debate this year, it would all be going so differently.
Still, I have no doubt that if Kennedy could be back in the corridors next week, he would offer Hatch a towel and work with him again.
Republicans like to claim that modern-day senate comity began to erode with that historic, eponymous borking, conveniently ignoring that New Gingrich, even before his ultimate rise to power, had committed his congressional career from the start to an overthrow of what he considered a lengthy tradition of congenial Republican accommodation to a Democratic majority. In contrast, the great senator knew, as do all great politicians, that most of the time you need to be able to talk– so that when the time is propitious you can work – with those fellow citizens of the republic who are so monstrously mistaken. (Glenn Beck, gun-toters, and dining room tables excepted.)
In the matter, then, of the Whole Foods boycott, on which I wrote earlier, here is the perspective of a practical political worker. A friend sent along the memo, written to a Democratic Club yahoo group. I have deleted certain identifying information.
Subject: If Obama called Conservatives a**holes, he would lose the A**hole Vote, right?
IMO Whole Foods boycott/picketing is a Self-Sabotaging/Net-Loss Activism plan – this Boycott of Whole Foods is counter-productive to any future Dem cause we care to promote on the premises of Whole Foods Markets down the line, forevermore. Please think again about promoting this.
I strongly consider this particular boycott to be an example of the ’self-destructing Liberals’ that the GOP always snicker at and the Pundit-heads acknowledge. I feel this is an ideologically-driven action that ignores real world practical considerations. This is my opinion, and is offered with all respect to Activist-Extraordinaire [name deleted] and the folks in [name deleted] for Change and many other groups who all carry out commendable boycotts.
We use various premises of Whole Foods ([name deleted], esp.) for many successful progressive political actions such as Food Drives, various Signature Drives, Voter Registration booths -
Are you planning never to use a Whole Foods premises ever, ever again for promoting Progressive causes?
Wouldn’t you consider it hypocritical to boycott and picket, and then return as if nothing has changed to launch a future Progressive food drive, signature drive, or voter registration in the future? That’s IF we are given permission anymore to set up tables, stand at exits, etc.
1) Politics is the art of the practical. Practically speaking, there is no net value to this boycott for at maximum we can count on paring-away a minor portion of the liberal/progressive patrons of Whole Foods, and,
2) While accomplishing such a slim objective, we at the same time screw-up a good relationship that has been extremely beneficial to the Liberal cause, if you analyze how many successfully-launched Dem activities rely on Whole Foods around the Country – not the least of which was the election of a minority President of the United States.
==> I would suggest, rather, to submit disagreement directly to the Wall Street Journal about the GOP Talking Points in the Op-Ed piece, and wherever conservative bloggers hail its content elsewhere on the web.
AJA
Imprisoned since 1977 for the murder of two FBI agents during a gun battle on the Oglala Sioux, Pine Ridge Reservation, Leonard Peltier was denied parole this past Friday. Peltier’s last parole hearing was sixteen years ago. He will not receive another hearing until 2024, when he will be seventy-nine years old.
People generally inclined to be supporters of the police and the need for law and order will be generally found supporting the conviction. It tends almost to the automatic, as well, among people of progressive, activist political inclination – those generally supportive of the cause of the historically wronged and the marginalized – to champion Peltier’s cause. I 
don’t do that. I don’t know. I haven’t made myself expert in the details of the case. I wonder how many with opinions, on either side, are such experts. I do not immediately believe that FBI agents are wrong and lying. I respect what they do. Regardless of my views on the history and current state of U.S. behavior toward Native Americans, I do not immediately believe that Indians – in this case, Peltier – are telling the truth. I don’t without judgment believe the contrary in either instance. In this case, I simply do not know. From what I do know, I am inclined to believe Peltier was properly convicted. But I could well be mistaken.
The conflict in which Peltier was engaged took place during the tail end of a period of what would be referred to, in conventional political terms, as radical political unrest in the U.S, from the late 1960s through the 70s. It is important to recognize, however – and so few do, or care to – that the history of Native relations with the U.S. government does not fall within the bounds of conventional American politics. In the 70s, a number of headline-making actions by native groups, such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island or the siege at Wounded Knee, drew public attention to Native unhappiness with the state of affairs in Indian Country. The American Indian Movement (AIM) led the way in producing what was, so far, the last such moment in our public consciousness. Unfortunately, given the general fatigue that developed during this period with political upheaval and any kind of perceived lawlessness, AIM and it campaigns were ineffective in bringing about any kind of change in that public consciousness.
By that point in the 1970s, it had already approached half a millennium since the European conquest of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere had begun. It was three hundred years since the Pueblo Rebellion in the Southwest and the defeat of the Wampanoag Confederacy in New England, the head of the slain King Philip of the Pokanoket displayed on a stake in Plymouth for twenty years. It was about 165 years since Tecumseh had organized the failed pan-Tribal resistance to United States expansion in the Ohio River Valley, a hundred and forty years since the Great Removal and the Trail of Tears that forcibly transferred the Tribes of the Southeast to the “Indian Territory.” It had been the same amount of time since Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court decision that declared Indians an “inferior race” of people and justified the taking of their land by right of “discovery.” A hundred years had passed since the Long Walk of the Navajo and the Apache concentration camps were established, almost a hundred since the theft of the Black Hills of South Dakota from the Sioux and the final surrender of Geronimo, who, with his Chiricahua warriors, and the Chiricahua scouts who helped capture them too, both defeated and betrayed at the same time, were then held as prisoners of war for twenty-seven years, until Geronimo’s death. It had been about 115 years since the Massacre of Wounded Knee, for which twenty Congressional Medals of Honor, the highest number ever for a single engagement, were awarded to U.S. troops. Fewer than a hundred had passed since the Tribes of the Indian Territory, in the dissolution of the Tribal land they had been given during the Great Removal, and of their governments, were offered individual allotments of land, later to be sold, so that Oklahoma could become a state. All of this had been followed by continued compulsory reeducation and deracination, in order to remove the vestiges of the problem, most of the twentieth 
century then passing with repeated alternations and reversals of government policy – on the reservation, off the reservation, assimilate and acculturate, protect and preserve.
Then Leonard Peltier did what he did in 1975.
Now, Reports Indian Country Today, in 2009, the leaders of South Dakota’s nine Sioux Tribes appeal to the federal government and the state’s two senators that the government must “fulfill its promises to provide adequate money for health care, economic development, law enforcement and other problems on American Indian reservations.”
“We need somehow to spur economic development, economic enterprise,” [Yankton Sioux Tribal Chairman] Cournoyer told the senators. “These recessions don’t even touch us because we live in poverty all our lives.”
“I don’t promise we’ll solve everything overnight, but the current situation is intolerable. It should not happen in the richest nation on Earth,” [Senator Tim] Johnson said at the end of the meeting.
“Overnight.”
Crow Creek Tribal Chairman Brandon Sazue said his tribe is in serious financial trouble because the Internal Revenue Service is seeking to take money and more than 7,000 acres of land after the tribe failed to remit payroll taxes for a couple of years. That means the tribe cannot help people whose electricity is cut off when they are unable to pay utility bills, he said.
[Senator John] Thune said an emergency fund approved by Congress will provide $400 million a year for five years to improve law enforcement, health care and water supplies on Indian reservations. That money can help improve the quality of life for Native Americans, he said.
Four hundred million dollars. Five hundred years.
Remember that the Individual Indian Money Trust Fund suit – to reach a settlement of Indian monies the U.S. has supposedly held in “trust” since the end of nineteenth century, and which the U.S. has fought for thirteen years – and the Tribal Trust Fund suit, which began only in late 2007, and which the U.S. government also litigates, are reasonably estimated at over $200 billion dollars in value. This is not compensation for the land that was taken. This is only the money made off the land during the period of the trust.
Four hundred million dollars. Two hundred billion dollars.
Leonard Peltier was convicted of an individual act against FBI special agents who were also individuals. Their names were Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. They had lives. They had 
families who live, still, with the pain of their loss. This should not be forgotten. They did not deserve to be murdered, which is what they were – executed, according to the evidence. A trial determined Peltier’s responsibility. He is paying the legally determined price, a just punishment for whoever committed the crime.
But Leonard Peltier did not spring, against nature, without cause from the ether. He was not parthenogenetically produced of anger and violence. He was born of the unequal clash of two civilizations over five hundred years of cultural assault, unsurpassed genocide, and continuing injustice. The violence in which he and others engaged in the 1970s was wrong. It was also futile, without any hope of benefit to Native Peoples.
What, in the thirty-four years since, has the United States – have the American people – done to prove there was, in truth, a better way?
AJA
Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, the largest circulation newspaper in Nordic Europe, produces a prima facie instance of anti-Semitic slander – an article by Donald Boström headlined “They plunder the organs of our sons.” Offering no evidence, the article reports the accusation of a Palestinian family that Israeli Defense Forces are engaged in organ harvesting from Palestinians and demands an international inquiry. Rival paper Sydsvenskan fiercely condemns the obvious, virulent anti-Semitism. Swedish ambassador to Israel Elisabet Borsiin 
condemns the article. What does the Swedish government do? It disavows the ambassador’s comments and despite calls for a statement of denunciation, from Israel and others, refuses, claiming respect for freedom of speech.
The blood libel lives, in the modern world, propagated not only in the form of fearful Palestinians nurtured in conditions of direct conflict with Israel to demonize their enemy, but still in the cultural institutions and the more “enlightened” modern political ideologies of a supposedly transformed post World War II Europe. Aftonbladet identifies itself as Social Democratic in leanings and it is partly owned by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, a confederation founded by the Swedish Social Democratic Party. While far right anti-Semitism never disappears, the hatred is a growth industry on the radical left, particularly in Europe, but in the U.S. too. Today, it frequently masquerades as criticism of Israel, but the engine of it, working in tandem with the age-old unreason of primal hatred, is leftist ideologies and cultural analyses of power.
Regarding Phillip Weiss and the Mondoweiss blog, a perpetual anti-Semitic screed under the guise of a pro-Palestinian action-journalism center, a reader, Andrew Michael W. wrote
The saddest thing is that Phil thinks about the same things neo-nazis think about – Jewish power. They project a sentiment onto the Jews – tribalism, where the Jews compete against whites and others for power. But it is really just neo-nazis who are tribal for no logical reason. Phil views Zionism as the tribalism the neo-nazis see. Zionism empowered Jews and because he sees it as an overall negative since the Palestinians suffered, he believes everything power related involving Jews is ill gotten.
This is very astute. Weiss is not just anti-Israel, i.e. an opponent of the state’s existence. He is a committed assimilationist, frequently arguing that Jews have reached such an ascendency of power in the U.S., become so embedded in the establishment, that the need for a distinct (tribal) identity – one that requires care and protection – is no more. Of course, this feeds nativist, far right anti-Semitic tendencies, the kind that have always begun, in ideation, with Jewish clandestine power and subterranean activities – like draining and using the blood of Christian children – and progressed to clarion calls to counter a rising threat. But established Jewish power engenders no greater comfort on the radical left.
In fact, distortions of post-colonial analyses provide the ground for opposing not subterranean, but state Jewish power. At the end of the spectrum where Jews once found their natural political defenders and advocates, their rise to organized power in the U.S. – the bogeyman “lobby” – and their creation of a state that has thus far prevailed over its enemies, rising in ascendency over a group preferred by the radical, “other” worshipping left for its powerlessness: all this has alienated the nation-aspirant Jew – the Israeli, the Israel supporting Jew – from ideological favor. Once more, in new ways, the Jew cannot be integrated unless, as Weiss would have it, the Jew cease to be a Jew. So we get the intellectual monstrosity of the leftist heirs of a centuries-old regime of European anti-Semitism and half a millennium of colonial conquest and genocide viciously condemning as colonial racists and Nazified perpetrators of genocide the victims of the greatest organized genocide of them all, who for that entire history didn’t have a country, never mind a colony.
For the modern European left, the ascendant Jew is as disturbing as was the ostracized Jew for the old European right. Once more, a weak-willed Europe that repeatedly demonstrates an unwillingness to bear the burdens of its own defense, and intellectually debilitated by self-regard for its (underwritten) secular, social achievements, is troubled by the Jew, the Israeli, who, in contrast, will – must – do the dirty work of defending himself. So now it is not the secretive, submissive Jew draining blood; it is the secretive, oppressive Jew harvesting organs.
But Sweden believes in the right of free speech. The right of the anti-Semite to slander. But not the government’s own right – no, its responsibility – to say, “This is wrong.”
Clausewitz’s famous proposition that “War is merely a continuation of politics by other means” might often reasonably and descriptively be turned on its head to state: “Politics are merely an enactment of war by other means.” Absent an attack of some sort on the “homeland” – and for some, not even then – domestic political opponents provoke a greater, more righteous ire than any perceived foreign enemy. One way to cope with the dissonance this reveals, as we see currently on the whacked and not as whacked out right, is to hyperbolically and emblematically transform the domestic opponent into the foreign enemy. Then one can fully embrace all of the embedded metaphors of war – attack and assault, offensive and defensive – in the attempt to destroy the political enemy who is either robbing us of our liberty or denying us our rights.
The campaign to boycott Whole Foods hardly reaches the extremes we see now in the phony town hall rebellions against changes in health policy, but it does evince the general 
intolerance for opposing views that feeds the current mania on the right and sustains the domestic political wars. Keep in mind, I’m not a libertarian, as is John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods. I think libertarianism a splendid ideal of human liberty and integrity that is at least two centuries removed from its proper sphere, and I’m not invoking the future. Still, unlike most on the right, Mackey in his Wall Street Journal Op-ed did offer real ideas for health insurance reform. Equalizing the tax benefits of employer and individually paid health insurance premiums, higher deductibles along with what Mackey terms (employer funded) Personal Wellness Accounts, and repealing the bar to health insurers competing across state lines are all reasonable ideas. They are all possible band aids, even soothing balms to a painfully dysfunctional health insurance system. (On the other hand, repealing government mandates on what insurers must cover is just one fine example of why the vulnerable of any society should never want a libertarian to occupy any influential political office. Ron Paul gets to opine and cast a fortunately diluted vote.)
Mackey is honest, too, about his philosophy: he may feel human sympathy, but he does not believe in a right to health care. He doesn’t find it in the Constitution. Of course, it is not in the Constitution. Proponents of such “rights” do not mean Constitutional rights; they mean it is a human right, which is a whole other argument. And the word it translates into once legislation is passed – “entitlement” – is equally problematic for the right, and I think misguided. I prefer my own neologism: “enlightenment.” Do we wish to be an enlightened society, providing adequate and life-sustaining health care to all, or do we not? That, too, is another argument, and argument is good. But the subject, instead, is boycotts.
A popular motto of the “enlightened” left for many years now has been “Think Globally, Act Locally.” How does a proposed boycott against Whole Foods for being, in the minds of many 
of its customers, impolitic (he could have kept his mouth shut) on the subject of health reform fit into the holistic notion of global consciousness enacted locally? You find out the local grocer has some different politics from yours and you – seek to put him out of business? Seek to damage his business sufficiently that he “gives” and purports to believe or even acts to support a policy in which he does not believe? And when your neighbor learns of your progressive leanings and organizes a boycott of your ice cream shop? When and how would an expanding conflagration of boycotts, the war of mutual ostracisms, end? These are not the makings of healthy communities, in which respect for people’s rights are married to tolerance for their differences. You don’t get punished for being unenlightened, if that’s what it is – you get to live in the darkness. That’s your right. And if you wish to promote your views, we argue about them (not shout each other down) at town hall meetings, and I still buy your organic steaks and you still read my blog because there’s value in knowing what a reasonable person who disagrees with you thinks.
Now, there are, in fact, a range of issues on which Mackey might make his progressive customers unhappy. Michael BlueJay runs a very fine sight detailing them, including Mackey’s aggressive anti-unionism. Still, BlueJay doesn’t support boycotting Whole Foods. He cites Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift:
In the ideal boycott, you temporarily stop doing business with an organization until they change some particular practice. The classic example is the Montgomery Bus Boycott that ended the segregation of city buses. But a boycott is on shakier ground when you’re trying to punish somebody for their personal political beliefs rather than what their organization does.
The boycott coming now is clearly intended as punishment for personal political belief. The anti-labor activities are a different matter, but that (ahem) battle is being waged in proposed “card check” legislation. To oppose boycotts, however, is not to deny a legitimate role for measures of community censure – not for belief, but for actions thought harmful to the community. The subject of community harm needs, itself, to be considered with care, though, as history teaches us how varyingly and liberally the notion may be understood. At the most fundamental level, in addition to one’s own political actions in support of health care reform, or the benefits of organized labor, one can enact community censure on a fundamental, individual level – by simply choosing not to patronize a local, or not so local, business. One’s neighbor might not do the same, and continue to patronize the offending merchant, but sometimes – most times – it’s probably better if we just agree to live in peace with our disagreements.
AJA
See Julia’s photo essay “The Catholic Church” (on the San Carlos Apache Reservation) in the Tikkun Art Gallery, and the post about our work on the Daily Blog at Tikkun Daily, with words by Jay.
Look back, too, if you missed it, at “The American Indian Church” on Tikkun Daily, photos, again, by Julia, words by Jay.
In 1957, the very recently, lamentably departed screenwriter Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan respectively wrote and directed A Face in the Crowd, starring a pre Sheriff Andy, very finely dramatic Andy Griffith. The film is the story of “Lonesome” Rhodes, a man with a troubled past who goes on to become a broadcasting phenomenon in the early days of television’s rise to cultural ubiquity. He takes a precipitous fall when his contempt for his audience is finally revealed. The film, designated as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” has been preserved in the Library of Congress’s United States National Film Registry. (Note, by the way, the above-the-title credit to the screenwriter, Schulberg, who gets the creator’s possessive.)
In the 1930s, Father Coughlin ruled the newly ascendant radio waves. His show ran from 1926 until 1939. The range and migration of Coughlin’s views from one end of a skewed political spectrum to another was centered on a consistent, virulent bigotry. At the peak of his popularity his audience may have reached as high as a third of the American population. According to Wikipedia, “Coughlin is often credited as one of the major demagogues of the 20th century for being able to influence politics through broadcasting, without actually holding a political office himself.”
The film, unfortunately, is little viewed by other than film aficionados. Father Coughlin has faded into a just obscurity among the general public. I am not an optimist by nature, so I will not predict a sure and similar fate for any present day counterparts, but I am a student of history, and I know it has often been so. If you care to do more than leave the end of these stories to the unraveling of circumstance, here is a link you can follow:
http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/
AJA
The Atlantic Wire
