Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Kansas, flat as advertised from the airplane window. Waiting to meet my sister at the airport, then up the river to St. Joe MO. Funeral tomorrow. 6:39:32 PM    comment []

Malkin was on MSNBC last night. Guest-host Pat Buchanan lobbed softballs at her, not the most compelling TV...oddly, Malkin seems to be backing away from the word "internment," she defined it as a legal term that didn't apply to most invovled...so why did she call her book "In Defense of Internment"? Meanwhile at Muller's, Greg Robinson sums up his case against the book and Malkin's defense of it with a calmly crushing finality. His politeness of tone over hundreds of words makes the anger that seeps through even more emphatic, so that when he calls an argument "self-evidently absurd" or "desperate and absurd," it really stings. He concludes: "It is ridiculous to say, as the author does, that because there is a preponderance of evidence of hysteria racial hostility towards Japanese Americans on the West Coast —and that the pressure from West Coast political figures and commercial groups in Washington pushed the Executive branch in important ways-- that this need not be factored into the decision. It is for this reason that I stated, and I repeat, that Malkin’s work is based in bad faith." 8:44:38 AM    comment []

The New York Times puts the Greensboro Civil Rights museum on the front page as part of an article on a broader movement toward such memorials across the South. Nice color pic, thank you very much. But the damn lede by Shaila Dewan is so obnoxious: One of the great peculiarities of the South is the exhaustive celebration of its own defeat. Equestrian statues, battle flags and stolid historical markers commemorate seemingly every shot fired in the Civil War. Now, the victories of another war - against white supremacy, Jim Crow and lynchings - are starting to get equal billing. Hey, Shaila: the South won that fight. The sit-ins were a victory for Greensboro, as your article makes clear. "The South" and "the worst aspects of Southern history" are not synonymous. As for the bond issue that failed here, well, I guess it's easier to chalk that up to racism alone than to actually learn something about the history and management of the museum at that moment -- which led even some fervent fans of the museum to oppose the bond issue. Oh, and you got Earl Jones' name wrong, too. 8:26:29 AM    comment []

An archive for multimedia files, created by J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter, will open soon at www.open-media.org. Lasica: "I got buy-in from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who offered free storage and free bandwidth, 'forever,' for the project." 8:05:46 AM    comment []