Saturday, October 01, 2005

With all due respect, Glenn Reynolds' grandma is hot. "Everybody who's old was young once." My grandparents shared a lot of stories with me, to my pleasure and benefit. Some of those I'll tell to my kids, although they're not quite ready for the one about my grandmother and her overly-excited slow-dance partner at a wedding circa 1929... 10:04:23 PM   permalink   comment []

And so the Truth & Rec hearings conclude, without (as I understand it) any of the six white members of the Greensboro City Council attending for a single minute. You would think they would be a little curious about the process they voted to oppose, over the objections of their three black colleagues. That they would at least want to confirm their suspicions, if not challenge their assumptions. That they would be interested in hearings that have brought national media attention to Greensboro and contained moments of high drama. Nope. Not one. Not for a minute. Good thing, too, that they didn't hear the testimony this afternoon from Cesar Weston and Alison Duncan, children of CWP survivors who spoke powerfully about the impact of the killings on their lives and worldviews -- it might have made them think about the lasting effects of the tragedy, and they've pretty much signed off on that already. Spoma Jovanovic made an interesting point in her critique of coverage by the N&R -- that a reporter, or team of reporters, assigned to cover this process in depth might have won a Pulitzer. She's right, this has prize-winner written all over it, no matter the quality and outcome of the whole thing, it was a chance to look hard at race and violence and history in our city. Spoma says she suggested it to JR. If I was an N&R reporter, I'd be feeling just a little let down. 4:58:44 PM   permalink   comment []

Henri Matisse                                               Danseuse reflétée dans la glace                                                (Dancer Reflected in the Mirror)                                          Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro 11:18:48 AM   permalink   comment []

Today in the DarkTimes, Tierney says it's time to consider a gas tax. "A tax would make people figure out on their own how to burn less gasoline. Washington wouldn't need to lecture them on conservation or dictate what kind of cars they can buy." More: "Individuals don't always make the best choices about energy use - you can make a case that we drive too much because the price of gasoline doesn't reflect all the social costs." I wonder if Tierney includes in those "social costs" the money we spend on military efforts to protect and maintain the free flow of oil. Building that into the price of gas would be an interesting experiment. MoDo catches us up on Paul Wolfowitz: "A lot has changed for this architect of the Iraq war since he left the scene of the accident. Following the lead of that other wooly-headed war theoretician, Robert McNamara, Wolfie scuttled to the World Bank, where he changed the subject from bollixing up Iraq to fixing up Africa." More: "The president spent years saying that Al Qaeda was on the run, and Rummy spent years saying we just had to finish off a few Saddam 'dead enders.' But... they are finally talking about Al Qaeda as a threat again...Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Gen. John Abizaid called Al Qaeda 'the main threat we face' in Iraq...Though the Bushie gang has maintained that it would be hard for Al Qaeda to operate on the run, General Abizaid noted that the group is 'empowered by modern communications, expertly using the virtual world for planning, recruiting, fund-raising, indoctrination and exploiting the mass media' to break the U.S. will and try to form a haven in Iraq... "...The rest of us may be glued to the gruesome pileup of bodies in Iraq, but Wolfie has moved on." 11:09:04 AM   permalink   comment []

Herb Everett says the Duke podcasting conference was great, and that an archive will be posted soon. 10:52:50 AM   permalink   comment []

I used to subscribe to the view that the Klan-Nazi killings could be seen -- or left unseen -- as a bizarre, one-off event in our history, in Greensboro but not of Greensboro, etc...you know the rap. Long before this Truth & Reconciliation process was initated -- six years ago, to be exact -- I changed my mind. 10:50:22 AM   permalink   comment []

Eric Collins has a roundup of yesterday's Truth & Rec hearings in this morning's N&R. (I'll link to it when they put it online. Quotes from speakers including Tim Tyson urging the Commission to write an honest report that acknowledges uncertainties: "Be clear on what remains disputed and what can't be known...so you don't produce something that's easily pushed aside." A&T professor Michael Roberto urged that "hundreds of people" attend a City Council meeting to let the powers that be know that they should pay attention. Update: Here's the N&R article. Update: Thigpen summarizes his contribution to the day, and clarifies his view of the N&R coverage. 8:43:04 AM   permalink   comment []