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Saturday, March 3, 2007 |
CommonDreams: "Remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the right-wing goon squad whose defamatory insinuations helped sink John Kerry's presidential campaign? They're back! This afternoon, key Swift boaters George 'Bud' Day, Mary Jane McManus and Carlton Sherwood are holding a little reunion, in the guise of a panel discussion at the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The panel topic? 'The Left's Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier.'"
It fits:
LATimes: "A Pakistani immigrant who hosted fundraisers in Southern California for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is being sought by the FBI on charges that he funneled illegal contributions to Clinton's political action committee and Sen. Barbara Boxer's 2004 reelection campaign."
LATimes: "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Friday was declared the winner in a competition to design the nation's first hydrogen bomb in two decades, a major step in restarting production of nuclear weapons."
AmericaBlog: "Are these people insane? The Army fired the head of Walter Reed today, and the new guy who's taking over until they can hire a permanent replacement is Kevin Kiley, the same guy who reportedly let a soldier sleep in his own urine, and refused to lift a finger when he was notified by the wife of a GOP congressman who had witnessed the horrifying scene."
NBC11: "An Alameda artist got a surprise visit from the U.S. Secret Service last week for displaying artwork some people thought was threatening to the president."
Slideshow.
1:39:56 PM 
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InstituteOfScienceInSociety: "In a surprising development that may well stump the further approval of GMOs, Federal Courts in the US have ruled against the Department of Agriculture (USDA) in three successive cases for failing to carry out proper environment impact assessment, making the original approvals of GM crops illegal."
1:26:54 PM
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Independent: "Two centuries after William Wilberforce's campaign to abolish the slave trade was won, two of his descendants yesterday began a journey from his hometown to ask for 'forgiveness'.
The journey was part of an effort to apologise for the trade - which thrived for three centuries in Britain - and to call for an end to all forms of modern-day slavery.
The walk is part of a series of events organised to mark the 200th anniversary of the parliamentary act to abolish the slave trade."
In Our Time (podcast episode).
The film, Amazing Grace is already out in the US and will soon be in theaters in the UK.
AlterNet: "Having heard this primer on Wilberforce, it was unsurprising to see how veteran Christian Right groups welcomed, and promptly appropriated Amazing Grace and Wilberforce as their spiritual and movement ancestors. Predictably, the film has gained the accolades of a wide range of Christian Right activists, from Concerned Women for America, which praised Wilberforce as a model for today's grassroots activists, to the Institute for Religion and Democracy, which announced, 'William Wilberforce made change possible by forging a social witness that connected orthodox Christian faith with public policy and cultural renewal'.
Though the movie may be documenting a noble cause and man with whom all sides of today's culture war may wish to align themselves, or strive to emulate, it seems as though the Christian Right is determined to have the lock on Wilberforce's legacy, at least as far as it concerns their own efforts to intertwine church and state, by laying claim to one of the best results of such an entanglement, and firmly ignoring all the others."
I assume the religious right at that time was much in favour of slavery.
WSWS: "Besides giving himself body and soul to the battle against slavery, Wilberforce challenged injustice on many fronts. He fought to reduce the crimes punishable by hanging and bring about penal reform for women prisoners. As a champion of myriad causes for the poor, he sponsored legislation for improving child labor laws and founded the Society for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor, among many others.
Perhaps inevitably, the film paints a relatively uncritical picture of Wilberforce, who was an individual, like any other, inevitably limited by his times and his class position. He was not a social revolutionary. His fervent Christianity makes him an icon even today for certain right-wing forces (like former Watergate conspirator Charles Colson) who set up his moral example against the struggle for political and social change. Many of Wilberforce's own colleagues, including Clarkson, repudiated his religiosity."
There is another Wilberforce, a fictional one. And it looks like he got his name from William Wilberforce. That person is Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, one of the main characters in the P.G. Wodehouse canon.
Like William Wilberforce, Bertie Wooster led an idle life in his youth. William was at Cambridge, but preferred partying to studying. That's our Bertie. But later on William stood up for the downtrodden. And if there is anything Bertie can be credited with it's his eagerness to do the right thing.
According to the film, Wilberforce ran an enlightened household, with his manservant familiar with the writings of Francis Bacon. And Jeeves, Bertie's personal gentleman, was a fervent reader of Spinoza.
I suppose the Christian name 'Wilberforce' was generally adopted after the death of William Wilberforce. Even horses were named Wilberforce. William is said to have saved a horse from a beating by its owner. And in 'Much Obliged, Jeeves' we learn that Bertie's father was a sporting man who named him 'Wilberforce' after a horse than won the Grand National. And Bertie had also won a Scripture Knowledge prize.
I have a feeling that Wodehouse had William Wilberforce in mind when he gave Bertie his second Christian name.
1:23:45 PM
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© Copyright 2008.
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