First Looks category archive

It’s been quite a gas watching the right wing rediscover another outrage that they can use as another junk you will pardon the expression talking point civil liberties as they cry crocodile tears over TSA searches, given that fomenting fear has been one of their major campaign strategies since the Red Scare of 1918.

No doubt they’re all going to join me in supporting the ACLU now.

Next up:

An AFV competition:

How many pigs can fly while this leopard changes its spots?

Dick Polman comments on the media’s shibboleth of objectivity that manifests itself as dueling talking points. He points out that the storied reporters of the past did not refuse to take stands even as they tried to report the whole story, A nugget:

Edward R. Murrow . . . , the CBS News icon of the ’50s, is routinely cited as the gold standard of quality journalism by those, like Koppel, who lament the current journalistic climate. But does anybody care to guess what was Murrow’s most indelible moment on CBS?

It was this moment, on camera, in 1954, during his special report on red-baiting smear artist Senator Joe McCarthy: “We will not walk in fear of one another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular…”

In much reportage, truth lies, not in the facts as events, but in the picture which the facts paint. Those pictures are often abstract and want interpretation.

From Southwest Virginia Today:

A friend at church likes to tell the old joke about a hiker who surprised a bear. The startled bear turned on the man, who lifted his hands in prayer. “Oh God, please make this a Christian bear!” Miraculously, the beast fell to its knees and began to pray. “Lord, I am thankful for this food.”

Follow the link and read the column this introduces.

As I waited in the dentist’s office yesterday, I pulled out my phone and continued reading Mark Twain’s Following the Equator on my ebook reader (hence this morning’s QOTD). It’s an excellent way to turn waiting time into useful, or, at least, bearable time.

Reading books on my phone tends therefore to be an intermittent activity–I may go several weeks without doing it, then do it frequently for a week. Following the Equator is an ideal book for intermittent reading: As a travelogue, it has narrative, but no plot to remember, er, intermittently.

Twain published Following the Equator in 1897, late in his life. He tells the story of a tour around the world roughly along the equator. So far, he has taken me from San Francisco to Hawaii to Fiji to Australia to New Zealand to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). I am presently his guest in Bombay (now Mumbai).

The contrast between the patronizing, almost contemptuous portrayal of things not American in his very early Innocents Abroad (1869) and the more mature reflections on Europeans’ and Americans’ treatment of what in the parlance of the time were commonly called “inferior races” in the last decades of the second age of imperial expansion is notable.

According to Twain, it was common for Western tourists in visiting India at the time to hire a “bearer”–a temporary servant–to tend to their needs and to help them negotiate the visit. He tells of seeing one such tourist, a European, casually “cuff”–today we would say “come upside the head”–his bearer because of some trifling error.

And it sends him back in time:

My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie–which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort.

He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature.

When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly–as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it.

Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.

Persons sometimes speak of the “dehumanizing” effects of chattel slavery, commonly implying that it is the slave who is dehumanized.

In truth, the master becomes dehumanized.

With that in mind, consider what this report from the Booman tells us about Republicanism today.

Afterthought:

Dennis G., who blogs at Balloon Juice, frequently refers to the Republican Party as “The Confederate Party.” He has a point.

_____________________

*I have edited this passage by breaking it into paragraphs; in the original, it is one paragraph. Paragraphs were longer in the olden days when I was a young ‘un.

I didn’t need that tooth anyway.

Via Bob Cesca, who’s on a roll.

Helen Philpot composes the travelogue.

The Olympia – last surviving warship of the Spanish-American War of 1898 – may still be scrapped or face a watery grave as an artificial reef off Cape May without money for restoration.

But the Penn’s Landing attraction will not close as originally planned Monday after the Independence Seaport Museum’s decision, announced late Wednesday, to fund interim repairs.

The Olympia will continue its daily visiting hours through Dec. 31, then move to a three-day schedule through March 31 while its fate is pondered.

This would be a good target for some stimulus money.

Barry R. comments on TSA’s security theatre.

• What: Virginia Beach Democratic Committee Third Thursday Dinner
• When: November 18th, 6:00 PM
• Where: Kelly’s Hilltop Tavern, 1936 Laskin Road, Virginia Beach, VA 23454 (map), in the nonsmoking section.

Show up, order off the menu (separate checks), socialize, and talk politics–or whatever else interests you.

I have attended several of these. They tend to be smaller gatherings, highly informal, and a lot of fun.

For more information, email VaBeachBoy@aol.com

Frankly, he’s got a point.

(The video appears to have been taken down.)

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on World Toilet Day.

Taking the weekend off. See you Monday.

The Philadelphia Inquirer interviews one of the railroad men involved in the incident that inspired Unstoppable, the movie whose relentless onslaught of advertisements has annoyed me so much that I shall probably avoid it (no link provided to the movie because I’m already sick of it).

Aside: I used to work for the railroad. I can tell they phonied up the facts just from the ads.

No real railroader would be heard saying, “I’m starting to like this job.” They may love railroading–the railroad is fun and I miss it–but real railroaders aren’t going to admit that they like their jobs.

They’d rather talk about back pay.

Shaun Mullen tells the rest of the story of the girl in the photograph.

Addendum:

Link removed. Shaun emailed me that he had to delete the post because it was giving the rest of Kiko’s House the vapors for some reason which he could not figure out.

Computers. Great when they work. Otherwise, otherwise.

Read this one instead.

And not meant the way the Cream meant it.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

I’ve been distracted by computer problems for the past few days (you can read about them at Geekazine) and have put off responding to this comment, from which I’ve excerpted the opening sentence. I’m promoting it because, in my view, it deserves the plain light of day:

Mississippi has more registered voters than residents is that not a problem?

Startpage is your friend.

• The U. S. Census reports Mississippi’s 2009 population as slightly less than three million.
• As of 2004, the most recent year for which I could find voting registration figures, as opposed to voting turnout figures, the voter roles totaled slightly more than 1,500,000. I rather doubt that the voter rolls have more than doubled since then.
• Mississippi’s turnout in the recent election was slightly under 800,000.

I have not argued and will not argue that keeping accurate voter records is not a good thing.

Nevertheless, the right-wing hysteria over voter fraud is a redstate herring.

It is simply not true that large numbers individual persons are registering fraudulently in order to throw elections.

The voter fraud fraud is the spiritual and intellectual bastard child of the poll tax and the literacy test–Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on a strategy to keep the poor, the downtrodden, the dispossessed from having a public voice.

Elections are stolen in the counting room, not in the voting room.

I have a computer to troubleshoot, or perhaps just shoot.

Image via All Things Amazing.