No Quarter is no friend of Barack Obama but I have to say Melissa McEwan posed some really dynamite questions for Obama here.
The Slave Ship opens with an extensive and unforgettable inventory of the trade’s particular horrors. There are the accused conspirators in a failed slave ship revolt forced by their captors to eat the hearts and livers of the recently executed. A captive starves himself to death after several unsuccessful attempts to rip open his throat with his fingernails. A black sailor accused of fomenting an insurrection gets pinned to the mast by the ship’s captain, who leaves him to rot to death without food or water over the course of three weeks. Sharks trail slave ships from one edge of the Atlantic to the other, overgrown by the time they reach Jamaica from feeding on human carcasses tossed overboard en route. Captains embrace the spectacle of grisly executions with devilish glee. The desecration of human bodies becomes at once efficient, whimsical and sadistic. A London merchant orders the captain of his ship to brand each captive with the first initials of his wife’s and daughter’s names. One master lowers a shrieking woman feet first into the Atlantic; when “she was drawn up” moments later, according to Rediker, “it was found that a shark…had bit her off from the middle.” The Atlantic slave trade has been the subject of rigorous historical study for more than four decades, but no previous work comes as close to conveying its terror.
—The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
Because of her endorsement of Barack Obama, some are saying Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius could be a vice-president nominee for Obama. I think a better choice would be Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor running for U.S. Senate.
It’ll be a better, tougher ticket against the troglodytic McCain-Huckabee ticket.
Caroline Kennedy this week sought to bestow on Barack Obama the aura of her father’s idealism. In hindsight, despite all we know about JFK, a certain saintly glow attends to his legend now. A martyred brother, RFK, buttresses the legend.
And his brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy, changed course on a wasteful life to become a champion of the poor and powerless.
And Obama, despite the taint of Rezko, still retains a certain purity, a neat trick, if I’ve ever seen one. Now, what does he make of all these endorsements?
I was traveling this past weekend when my computer got sick (a complete system failure) and died. No amount of dancing, soothsaying, or human sacrifice could coax it back to life. I finally returned home Wednesday and spoke to Toshiba (well, to the outsourced customer service desk in Bangladesh, or thereabout). The agent got frustrated with me because I couldn’t understand him so he instructed me to take my dang blank laptop to an authorized repair center in the morning for diagnosis.
I was working on a long post about my travels and that is now trapped in the consciousness of my dead computer. My notes on a different post that I promised last week are also on that computer.
I have too many applications, too many programs on the computer that I do not want to lose. But, more than that, I have been working on a redesign of this site that I want to migrate over to its own website and that, too, is on the computer.
I will, of course, continue to post in the coming days and weeks but it may be sporadic until I either get my laptop back, or buy a new one.
So long . . .
“After the revolution there will be enough for all.”
* * *
“Because legality is just the name for everything that’s not dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because just round the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn’t enough, not by a long way, because there’ll come a time when any amount of love will be too late.” *
—Hari Kunzru, “My Revolutions,” a novel, Dutton. 2008
The Clintons and the national media covering the Democratic Party race for the presidential nomination have broken out a new story line regarding Barack Obama: That he’s “angry” and “frustrated.” Hillary Clinton practically taunts him with this. It does not help that the media has not only totally bought into this, they’re mischaracterizing their news coverage to turn normal or innocuous exchange with the candidate into “tense” encounters. ABC News breathlessly reported on its website that it had filmed a “testy” exchange between Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times and Obama. Their tape, however, does not match their description of the encounter.
A measured Obama was trying to both sign autographs for voters and talk to the reporters as he campaigned in South Carolina. His voice was not raised. A bemused smile played on his face, as if he recognized the trap he was in. The reporters were trying to manufacture a story where there was none and he was not about to give them one. He even tried to go off the record at one point.
It’s a singular achievement of the Clintons that and the media in this campaign that they’ve managed to turn Barack Obama into the “Angry Black Man” without any evidence of him being one.