Every night when I go to sleep I listen to a documentary to put me down. There is something soothing about the sound of a narrator talking that just knocks me out. I also like AM radio voices, but they are all conspiracy nuts or shouty at that hour, so documentaries are my go to. Recently, I have been working my way through Ken Burns Civil War again, and Peter Coyote lulls me to sleep. At any rate, while listening to this, it just struck me how, in the big scheme of things, the Civil War was really quite recent.
As we all know, when you’re younger, everything is bigger and old people are older and your perspective form your experiences is much narrower. When you’re ten, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War and the might as well be the middle ages because it’s a long, long time ago- so long ago that your few years don’t provide you with the ability to truly comprehend time. I remember when I was a kid summer vacation felt like 50 years and turning 18 seemed unfathomable. The civil war when I was ten was had been over for 115 years, and that just seemed like ancient history. Now, as I approach 50, I have more persepctive, and 150 years ago is just three times my age, and doesn’t seem that too far back.
I guess it’s kind of like the opposite of that first time you climb up on a diving board. From the ground, it doesn’t seem that high because it’s only four feet from your head and you can almost touch it, but when you get up on there, you’ve added your height to the height of the diving board you’re standing on, and damned that ten foot diving board is now almost 16 feet from the water and seems a helluva lot farther away. It’s kind of like that in reverse.
At any rate, the Civil War wasn’t that long ago. Neither was the Civil Rights movement. In terms of historical memory, these events are babies- so is the founding of this country, for that matter. Hell, Hawaii and Alaska were barely states when we voted in Kennedy. This is recent shit.
This afternoon I was sitting in the chair reading and had the tv on in the background, and I switched for some reason to MSNBC to see if Trump had fucking declared nuclear war or something else awful, and the first topic covered was the protests in St. Louis because once again, a fucking cop had killed a black man and had been acquitted. The next topic was the fucking scumbag President demanding an apology from Jemele Hill for correctly pointing out that he is a fucking white supremacist who has surrounded himself with white supremacists and has worked to enact white supremacist policies and who can not condemn white supremacists even when they murder people in the streets without making up some bullshit both sides argument.
I turned the tv off.
Now look, I know the last fucking thing this planet needs is another hot take on race from a middle-aged male so white that French vanilla ice cream looks tan next to my skin, and I know I am not a first rate intellect or an amazing writer, nor do I have the experiences of being black in America, but you’re getting one anyway because I need to get this shit off my chest. Do white people truly not understand that black people in America are some of the most patient people on the fucking planet? And I truly mean that. Because if white people had gone through 1/100th of what black people have collectively, and the roles were reversed, this is what St. Louis would look like right now after a black cop murdered yet another white person, planted the weapon, and then got acquitted:
That is not an exaggeration. We white people rioted for the simple reason a black man got fairly elected. We (and this is a royal we) lost our fucking shit when the black President suggested that maybe a white policeman shouldn’t have gone Robocop on a college professor on his front porch for, well, being black. We demanded he have the fucking cop over for a beer. Do you remember that shit? I can’t even think about it without rolling my fucking eyes in disgust at my fellow white people. Jesus fucking christ.
Can you imagine what shit would be like right now if we had suffered through slavery, the systematic dehumanization of our kind, the institutional racism, the lynchings, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex- ALL OF THAT SHIT down to the every day little shit of being looked at sideways any time you enter a store to the MOTHER FUCKING PRESIDENT demanding an apology from a black woman for telling the truth? We are so fucking lucky.
Fer fuck’s sake, the patience of the black community is unbelievable. Christ on a crutch, Obama was elected and people got all worked up and how did black people respond- by suggesting we have a national conversation on race. And we white people even fucked that up. What was meant by a national conversation on race was a dialogue, and one in which WHITE PEOPLE SHOULD SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN ABOUT ALL THE HORRIBLE SHIT WE HAVE DONE, but we couldn’t even do that. Fucking white people took it as an invitation to tell black people all the reason we think they suck.
If roles were reversed, we’d have white terror cells that would make ISIS and Al Qaeda blush. As it is, roles are not reversed and the fucking racists are trying to get there anyway. So yeah. Shut the fuck up and count your lucky stars you are white and thank your god that shit has worked out the way it has. Because we’re lucky as fuck that the sum total of the black response is to form nonviolent groups like Black Lives Matter and the NAACP and what not, maybe a few randoms obliquely discussing reparations, and a few fucking broken windows every now and then when black people are murdered in the fucking street by an unrepentant white power structure.
God damnit.
Baud
I’m having vanilla ice cream right now.
Truth to all the rest.
Waspuppet
In a country that (sort of) elected Donald Trump president, we’re getting sniffy about people breaking stuff because they’re angry? I thought angry Americans were the new saints, who must be listened to above anyone else.
Racism is a hell of a drug. So is denying racism, I guess.
zhena gogolia
You’re a good man, Mr. Cole.
RSA
My wife used to listen to old episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater, which she first heard as a child in the 1970s, to fall asleep. Most(?) of the recordings are directly from radio broadcasts, so you can also hear local advertising and brief news capsules, including riots and what Nixon was doing about Watergate. In some ways, we haven’t come far in 45 years.
sukabi
Ummm, the roles aren’t reversed but still we have those “terror cells” in the form of KKK, Nazis, forced birthers, ect. The FBI and DOJ just won’t classify them as such.
joel hanes
My mom, now 85, often remarks that she has personally experienced a full third of the history of the United States.
Patricia Kayden
Yep. Like the KKK and the White Supremacists whom Trump praised as good people after Charlottesville. Preach, John. Very well said.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
I was listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates talking to Chris Hayes last night. The man is utterly brilliant. And at the same time, he’s preternaturally calm as he explains the pervasive nature of racism.
germy
Dick Gregory said that if police were killing dogs the way they killed young black men, white people would swarm police stations and burn them to the ground.
donnah
We live in a country populated by many races, and we still have not found equality. We live in a country where African American parents have to have a conversation with their children about how to avoid being shot and killed by white police officers simply because they are walking or driving while black. We live in a country where large groups of hate-filled white people believe that Nazis were the good guys and the Civil war was about property rights.
It’s just unbelievable.
Psych1
Vietnam now has a lot of US tourism. It seems to me that anyone there would be perfectly justified in killing any American they see. But, they don”t. Why not?
Heidi Mom
Amen, John. Well said.
rikyrah
Here is the Maddow segment from last night.
When she gets snarky, it can be funny.
She was like…and here’s ANOTHER lie of the Vice-President.
I know that Pence and Mother have House of Cards fantasies…
but, he’s up to his eyeballs in lies that have Bobby Three Sticks’ interest.
https://youtu.be/2J91YLjKvLI
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): TNC once said his job is now explaining race to white liberals.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@RSA:
Heh. After all these years, I could hum you the theme “song”, such as it is (basically 5 dramatic notes, kind of like the opening of Thus Spake Zarathustra), with creaking-door sound effect, despite the fact that I haven’t heard one of those since they aired.
My memory says that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy first aired as a radio serial about the same time, and many radio stations were carrying it in the US. I think our local college station was. Needless to say, Hitchhiker has probably aged better. I can’t remember any of the actual plots from those Mystery Theater things.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He will fail.
Ohio Mom
@joel hanes: That threw me for a loop — I walked myself through the arithmetic, and yup, your mom has lived through a third of this country’s history.
A sixty-year old has lived through
a quarter, which isn’t too shabby, either. It’s a whole new perspective, put that way.
rikyrah
hmmph
Eric GarlandVerified account @ericgarland
Trump’s digital contractor is, a year later, bragging about using Facebook on behalf of Russia. SOLID WORK!
https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/909155207480737792
debbie
Amen.
frosty
Re: Time dilation. I’m not sure where I heard this (maybe I thought it up myself!) We experience time as a fraction of the time we’ve lived. So when you’re 10, the summer vacation is 3/120 months or 2.5% of your life. When you’re 50, it’s 0.5%.
The equivalent length of time for a 50-yr old would be over a year: 15 months. So hold onto your hat, everything’s just going to go faster and faster. When I was in my 20s, I reckoned that the years went by for my 80-yr old grandmother the way the seasons went for me.
This is also why I can’t get anything done at work in less than 2 hours. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Of all the big problems in our country, I’m convinced racism is the biggest. Until we break the hold of the racists on power, we’re not going to fix any of the other problems. We have to stop grading incompetent assholes on that curve that Rikyrah mentions so often.
rikyrah
Oh really?
Mark RuffaloVerified account @MarkRuffalo
Turns out that the ‘Antifa’ group claiming they protested Red Sox game are actually right wingers
Baud
Another side point to this post is that anyone who offers a grand theory about what the future holds is talking out of their ass.
Baud
@rikyrah: GOS has a post up on that.
planetpundit
JC: I do the same thing; British documentaries have wonderful accents. Battlefield WWII works well for me.
rikyrah
Tell it Topher!
Topher SpiroVerified account @TopherSpiro
The cynical strategy here by @BillCassidy is to force MASSIVE CUTS in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security later on.
12:57 PM – 16 Sep 2017
sukabi
@rikyrah: bragging about the scope of their treason, that’s a new one.
Glad Drumpf hired the best people.?
Dmbeaster
The same can be said for the remarkable black restraint when power was transferred in South Africa. Nelson Mandela. Bishop Desmond Tutu. Martin Luther King. Remarkable people.
As for the relative recency of the Civil War, my grandfather told me stories about his grandfather talking about fighting in the Civil War, and he is on the Pennsylvania Monument at Gettysburg.
Your post reminds me of this passage from, of all places the recent National Rview article by Jay Nordlinger, about George Walker, a famous 95 yr old black composer and pianist.
Kind of shows how the whole thing is still in living memory, and the restrained response.
rikyrah
Joy ReidVerified account @JoyAnnReid
What is going on in the White House…? Trump Administration Won’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I can still hear that creaking door and the voices of EJ Marshall, Tammy Grimes and Fred Gwynne in my head… I remember their version of Les Miserables, spread out over several nights, and a series about IIRC Akhenaton (sp?), an Egyptian pharaoh who again IIRC came to believe he was the god of the sun. And a lot of Poe
I found them on the internet, of course, and it wasn’t the same as listening under the covers with the single ear plus connected to my radio when I was twelve. You can’t go home again.
rikyrah
Jemele HillVerified account @jemelehill
Thanks to @TheRoot for this video profile, which was filmed a couple weeks ago. Full interview can be found on the website.
https://twitter.com/jemelehill/status/909084240880504833
Lavocat
Preach it, Brother John! Spot fucking on!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
On JC’s point about time: as a kid in the 60s, I felt like the 40s were impossibly ancient history. I knew my parents lived through that time, but it still didn’t seem real. The older I get, the farther back I feel some sort of identification with, in the sense of being able easily to imagine living then, or talking to or being those people. It’s hard to describe, but it’s being able to realize that was a real time with real people. Feeling connected to it. These days, I feel like the 19th century was very close. Most of the suburbs in PA around me sprang up in the 1880s-1890s, around commuters riding the same trains, on pretty much the same timing, that I do. My grandpa was born in the 1890s, and that no longer seems like Ancient Rome to me the way it did when I was a kid.
Still, it’s kind of jarring sometimes to flip through the IMDB and look at the bios of people in old movies. If you played the Wizard of Oz in a 1939 movie, you are a 19th century person. When we look at those actors, we see people who watched electricity, the telephone, the car and the radio be invented and spread.
And one time I was reading the Autobiography of Ben Franklin (a guy who also feels right next door, time wise) and stopped dead when he mentioned that his grandpa was born in 1595. So he had a direct connection to the 1500s! I still find that hard to get my head around. (Ben was born in 1706 and grandpa and dad both had kids very late in life)
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: I heard they were unaffiliated with the fake antifa group. I also can’t be bothered to look it up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
it would be hard to overstate the extent to which it touches almost every aspect of our politics.
Drewmoney
Thank you, John. As a St. Louisan, I appreciate your sentiment and glad it did not turn into a riff on how backwards our region is. We have some of the best fighting systemic racism but are burdened by a shitty City governance system (all the wisdom of the same system employed in Chicago), an out-of-control STL Police Department under the thrall of a white supremacist police union, a state governed by rural legislators that hate the cities (KC, Columbia, and St. Louis) and enact the most reactionary RW nutjob litigation to own libtards (open carry & anti-LGBT right-to-discriminate laws), and now a DOJ that will turn a blind eye to racist police violence.
Add a completely fragmented local government structure that has engendered some of the egregious residential segregation in the country (outside of the South), and you understand why systemic racism reigns in the 21st Century. Fix the Fed Government, fix the Judiciary, fix MO state, and fix STL’s political system, and you will be advancing justice for St. Louis’s long patient black citizenry.
Richard Grant
Mr. Cole, determining whether someone is a first rate intellect is not in my wheelhouse. The very fact that I used ‘In my wheelhouse” should make my case. However, no one can convince me that you are not an amazing writer, including you.
Jerry
To put this in perspective: at my former house in Raleigh, I had a neighbor that is a Korean War vet and happens to be African American. Sure, he was aged, but he was still working and still very active. Can you imagine, putting your life on the line for your country just to come back home and be considered a second class citizen? And technically speaking, the civil rights movement hadn’t quite got off the ground during the Korean War. The Jim Crow South was still very fresh in that man’s mind, you could tell; didn’t want anything to do with his white neighbors. Remember that when some right wing twat starts spouting off on how old segregation was, that it’s ancient history.
Shantanu Saha
You’d be black people.
rikyrah
THREAD:
JEN KIRKMANVerified account @JenKirkman
1. On June 9. Don Jr, Jared Kushner & Paul Manafort met Russian lawyer for Clinton oppo. That same day Bernie managed by Tad Devine – a
11:47 PM – 15 Sep 2017
2. former partner of Manafort – meets with Obama. Won’t concede, does a solo press conference about taking it to the convention. #justsayin
3. You bet your ass in addition to touring, writing, running my necklace line I’m reporting my own intelligence speculations on Twitter.
4. So anyway this happened two days before June 9th.
https://twitter.com/JenKirkman/status/908949024467644416
5. That same night Trump makes a speech and even though he’s an opponent he praises Bernie & claims he’s a victim of a rigged system #huh
6. Enjoy if you will the responses to this thread. None of the people follow me. Accusations re my mental state. Classic #putinbots 4 Bernie
7. Tad Devine was hired to “engineer” a “protest candidacy”. No mention or question in article why he would want to or why that paid well.
8. Devine made about $10 million working for the campaign. The story is it was all unprecedented grass roots donations.
9. Okay. The usual thing that was reported. He made at least $10 mil.
10. Oh wait. The Feds are here. They’re like “Ummm $10 million isn’t accounted for. It’s unnamed. Care to share?” They don’t.
khead
Nice rant with one quibble. Don’t confuse patience with self-preservation.
karen marie
Great insights, John Cole. You are a national treasure.
I’m going to take this here opportunity to give a shoutout to Librivox for your going-to-sleep listening pleasure. One of my favorite readers is Mil Nicholson. She is amazing. She read “Dombey and Son” – not one of Dickens’ more popular novels but absolutely amazing, especially read by Ms. Nicholson. She also read Thomas Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge.” She brought that novel to life. I had never read “The Secret Garden” when I was a kid or as an adult. It always sounded way too sappy to me but because it was read Mil Nicholson, I listened. I was blown away. It’s wonderful. Currently I’m listening to her read the hugely long but fascinating novel “Our Mutual Friend” (Charles Dickens, of course). I’d like to lock her in a room and make her read the world.
Matt McIrvin
There is direct evidence for this: for a short time during Reconstruction, there were black-majority governments in parts of the South, not a fraction as oppressive as whites had been toward black people, and there were in fact white terror cells that would make ISIS and al Qaeda blush. Sometimes they mounted coups.
CarolDuhart2
Put it another way: my mother who died more than a year ago at 95 had grandparents who were slaves. Three generations at the most. I’m 60, and as a child remember well the turmoil of the 1960’s and how much it took just to get the segregated signs down and the ability to just move out of the neighborhood.
Sometimes I think it’s going to take even MOAR immigration to dilute the influence of the bigots. Not that immigrants can’t have their own prejudice, but perhaps they won’t be so afraid of integration and upward mobility of black Americans. Certainly one of the things that is moving away from the “lost cause” mythology and the “save our fake racial purity” panic is the presence of Americans, first and second generation who have no investment in either.
This has made it easier to take down the Confederate Statues in places like New Orleans. New Orleanians (sp?) are increasingly diverse and forward looking and come from places where Robert E Lee is just a name in a book.
Another Scott
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Thanks for the reminder. It’s a good clip, and you’re exactly right about everything else you said, also too. I put his book in my cart.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@joel hanes:
I’ve experienced 28%. And I’m a geezer, older than dirt. But not as old as EFG.
We really do have a hell of a nerve thinking we are exceptional as a country. We might have been pretty good with WWII, well except for that whole atomic bombing incident and maybe the fire storm bombing in civilian areas. That part about all men are created equal – screw women and anyone else we don’t think should count thing kind of makes that ring just a touch hollow. I’m thinking the part about forming another country to be able to have slaves wasn’t our shinning moment, nor was the way we haven’t really ended that yet. But we weren’t much past teens then so you know youthful transgressions. But then we elected a complete fucking moron white supremacist because we couldn’t allow all those not so equal people to have their votes actually count. Yeah, I’m not so sure we’ve grown up much past the stage of a rotten spoiled 5 yr old. And as a lot of countries go we really aren’t much older.
Mart
@joel hanes: I am 59, in a two more years I will have lived through over 25% of our history. That is weird. The War on Terror has seen almost 7% of our countries history. That is fucked up.
Lurking Canadian
@Jerry: I just finished a book of oral histories of WWII vets. There was a brigade (battalion? Unit anyway) of Black paratroopers. Never saw overseas combat, instead Uncle Sam dropped them into the Pacific North West to fight forest fires believed to have been started by Japanese incendiary balloons.
Anyway, these men were trained at Ft Benning, in Georgia. And while they were training to jump out of airplanes and then get shot at by the Wehrmacht, the local crackers wouldn’t even let them take the damn bus into town.
Patricia Kayden
And we still have Senator Sanders’ supporters defending Trump supporters as not racist despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
Sigh. Talk about delusional. Willing to give Trump supporters the benefit of the doubt but not willing to give Secretary Clinton any such courtesy no matter what she does or says.
Felonius Monk
I fully endorse this sentiment.
Patricia Kayden
@germy: That is so true. I’m furious that the police shot this poor dog too but it’s too bad that too many people can’t have the same compassion for human beings wrongfully shot by the police.
germy
Mary G
You are a great writer, John.
I have become downright rude to people. I used to roll my eyes or try to politely argue when white people called BLM violent thugs, or blacks the real racists, now I just yell.
Those are acquaintances, but the real revelation has been the good Democrat totebaggers who would be appalled to be called racists, but still turn a blind eye to police killings, etc. I have cut ties with a couple of them and told them why. They weren’t even Bernie Bros., but they just don’t want to hear it.
Jean
I’m always soothed by Peter Coyote’s voice.
Waspuppet
@CarolDuhart2: The Little Rock Nine had rocks thrown at them because they wanted to go to high school. Thr National Guard had to escort them.
Eight of them are still alive. They’re significantly younger than my mom.
NotMax
Netflix, of course, has its own documentary category.
If you have a Roku box, the ‘hidden’ Roku channel XTV also has quite an eclectic array of documentaries in their own box in the XTV Movies category.
zhena gogolia
@khead:
Right, that was my reaction too. Still a good rant.
rikyrah
truth
‘He is the embodiment of a racist’: Trump biographer unloads on president in brutal take-down
Tom Boggioni
16 Sep 2017 at 11:48 ET
https://twitter.com/RawStory/status/909171322814701568
Roger Moore
Of course, if white people had suffered everything black people have, we’d probably have their patience and perspective. We’re impatient because we’re unused to being told no. I suspect this is a huge reason purity ponies are almost exclusively white. The idea you should be able to get exactly what you want immediately, and that anyone who presents a reason you can’t is a sellout and/or enemy is the essence of privilege.
FoundOnWeb
The Civil War really is closer than we think.
CarolDuhart2
But what has encouraged me during the age of Trump is that the margin of his victory was so small. 77,000 in four states. And I’m not convinced that there wasn’t some tampering with the machinery of the election itself along with the voter suppression and the rest. And look at what happened today and since the Inauguration. For all the talk (and even that has ended) of a silent majority of supporters, nobody seems to really show up at his rallies or rallies for him. Yes, they say “we work” but where do they work at that they have to work on Saturday? Or can’t take days off for an Inaugural that’s two months away?
Also white allies don’t seem to be afraid of being seen as white allies. “Race Traitor” “Liberal” and other stuff aren’t scaring them away or into silence anymore. BLM marches have white and other cultures marching alongside black marchers. Organizations and the #Resistance are intersectional in so many ways. And industry refuses to go along. It was much different back in the 1960’s.
Uncle Ebeneezer
We (white people) had bloody revolutions because of taxes and the possibility of NOT being able to own other human beings. Like snowflakes, we are fragility turned to 11.
Roger Moore
@germy:
Republicans want to shrink government until it’s too small to help Those People.
rikyrah
Facts Do Matter @WilDonnelly
After ACA repeal failed, Trump tried to implode the ACA markets by withholding funding. CBO says he is succeeding.
NotMax
@Ceci n est pas mon nym
Still blows me away that best actress Oscar nominee May Robson was 7 years old when Lincoln was assassinated.
debbie
I used to like falling asleep to BBC Overnight. But then, a few weeks ago, they reported on a finding that chimpanzees are capable of murder. They ran an audio of the murder, and the shrieking had me up for the rest of the night. It was terrible, and they let it go on for too long.
germy
This man went on tv in 1956, said he witnessed Lincoln’s assassination.
Eljai
I firmly believe this country needs to confront its history honestly before we can truly progress. There was a good article in The Guardian today about the Equal Justice Initiative’s plan to build a Memorial to victims of lynching. It’s set to open in Montgomery, Alabama next Spring. In the article, Bryan Stevenson, civil rights attorney and founder of EJI, discusses the silence about enslavement despite the preoccupation with the Confederacy.
germy
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Paul Mooney did a bit, right after 9-11, about white people crying in outrage about the way they were suddenly being treated by the TSA in airports.
Steeplejack
OT, but, hey, documentaries. The Indieplex channel is showing Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (2012) at 2:32 a.m. EDT. (It’s on now but ends in 15 minutes.) It’s about Big Star, the very talented but success-averse ’70s band from Memphis. I know at least a few people here will be interested (MikeJ, I think?).
Ohio Mom
@Mary G: That was me two Thanksgivings ago, and that is why my sister-in-law refuses to speak to me. Those tote-baggers don’t like it when you don’t play along.
I guess I feel bad that I put Ohio Dad in an awkward spot, since said SIL is his brother’s wife.
NotMax
@FoundOnWeb
Yup, history is closer than we perceive it to be.
Remember doing a double take in 1996 when came across this obituary for a wife of Pancho Villa.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Eljai: Peggy Noonan had a remarkable tweet thread a couple weeks back about how we shouldn’t take down statues because we shouldn’t hide from history, or some such nonsense, and it included the remarkable assertion that after the Civil War we as a nation came together and moved on. What it all boiled down to was: let’s not make white people uncomfortable. Jim Crow, segregation, lynching? Sometimes you just have to walk on by….
She was introduced on MSNBC not long before, and they introduced her as a “contributor”. I haven’t seen her on since, I’d like to think they changed their minds. I’d like to think that happened when Joy Reid went to Andrew Lack and said, it’s her or me, and I won’t leave quietly. But I suspect she’ll turn up again.
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
what do you think the creation of Jim Crow was about?
The saddest part of Chris Hayes’ interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates was him explaining what the title of his book meant
” we had 8 years of power”
I foolishly thought that this was in reference to Barack Obama’s tenure as President.
Had nothing to do with Obama – it was in reference to South Carolina, They were about to institute in Jim Crow, and the Black legislators pointed out all the good government – available to all – that they had instituted.
It was never Black failure that White folks feared. It was Black success.
They don’t hate 44 because he was a Black version of Shrub..
They hate 44 because he should be considered for Mount Rushmore. THAT drives them crazy.
rikyrah
tee hee hee
Yashar Ali
?Verified account @yashar
New: Establishment gears up for Steve Bannon’s war on the GOP leadership.
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/909209240925097984
Patricia Kayden
@Dmbeaster: Wow. Ms. King’s comment is horrifying. That’s exactly why I avoid movies, books, etc., which focus on slavery. Way too painful.
Eljai
@karen marie: I love hearing about good readers. I will have to give Mil Nicholson a try. I like to listen to audiobooks before bedtime and one of my favorites right now is the British actress, Juliet Stevenson. She’s recorded some of the Jane Austen novels and her reading of the children’s book “The Magician’s Elephant” by Kate DiCamillo is absolutely delightful.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Baud: How many scoops? And do they look like eggs? (video)
Cheryl Rofer
The last living woman to have had an affair with Joseph Goebbels just died at 97.
Corner Stone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Nooners was on Bri-Wi last night:
“Aw, hell, no! Brian Williams welcoming Peggy Noonan to “our on-air family tonight.”
ETA, expecting or waiting on rachel to make a stand or force something is probably not a great meme. I can’t say I blame her for it, actually, but it just is not going to happen.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Ken Burns’ epic 18 hour documentary on the Viet Nam war debuts Sunday night on PBS
here’s a 30 second preview (video)
Chris
It’s kind of epically fucked up once you think about it, that our national narrative says that it was good and right for white people to throw a violent revolution over some new taxes and shit, but that it’s very very very bad for black people to get violent over four hundred years of slavery and a hundred years of segregation, and that the Good Blacks are the ones who told everyone not to be violent. (That’s before you even get to what’s happened since desegregation, and what’s happening now).
If MLK ever behaved like George Washington did, we’d remember him as a terrorist and a race-war-monger. If George Washington ever behaved like MLK did, we’d remember him as a quisling and an appeaser and a traitor.
Eljai
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I can’t stand Nooners. But I’m not surprised. She’s a horrible person.
ETA: And I would LOVE to see Joy Reid kick her ass, but I’m sure Peggy Noonan is too cowardly to go on Joy’s show.
m.j.
I agree.
God damn it.
I don’t believe in God.
Chris
@sukabi:
Yep.
If one wants to get pedantic here, ISIS is the “KKK” of Iraq – they’re the Sunni nationalists in a system in which Sunnis have historically been the ruling class. A better analogy for those hypothetical black terrorist cells (or white terrorist cells in this mirror-universe case) would be the various Shi’a militias that finally got their chance to start punching after Saddam’s downfall empowered them.
I have plenty of issues with The West Wing, but the “jihadist = KKK” analogy was a pretty good one that may have gotten better with time. The AQI and eventually ISIS mirror the KKK pretty well: originally had pretensions of being a resistance movement against the occupying U.S. Army, but quickly turned its attention to terrorizing the local historically disenfranchised and newly liberated underclass.
NotMax
@Cheryl Rofer
Cheryl, will be rudimentary to you, but recommended this piece as a valuable round-up of strategic and tactical threads from tapestry of North Korea and things nuclear there for us laymen. As I said in another thread, nothing particularly new in it, per se, but as a current resource found it a must read.
Curious if you might take issue with anything there.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Eljai: She’s Dolores Umbridge, all that simpering and cloying mugging and purple prose covering one of nature’s fascists. She titled a published collection of her columns, “A Heart, A Cross and a Flag”, which reminded me of Sinclair Lewis’ quote about fascism coming to America, with the added bonus of the ostentatious religiosity of the Bush years.
Flanders' Former Neighbor
I feel like most white people think, “Hey, I didn’t import your ancestors for slavery, and neither did my ancestors. So quit complaining to me.” That was my take until I moved out of an entirely white (save for the kitchen help) part of Wisconsin and moved to the SF bay area. Last time I went back to visit family, it was weird NOT being around people that weren’t white. Better relations though food, I think. Who doesn’t like Indian or Ethiopian cuisine? Still, it’s extremely embarrassing to tell an Indian engineer who is the nicest guy around that maybe his desire to tour the country at some point should avoid 50% of the US.
Matt McIrvin
@CarolDuhart2:
The thing is, those bigots are all descended from immigrants, and some of them didn’t immigrate very long ago. Some of the worst ones are themselves recent immigrants from “white” countries. And “white” seems to be capable of expanding indefinitely to encompass more and more people as long as they’re not black, because it’s defined by opposition to being black.
So I don’t hold out much hope from the US becoming majority-minority through immigration. On the other hand, the Republican Party seems to have shit the bed for a good long time when it comes to Latino and Asian-American votes, so maybe there’s hope.
magurakurin
Perhaps the reason that the oppressed have more patience and forgiveness than the oppressors is because being the oppressors causes you to lose your soul but being oppressed doesn’t…the opposite in fact.
but yeah,
“god dammit”
is all I have, too.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cheryl Rofer:
Buh-bye.
Steeplejack
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Noonan was on Brian Williams’s show last night. Mercifully short appearance, but still dreadful. She basically pimped her latest Wall Street Journal column.
chris
OT, Edroso has some good pictures from DC this afternoon.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: I keep coming back to Tulsa in 1921. What happened there is often described as a “race riot”. It began with an aerial bombing campaign, biplanes flying over the prosperous black district of the city and dropping crude incendiary bombs that burned the whole place down. That’s not a riot, that’s an act of genocidal war. It’s a footnote today.
Geeno
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I remember listening to CBS Mystery Theatre at the end of the day when we were staying at our cottage on Keuka lake (early 70’s, before the Corning flood). No TV signal in the valley around the lake, just the radio station from the town at the end of the lake (Hammondsport). It was weirdly fun to experience entertainment as a prior generation had. We even found a trove of old magazines in a large chest; it was a very cool time travel like couple of weeks. I wish I could have provided my sons with such a viewport into the past.
Cheryl Rofer
@NotMax: Vipin Narang and Ankit Panda are two of the smartest commentators on the North Korean situation. Narang is just plain brilliant – I listened to him talk about Pakistan and India at the Carnegie Conference last spring and was blown away. Panda and I worked through the North Korean response to “fire and fury” on Twitter and found what looks like an opening to negotiations with North Korea. I wrote that up here a while back. Both have given me full credit for my contribution.
The article you linked is the fourth or fifth in a series they’ve done together on North Korea. I recommend all of them. I think most, including this one, are at War on the Rocks if you run out of free articles at The Diplomat, as I did a while back.
I really need to read this one more carefully. I appreciated their insight that the North Korean weapons may not be fully assembled. I would have thought they were, but I need to think about that some more and perhaps bug both of them on Twitter. The details of nuclear strategy are not my thing – I tend to flop back into the position that this is all totally absurd, so why are we even thinking about it. So I appreciate people like Narang, who probably supplied most of that in this article. Panda tends more toward the equipment side of things. They work well together.
ruemara
@khead: It can be both.
encephalopath
Civil War plays really strangely now compared to when it first came out. I watched some of on PBS recently when they play the remaster.
Shelby Foote and his glowing, romanticized tales of the Confederacy just seem wildly out of place. That a historian would get that caught up in treasonous rebel love is unseemly.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Amen. I’ve said this a million times before: If white people had to put up for a month with what Black Americans have been dealing with for 400 years, we’d have burned this country down already.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Actually police kill a lot of dogs in the US.
Database:
https://puppycidedb.com/
Some reporting:
https://www.thenation.com/article/police-kill-nearly-25-dogs-each-day/
https://qz.com/870601/police-killing-dogs-is-an-epidemic-according-to-the-justice-department/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/what-dog-shootings-reveal-about-american-policing/533319/
Geeno
@Matt McIrvin: That NEEDS to be added to our history teaching. People would have a much easier time understanding each other if history were taught without bias. Instead it’s taught as if we need to bias things in the favor of white males, but that only raises the question that if that were appropriate, we wouldn’t need to bias things.
Admittedly, history has to be told from some point of view – depending on the country where its being taught (Belgians will care about Belgian history, etc.), but it should be factual, and cultural judgments should stick to the relevant facts.
Gah – can’t say what I want correctly cuz I’m +5
Adam L Silverman
@rikyrah: Here you go:
Gretchen
@CarolDuhart2: that’s a really hopeful perspective, that all these new immigrants have no dog in the black-white hunt and think it’s just stupid, and move past it. I like that idea. Thank you.
CarolDuhart2
@Geeno: One of our public radio stations would broadcast old radio serials up until the early (or was it mid) 2000s. An hour or two a day.
Adam L Silverman
@Drewmoney:
One day we will have to have a discussion of what you all consider to be pizza.
kdaug
A) We have rudimentary writings going back, what, 8000 years? Solid knowledge of “ancient” culture going back 4000? Laws based on 2000 year-old desert nomad tradition? And the “Greatest Country On Earth” is just barely over 200 years old?
This is a speck in time. The proto-reptiles ruled for a couple million years.(Don’t make me drag out Segan standing on a floor-calendar). So noob they don’t know they’re noob. The Chinese object to our hegemon because we’re a 200+ year old culture, they’re 2000+ years.
These are fractions of a percentage.
B) I’m Irish-American (2nd gen on one side, 3rd on the other). I remember the Troubles, and know damned well how the “white people” would react, or at least my particular slice of that peculiar strata.
“Irish Car Bomb” isn’t just a drink.
(To be fair, the IRA generally called ahead with a warning to get the people out. The objective was property destruction, not casualties.)
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
God help us. James O’Keefe has become a role model.
Another Scott
@NotMax: An interesting read. Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
SuzieC
“The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.” Faulkner. Sure applies to American race relations.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: It was ethnic cleansing. I apologize for not doing a post on the anniversary, which was last Monday, but I was in the process of getting home from Irma evacuation.
Adam L Silverman
@encephalopath: Foote deserted during WW II, but was never prosecuted for it. Burns reliance on him made that documentary worthless.
John Cole
@encephalopath: Foote was an old white dude from Memphis. It plays exactly as you would expect from him.
debbie
Hope this isn’t fake news.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: I didn’t like Burns’ “Civil War” for that reason, though there were some interesting segments.
It makes me question how his “Vietnam” is going to turn out….
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: It isn’t. The complaint has been submitted. Whether it amounts to anything is another issue.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: I’m not watching it. I won’t watch any of his documentaries.
Another Scott
Speaking of the Civil War, Lee is in line after Jose and Maria…
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Another Scott:
Oh boy, I can hear it now: The South shall rise again.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
His documentary about Prohibition was okay. Less tunnel visioned than some his other efforts.
rikyrah
Keep Speaking Out: Why Hillary Clinton’s Voice is Critical to the Feminist Movement
Hillary Clinton is back in the news with her new book, What Happened, and some liberals couldn’t be more uneasy. They wish she would shut up and go away, so the Democratic Party and the progressive movement could move on with picking what they dub the ‘next generation’ of leadership. Comically, many of their choice for this ‘next generation’ is white, male, and within striking distance of 80.
Nevertheless, I have had the chance to listen to some of Clinton’s interviews, and it has only crystallized my view that Hillary Clinton needs to keep talking. She does not need to shut up and go away. Her detractors do.
Hillary Clinton has announced that she is done with electoral pursuit, and no one can blame her, though America is irreparably worse off for it. But among other factors that made her the winner of the national popular vote on election day and yet narrowly lost her the electoral college – including the then-FBI Director James Comey’s interference into the presidential campaign to announce nothingburgers about Clinton’s emails while remaining deadly silent on the then-ongoing investigations into Trump and Russia, rank racism and Trump’s cult – she defined a key flaw of American politics and of American culture: sexism. She pointed out a form of sexism that is dangerous and pervasive precisely because of its seemingly ‘benign’ nature in our culture.
Particularly, Clinton pointed not just to her campaign but the uphill battles faced by female executives, directors, and leaders in top positions across American culture, society and industry as palpable proof of this particular form of sexism. As a society, America (and America is certainly not alone in this) still views the natural role of women supporters and advocates who serve the cause of others, while it views the natural role of men as leaders and directors who should seek to serve their own interests. As a corollary, when men seek high positions of power and influence, they are applauded for doing so. When women do the same, they are seen as selfish, an affront to ‘traditional’ values.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/2017/9/16/keep-speaking-out-why-hillary-clintons-voice-is-critical-to-the-feminist-movement
Ruckus
@Flanders’ Former Neighbor:
I’ve traveled to 46 of the states. Quite a few of them many times. A few yrs ago I was going to move from OH to anywhere US. I got out a map and started to knock off places I didn’t want to live. It took all of 5 minutes to think parts of the northeast or back to the west coast. It took another minute to go, “back to CA.”
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: @debbie: It’ll be effective below the Mason Dixon line, but if it tries to fight north of that it’ll lose.
Geeno
At 56, some regard me as a boomer, but I was 7½ during Woodstock. I grew up in one world (striving for the moon), and became an adult in another (the actually depressing Disco era), and that world didn’t long survive the 1980 election, and it became something new and worse (though music improved for a bit).
It’s been getting worse ever since. My own attentions have distracted at various (and all too frequent) points, so I don’t claim to be some protector of the “True Faith”. I’m now frightened of the world my sons (15 and 22) are inheriting.
Racism was supposed to be thing of the past by now. At least as a thing someone would be proud to proclaim in public. Even Lee Atwater said you can’t say “Nigger, nigger” anymore, but he was wrong.
Misogyny – ZOMFGWTFBBQ – I knew it was still around, but the extent to which it still holds sway is jarring. I think that was thing about the last election that freaked me out. I knew misogyny was still a thing, but to THAT extent?!?!?! That shocked me.
It’s like my life started in a bad place during the race and anti-war riots. Things seemed to improve for a while, but now nearing the end of my life – nothing has actually changed. The world may actually have gotten worse.
Lapassionara
@Steeplejack: And me. Just saying.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
It seems he goes into a lot of detail to make them sound true, but many of them seem also to have blind spots the size of TX about reality.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Jazz was excellent until it got to the present day (2001), when it unsurprisingly revealed that contributor Wynton Marsalis was the future of jazz. But on everything up to the early ’60s it was spellbinding.
Billie Holiday et al., “Fine and Mellow” (1957).
NotMax
@Geeno
Demographically, if you were born between 1946 and 1964 you are a boomer.
Culturally may be another matter, but the label’s purpose is a demographic one.
(My mother and step-father – born during the 20s – attended Woodstock. I, a boomer, was working way out in a rural area and was unaware of it until after the fact.)
Gretchen
So true about the past telescoping. When I was a kid WWII was part of the present. Most of the dads had served, the moms talked about what rationing was like, many of my friend’s parents were refugees. My best friend’s dad was a Polish POW of the Nazis, and her mother spent the war in a Polish slave labor camp. They met in a displaced person’s camp before coming to the US. That was a not uncommon story among the kids in the Catholic inner-city high school I attended in Detroit. Later, when my kids were little, one of the dads had a crippled leg. My first thought was, “that Nazis did that”, because that was the explanation in my childhood. What a relief to realize that an injured dad was that way because of a stupid motorcycle accident, not because of Nazi torture. But that was a presence in my childhood. For my children, that’s as remote as the Civil War.
Chet Murthy
@Geeno: I’m 52. Not so far in age from you. But I don’t feel that things are getting worse. At least, not here in California. Sometimes I take Lyft, and nearly-invariably, it’s people of color driving. Sometimes native-born, sometimes immigrant. On the streets of SF and Sili Valley (yeah, still segregated, but even so) there are people of all races. In SF, over and over I can’t tell what race somebody is. I see mixed-race couples, and their little children are so beautiful. It’s all GLORIOUS. They’re “Californian”. They’re “American”. And I gotta believe that they’re still brown or Asian or black enough, that they’re not gonna forget about social justice.
Maybe the rest of America is getting worse. But it seems to be getting better out here. At least, compared to what it was like growing up (in a sea of white christian nutjobs), this seems like paradise.
Jeffro
@rikyrah:
AGREED. When the Turtle said his main goal was for Obama to be a one-term president, I don’t think many of us knew (I sure didn’t) the history and fear behind that statement. Or how much it would matter to that old Southern white man to see a black president fail.
Cool and competent: no wonder he scared the crap out of so many of them. But then again, any black president would have, in some way or another.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: I have friends back in DE, so let’s hope that he can’t fight east of the Mason-Dixon line either…
Tehanu
@Geeno:
Well, I am a boomer, almost 70, and I’m not quite as depressed. You say “nothing has actually changed” — I can’t agree; things have actually changed, but not all things — or to put it another way, I think most people have moved in the direction we liberals / progressives would like them to go, but it’s hardly a surprise that the others haven’t, or that even the ones who have changed retain some of their earlier notions. We don’t progress by a straight line, start out “BAD” and gradually become “GOOD”; we lurch forward a bit, regress some, lurch forward a bit more. And I’m not saying the bad can’t win out for a while. But I’m enough older than you to remember, all too vividly, the world in which my well-meaning parents told me not to let boys know I was smart, and I couldn’t get a credit card because I didn’t have a husband,* and the great university I attended where the only black classmate I had was a world-famous basketball player whom nobody ever actually talked to. People much braver than I worked hard to change those things, and change they have, and although it often seems to me too that it hasn’t been enough, I’m not giving up hope and I hope you won’t either.
* I could never watch “Mad Men” — tried once and gave up after about 2 minutes; I was in my early teens during that exact time, the early 1960s, and I can’t tell you how much I hated the attitudes that went along with the clothes and the hairstyles. Seeing them literally made me feel sick at my stomach. I’m sure it was a good show, but it just took me back to a time I’m so, so glad is over!
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: That too.
Ruckus
@Geeno:
Man if you are 56 you have a long time to go.
Mobile
@CarolDuhart2: The civil war ended 80 years before I was born, in 1945. My grandfather, who was born in 1850, was 15.
Enzymer
@Baud: amen to that
debbie
@Steeplejack:
I liked Baseball, especially the early episodes.
Chris
@magurakurin:
One of the better moments in TNC’s Black Panther comic has a conversation between T’Challa and the local reformist intellectual/philosopher in which he gets into the history of race relations in the U.S. to make a point about Wakanda. Using a real book as a reference, he describes the process by which entire generations of white people were raised century after century with the duty of keeping an entire nation of people enslaved. “It drove them mad eventually.”
NotMax
@Steeplejack
“Happy Jack” Parker, “I Want To Be Bad” (starts ~1:50).
Josephine Baker, “You’re Driving Me Crazy.”
And a bonus (NSFW) Baker dance clip.
Ruckus
@Tehanu:
It’s almost like I wrote that. Well everything other than the black ball player. I went to integrated schools from 7th grade to college. When I was 12-14 my dad had a black man working for him, Richard, (he was not the only one!) who took me under his wing and for that I am eternally grateful. I learned more about being a real human from him than anyone else I can think of in my life. And I’ve had some pretty decent tutors along the way.
NotMax
@Tehanu
Mom took driving lessons on the sly because her husband insisted that women had no business behind the wheel. This was either late 40s or very early 1950s.
Mike J
@rikyrah: I’ve long thought Bernie was played like a trout in the Russian affair.
Of course in January of 2016 John said we weren’t allowed to accuse St Bernard of any ties to Russia, probably because he thought the problem would be soçialism, not fascism.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl Rofer: What did he say about India and Pakistan that blew you away.
FWIW I don’t think its just the United States that suffers from historical amnesia most Brits know how exploitative their Empire really was. India for its part sees it own history through Victorian eyes.
schrodingers_cat
Am the the only one who I hasn’t seen Burns Civil War. I usually find his documentaries overly long and too talky. He needs a good editor.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: @Mike J: Considering all we’ve learned with Flynn, it’s surprising to me we’re not hearing anything (so far) about his table-mate Jill Stein having some deeper entanglements with Putin and his trolls
Johannes
@Richard Grant: This. And This to the main post, too.
Timurid
@Chet Murthy:
I’m 49, I live in Louisiana and, yes, it’s getting worse.
At this point the best case is that I somehow keep this job until I retire. It’s almost certainly the last academic job I’ll ever hold, whether it lasts me 20 more years or 20 more months. Outside of academia I’m pretty much unemployable. If it gets worse here, to the point where I’m endangered, I have no out. There’s nothing I could do in California but starve.
Dmbeaster
@encephalopath: Actually, he tamps it down in the series. His comments elsewhere at other times were much more blatant and offensive. Or maybe Burns edited his remarks in order to leave the real crap out.
Patricia Kayden
@Matt McIrvin: And I bet the survivors’ descendants didn’t get any reparations for that act of war.
birdie
I was born 96 years after the CW
My mother was born 67 years after the CW
My father was born 57 years after the CW
My great grandmother was born 24 years after the CW
My great great grandmother who was raped at 14………
to quote Fanny Lou Hamer: I am sick and tired of being sick and tired
Steeplejack
@debbie:
I didn’t see that one. I will say that I would be a little nervous to watch it, because there is something about baseball that makes American intellectuals go weak in the knees. I picture George Will and Doris Kearns Goodwin poetically blabbing on and on as their eyes get more unfocused.
Patricia Kayden
@schrodingers_cat: Haven’t watched any of his documentaries.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Good ones. Jazz really went after the “deep cuts” and had some great clips (both audio and video).
Cheryl Rofer
@schrodingers_cat: It blew me away for two reasons: First, how smart and clear his analysis was. Second, because it implied (to me; others took it differently) that in that case at least, being the first to use nuclear weapons makes the most sense.
Corner Stone
@Timurid: Can’t speak to LA but in my small part of TX rotating around the Greater Houston Metro Area, I can tell you that this is the most diverse I have ever seen. And I grew up in a really diverse area and school district (for the time).
Corner Stone
Is the 2005 remake of King Kong put together with the express purpose of making the viewer absolutely hate the native island inhabitants?
Quaker in a Basement
@sukabi: +1 for speaking my mind when I got here too late.
Chet Murthy
@Corner Stone: For all my bloodthirsty hatred for all things Texas, all things Texas, all things Texas (it was -that- horrific), Houston is the one part of Texas I’d spare. B/c even 30yr ago it was a multicultural haven. 30 yr ago there was an area where you could be out and gay safely (well, at least, much dangerous than where I grew up). There were neighborhoods of Chinese, Vietnamese, Jewish, etc. It was …. amazing. Why couldn’t it have been someplace with …. less apocalyptic weather?
Ivan X
You’re an amazing writer, John. Why the fuck else would I still be reading your blog after 10 or 12 or however many years it’s been?
Corner Stone
I mean, if a dudebro will fight off three T-Rex’s for just another chance to ogle your boobs isn’t that like a form of love?
Sentient AI from the Future
People up thread have probably said this already, but i have to take issue with characterizing it as “patience” when its a bit more like “understanding that one can be killed, consequence-free, for bringing certain subjects up, even if that connction happens entirely in the mind of a white person” is closer to the mark. I would characterize “patience” as more volitional.
Nelle
Very late to the party and the time compression discussion but I offer this. I’m 66. My grandfather was born in 1863 in then Russia, now Ukraine (better check the boundaries this week – may be Russia again). My uncle was a student revolutionary in St. Petersburg in 1917 (and later, with the rest of the family, including my father, fled Russia and the Lenin folks). His great-granddaughter is now part of the resistance in Berkeley.
Nelle
@Jerry: Ruby Bridges, who desegregated the New Orleans schools, is in her early 60’s, several years younger than I am.
Tim C.
I like Ken Burns, but I think his “Not War” documentaries are much better than his “War” ones. The west was a brutally honest look at just how awful the ethnic cleansing was against Native Americans and the treatment of the Chinese as well. Likewise, the one on Prohibition, particularly how the politics of the matter made it a classic “wedge” issue have real relevance today.
Gian
@Jeffro: I have to admit I may have daydreamed about Obama turning into Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury Agent of Shield and bringing justice to Hydra moles McConnell and Ryan
LongHairedWeirdo
The beer summit cop story was all the more annoying because I saw RWNJs cheering in comments sections over Obama saying a cop shouldn’t arrest a fellow who was legally in his own home. They knew a fuss would be made, a hissy thrown.
And, oh, how they tore into him in another incident where he called for a THOROUGH INVESTIGATION which proved he was racist and anti-cop. Because Trayvon Martin was black, like a son of Obama would be. This actually makes sense to a wingnut.
Brachiator
Missed an interesting thread. On time dilation. I found it interesting that to teens and 20 somethings, WW II is ancient history, and many seemed not to know anything about WW I, who was fighting or why (noticed this a lot in comments in various online stories about the Wonder Woman movie).
I had a great aunt, born in 1893, who rode the train as a young girl, but who lived long enough to travel in a jet plane as a mature woman.
LAC
@Eljai: and for nooners the joy reid show is too early. That booze isnt going to sweat itself out in time.
Bob
I do the same sleep technique. Although with me, it’s documentaries and / or sitcoms. The A & E series, “Engineering an Empire” is my favorite.
Brachiator
Oh yeah, I regularly listen to BBC Radio 4 comedy and drama programs before I go to sleep. Often these are repeats of programs I listened to earlier in the week while fully awake.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@germy: I gotta start checking out Mooney. I remember him from Chapelle Show but I don’t know his stand-up well. Some of my favorite Black podcasters have mentioned how Mooney might be the GOAT for comedy that makes White people uncomfortable.
Seth Owen
@CarolDuhart2: I think you are touching on an important dynamic, as the country becomes more diverse it gets harder to maintain the white power structure. Yes, all the various immigrant groups are very diverse among themselves and often have their own prejudices, but the key dynamic is that they are not white. And they are natural allies in the struggle for equality.
When it was purely a white vs. black dynamic it was easier for the white power structure. The only real ally blacks had were Jews, who understood quite well that animus directed at blacks could easily (and in fact, inevitably) turn against Jews.
One of the things I see is that Muslims, Sikhs, Asians, Hispanics, etc. seem to also understand this and there is considerable solidarity despite their otherwise diverse characteristics. Soon this country will be majority nonwhite and that will be good for everybody, including white people.
Matt McIrvin
@Seth Owen: Exception: recent Russian and Eastern European immigrants are often very right-wing and pro-white-power-structure. I think there are also more Hispanics than you might think who identify as white and could be co-opted to turn against non-whites. And there are the reactionary immigrants from places like the UK who actually join anti-immigrant groups because they figure they don’t count.