"Todd and Sarah [Palin]

. . . are scratching their heads wondering, why on earth hasn't [Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan] -- why is this guy still representing the department?"

I refer of course to the attempt to fire the man who would not fire Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten.

My question is: Why does anyone care what Todd thinks, why Todd is scratching his head, UNLESS the matter was a personal one?

Megan Holland, Anchorage Daily News, July 19th:

Monegan said phone calls and questions from the Palin administration and the governor's husband, Todd Palin, about trooper Mike Wooten started shortly after Monegan was hired and continued up to one or two months ago.

The governor herself also had a brief conversation with him about Wooten in February, Monegan said.

The new assertions from Monegan, who has been mostly silent on his abrupt firing July 11, conflict with what the Republican governor said earlier in the week. She said she never put pressure on the commissioner to fire her sister's ex-husband and no one from her office had complained about Wooten. She has also said replacing Monegan with Kenai Police Chief Chuck Kopp had nothing to do with Wooten. She has offered little explanation for the dismissal.

So we pretty much can deduce via Todd's involvement off the Idioterod course that it was a personal issue.  So the issue is, watch while the GOP basically says, It doesn't matter.  So what. You can't stop us cuz of that.  She was right.  It don't matter.  The rule of law is less important than looking good and having a Mom on the ticket.  Screw you if you don't like it.  We found a Republican woman who is very pretty and thin, who has lots of babies and hates abortion, and she wants to save the polar bear her own way, and she . . . she . . . ugh . . .

Recall Vietnam

As opposed to "remembering" it, which has too many overtones. Let's just stick to the facts. The war almost crippled our military beyond repair. Young people who made it through were forever changed by the experience of going and killing peasants in their own rice paddies. The rest of the world celebrated the fall of Saigon. The damage done to a generation's faith in the rightness of their government was catastrophic.

John McCain!

Candidate John McCain

flew a bomber over Vietnam killing peasants in a war that my father raised me telling me was wrong. I remember the Pentagon Papers and Bobby Kennedy and MLK, and the Watergate hearings with Senator Sam Ervin. The feeling of topsy turvy ness where the greatest power on earth, the US government, was shown to be wrong (Segregation) and right (Johnson's Civil Rights legislation) and wrong again (water hoses and dogs) when it came to the important, forward-looking matters, and wrong —

wrong as wrong can be —

about it being worthwhile to kill 54,000 Americans and a million anticolonial Vietnamese. Leaving it as a secondary matter how America left Vietnam and what happened thereafter.

McCain missed all that.

None of it left a mark on him. He came back to the west, after his captivity, having missed the entire shift — the changeover from what Tom Brokaw calls "the greatest generation" to the next generation, McCain's (and Clinton's) own.

McCain missed out, in other words, on what Brokaw calls the complexity, the ambiguity, of the 1960s "and thereafter" (on NBC, from Denver, today 8/25/08). There was only chaos since gramps got infirm, according to Brokaw. McCain is not of that generation: he only seems so, because he is unmarked by the interim craziness when the young people like Brokaw took over, impetuous lot, because he was in a Vietnamese POW camp.

So, yes, McCain was a courageous man, and withstood beatings and torture, was tenacious and inspiring. I think highly of him. But let's face it:

John McCain

A. Was on the wrong side of an equation obvious to all sensitive and smart people in 1968 and again in 1972

B. Killed people because of that

C. Thereby skipped a period wise old men like Brokaw call confused, but was really Left-ascendant

D. So to be viewed by the public as a member of the "greatest generation" himself, even though he isn't

NBC Olympics, part III: Coventry and Zimbabwe

K. Coventry has given the games on NBC an odd twist. With their usual condescension to foreigners, the commentators were slow to recognize her greatness, but after a while it becomes too much to ignore . . .

Black Zimbabweans mob her back "home," and she "unifies" the public behind her, the white girl who still wears the flag, even after the government made itself into a sad joke. Upsets the normal range of responses for African atheletes . . . Is Coventry African? Did she vote? A well-chosen statement would mean a lot right now . . .

Come on, do it, Coventry!

Remembering Nuafrica

I thought about Nuafrica yesterday and then again today, and I figured out what I think about it.

The reason it was fun for a while was that it was like talking to your friends in a smart and well prepped seminar over coffee. You knew you were not going to be cited, like you were publishing. What you said mattered, but not as much as a published commentary or review.

Not any more: now it is all "publishing."

Nuafrica would have to return as a small, closed arena, with no publication permitted, to have the same freedom. It would have to reemerge as an exclusive, opaque domain, — in order to mimic its earlier function as an open thread discussion forum for people who might actually share incipient ideas.

Eye on the NBC Olympics' Coverage -- Part II -- Bob Costas

Bob Costas was miffed and surprised by the unprofessional and abrubt shift to closing the coverage of his interview. It's time for the local news!

Eye on the NBC Olympics' Coverage -- Part I -- Cubans are Again Revealed to be Black People

It is so fortunate that we get to call call them "Cubans," since, "some black people descended from the field slaves in sugar esates" is not as nice. And wouldn't it seem odder than even it does now, were we to rename them thus, when their Olympic teams come and kick our a** ?

Returning

to urban D.C. home . . .

Gertie, my nearing-eighty next door black neighbor, matriarch of a large and successful family, sat on the stoop in the hot sun on the sofa cushion she likes to have there. Gertie's daughter was talking with my white neighbor Bob, who is an Eastern Texan Democrat who has strong opinions about upkeep in the neighborhood. The girls came into the house, and I gave Gertie a hug and told her it was good to see her. She's had some strokes and other health problems. Gertie once told me sharply I ought to think harder before I speak, and I love her for that. I think I was between medications. Bob went inside; things are not as openly friendly between us since I called his wife a "noodge" for getting on me about shovelling my part of the sidewalk.

Anyway, the family in the house, I unloaded the car, in slow motion. That's because a week ago I threw out my back, pulling something around my lungs. We had the youngest's birthday party at a local "waterpark," and we were loading huge amounts of ice and beverages into the trunk of the car, when I spasmed, like a boa constrictor cinching up his coil around my chest.

(Still, I just had to try the "giant bubble maker." I used a wet paper bag with plastic wrap in it, and prepared the concoction from the soapy liquid and water, in the sprinkler area. Watch out for middle aged man in wet shorts with the giant soap-wand, lurching around like Frankenstein! He may hit you!)

Checked the rat traps. Nothing!

Using Primary Source Material to Teach Africa's History . . . the Logbook of the Northern Light Gold Mining Company

This semester I plan to do something new in the South African History course.

I do not want to compete with the world of visuals as put forth in available media. But I want to ride it forward a little.

My initial thought: people's sense of time in the past differed from today's, especially in rural places and before the railroads.

I have a "logbook" from the cook and account keeper with a party headed by Danial Francis transporting head gear to the previously defunct "Blue Jacket" mine between the Tati and Shashe Rivers, in the middle of nowhere, by "ox wagon": up from Barkly to Kanye and into the hinterlands of Khama's and Lobengula's dominions. The "logbook" is a daily update, at times laconic, at times hilarious, at times offensive, ultimately revealing of a particular time and place the way few other sources I have encountered are. It is still unpublished: I found it in the Zim Archives -- try going there now!

But it works only if each entry is read slowly, and clearly, over a long time — in fact, ideally, when each entry is read only in series, one per day, every day, over the same amount of time that the entries cover.

It goes from July 7th, 1881, to October 9th, covering 94 days or about thirteen weeks, mostly in laconic prose, but sometimes in verbatim and colorful quotations exposing the class and racial tensions in the outfit.

Three months. That's how long it took to haul a piece of machinery from the Cape docks to Tati District, a little piece of South Africa stuck in the corner of Botswana.

The effect, if the kids do it, listening to each installment, is to force the listener to slow down, to stop their expectations, and to relive, in something approaching real time, the entire journey, which is repetitive and dull . . . but then sometimes suddenly hilarious or awful.

The narration is then racist and casually uses Kaffir and once even N——, which we are told is absolutely verboten. It also pits "white men" against one another and rehearses their colorful language toward one another. It is laconic and stark and the reader has to think about what is going on in order to piece together the relationships between the principles and the people around them. I'll help with the larger context, of course.

I am going to edit myself on IMovie to bleep both the N and K words. I do not want to offend anyone in a stupid way, when the facts of history manifest in the narrative of the "log book" are legitimately offensive, because of what they WERE.

Otherwise, therefore, my plan is to read, in a straightforward manner, each entry, labelling each one by the day, and linking them in series to the syllabus, posted on line.

Students will sometimes hear a few concise words, "Inspanned at the river, paid the boys," and that kind of thing; but over time, something very different will emerge, a glimpse of the past in realtime.

Anyone interested in trying it will ultimately also find the links posted here, on my obscure website. As they will also be linked to my syllabus, I'll be identifiable by name for anyone who can type, I suppose.

What African revolutionaries, Michael Powell?

"Although his campaign has been known to fire volleys back at Mr. McCain, and Mr. Obama has often been critical of Mr. McCain’s policies in his speeches, opportunities to draw blood have come and gone. And he finds challenges on many fronts these days, including at one of his rallies on Friday, where seven self-styled African revolutionaries began shouting and pointing at him, accusing him of undermining revolutionary struggle.

"This was perhaps one of Mr. Obama’s easier moments of the week, as the crowd was allied as one with him. He motioned the crowd to let the revolutionaries have their say, and then he responded."

Does Michael Powell in today's New York Times have some information the casual observer does not? The guys with the banner asked, "What about the Black community," not the revolution. And were they not Americans? Give us your sources!

See: "With Genie Out of Bottle, Obama is Careful on Race:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/us/politics/02obama.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Playing the Race Card

McCain's people tried to paint Obama as foreign, "worldly."

They accurately point out that Obama's people want to shift the force of GOP criticism into the domain of race. It is only good for McCain when we think of Obama as half Kenyan and raised in Indonesia and as an "international" type of person. Being black is being American as apple pie. So in order to prevent Obama from canalizing the criticism into that domain and thus neutralizing it, they struck.