Marian's Blog

What George asked the Queen (in 1991)...

Mara sent me a piece in NYTimes this week, The Queen Visits the White House, in which the  author reflects upon Bush the younger's curious behaviour sixteen years ago in the very same White House. On that occasion George found himself in the presence of both QE and his mom Barbara - "... when the first President and Mrs. Bush played host to their own state dinner for the queen. By several different accounts, including Mr. Bush's own, Barbara Bush told the queen that she had seated her son far away from Her Majesty, for fear he might make a wisecrack. Then, to his mother's horror, he did, telling the queen that he was his family's black sheep and asking, "Who's yours?"  The queen, apparently not amused, replied tartly, "None of your business." Ahhh... a refreshingly direct answer to a startlingly stupid question!

"Embedded" in Iraq

Recently GOP "maverick"(?) Colin Powell labelled the reality in Iraq a civil war. Knowledgeable journalists and others say what we see in the press does not begin to convey how bad it is. It's almost two years since my Jan 19, 2005 entry when I wrote about what to some of us already looked like a tragic, inexorable descent into hell. I contrasted it with George Bush's grand, lavish and self-congratulatory 2005 re-entry into the White House on the same day. Two years on I'm still trying to comprehend the U.S. media's "approach" to reporting Iraq and the kind of place it has become since Bush & Co.'s 2003 unilateral invasion.

This led me to search for the meaning of the term 'embedded' via Merriam Webster's dictionary online. As in "to have embedded virtually all journalistic coverage of Iraq inside the military". Here's what I found: "... to enclose closely in or as if in a matrix"; "to make something an integral part of"; "to prepare [a specimen] for sectioning by infiltrating with and enclosing in a supporting substance"; "to surround closely"; and the use of the intransitive verb: "to become embedded". How will journalists and historians chronicle this still-unfolding story of the way so many are covering Iraq?

The American assassinations, part 2 - 1964, 68: Malcolm, Martin and John's brother Bobby

On the Web I found a photo taken in Washington, at Richard Nixon's January 1969 inauguration. A notation says ten thousand people came out in the cold for this event. Two thousand were protesters. In the foreground, above the crowd, a young woman holds her handpainted sign. "PEACE IS NOT SUBVERSIVE". I read those words and forty years later they make me ask myself what exactly is different today? Is America a sleepwalking society? Quite often that's how it feels. I started blogging this thread, "the American assassinations", before reading that this week BBC News has alleged U.S. CIA involvement in the 1968 murder of Robert Kennedy. The report by Shane O'Sullivan appeared November 21, 2006 on BBC Newsnight. It is possible some in the US still really do not want to think of such things. The evening he was murdered Bobby Kennedy had just won California's Democratic Party primary and was on the verge of becoming the party nominee for president of the United States. How many of us ever stop to consider the implication of these multiple assassinations in the US? All the victims were male political figures and not one of them right wing. All this violence and death. The violent reversal of the politically possible. All in less than five years, from 1963 to '68. The Boomer generation. My generation. Multiple political murders shaped my generation of American youth. In the face of serial murders and assassinations, wouldn't coming-of-age somehow change? One devastating death followed by another and another. All in barely half a decade. All with deep social and political effects that remain today. Who talks about how these killings in the U.S. marked the baby boomer generation? Many of us weren't even 18 by the time we'd lived through all this. How many people, Americans and everyone, ever think about that? Had Robert Kennedy not been shot in the recesses of an L.A. hotel it is possible, even likely, he'd have become the 37th U.S. president. Is this the real reason he died? Indeed this 'alternate reality': had Bobby Kennedy been allowed to live, at the very least would have spared us who we got instead: Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon. Some of us remember -only too well- his other "name", "Tricky Dick". Tricky Dick Nixon. Before Robert it was his brother, our president, on a routine political visit to Dallas where he, too, was assassinated in November 1963. Fewer than nineteen months later it was Black American leader Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), shot so many times, by multiple gunmen, in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. It was Sunday, 21 February 1965. In Pennsylvania my family heard the news on our car radio. This moment in my parents' car stays frozen in my mind. A sunny, early Sunday afternoon, right after church. I am in the back seat as we ride. The news comes on the radio as we're stopped at the light at East Market Street, heading north on South Queen. So much violence. And then barely three years later Martin Luther King is shot and killed, Thursday, April 4th, in Memphis, Tennessee. Then Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 8th. Two more American assassinations less than eight weeks apart.

Hope somewhere in our humanity: Hermann Hesse to Teilhard de Chardin

We're off to an outdoor concert of jazz - "Black classical music" (my term since my 1975 Penn State radio show). In the midst of what I witness and write about in this blog, each day I'm on my own search for 'what helps us' - me especially - to become more fully human. Among the people, thinkers, writers, etc. I admire, whose actions, utterances and writings have influenced me, is the late French writer - Teilhard de Chardin. I came across an archived article at WIRED (Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, June 1995) on de Chardin and development of a "Net-based" global consciousness and how even 51 years after his death in 1955 de Chardin's thoughts connect to and continue to develop with this consciousness that's making itself real, as we Black Americans might say.

Misogyny, "the English disease"; and Julie Bindel in The Guardian

I noticed Julie Bindel's commentary in today's Guardian and just sort of exhaled, thinking "finally". Finally a British woman writing openly about something which has disgusted me for years, and in spite of my appreciation for much of what makes the UK the UK. What has disgusted me is the glaring contempt toward women that exists and is even rewarded among some British men; even to the point of murder (femicide) and serial murder. Over the years watching British news I kept seeing how it seemed like almost every few weeks some woman's or girl's remains were being sought or found. There are also the stories of UK male doctors and nurses with a penchant for killing mostly women patients. The first and last straw was my own experience working with certain - not all - male Brits. Finally when I fairly screamed about all this, a male close to me - and an Anglophile mind you - told me of "the English disease". I'd never heard it before he said it though I'd definitely felt "the English disease". My friend did not invent this string of words which refers to a profound antipathy among some men toward women. I would love to know who coined it; how this phrase came to be. Bindel writes forcefully in The Guardian: It is high time we start treating murders committed because of men's hatred of us, and, where no conviction is achieved due to the internalised misogyny of police, as being as serious as the Stephen Lawrence case. Stephen Lawrence was a Black teen murdered in London in 1993 by a group of young white men. In 2000 in London I met Stephen's mother. His killing was so poorly handled by authorities that all of it required another, far-reaching investigation. My own hope is someday soon one of us with a 'special' human sensitivity, and one that is not 'selective', will be able to explain to Britain and the whole world the type of antipathy which obviously links both.

"Great Society" Speech, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, Univ Michigan May 22, 1964

Friday, 22 May 1964 "... the "Great Society" is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor. ..." - Lyndon Johnson, 36th president of the United States of America

Back to Burning Women at the stake? South Dakota's move to end abortion & women's most basic freedom of choice

I am a 'pro-choice mom'. I am a mother (and Grandma) - I am a mother by choice and I am highly concerned over South Dakota's state government positioning itself for its assault on Roe v. Wade - the US law that gives women the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. My guess is that with its large population of Native Americans and including Indian "reservations" (Native 'reserves' in Canada) such as Rosebud and Pine Ridge, hard-pressed American Indian women will be disproportionately affected. Monica Davey writes in her NYTimes article, "If enacted, the bill, the most sweeping ban approved in any state in more than a decade, requires the signature of Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, who opposes abortion." Well of course; just what we need. In South Dakota's long and racially exclusionary "racially hostile" political tradition, one more white guy awarded the reins of power who pretty obviously never had an abortion and never will need to even consider one for his own body, yet politically poised to run roughshod over thousands of women's (and other men's) lives. Read my lips. In the long run any effort that might ban legal access to safe and affordable abortion will backfire. It is not going to work. You can try to destroy Roe v. Wade, but women's lives, minds and our political organisation will not turn back to pre-1973. ...Come to think of it, not even pre-2003. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mike.

Liverpool, Slavery and The Beatles: Modern Black Atlantic History

"As we write the 20th century what is the role of the Beatles - four white guys from Liverpool UK - in modern Black Atlantic history?" I feel a sense of betrayal when I recall that in the 1960s and later American kids made quite wealthy a group of young men from a city called Liverpool. And in recent years scholars of American popular music and culture have discovered the high cost of the "Liverpool music" phenomenon to the careers and livelihoods of U.S. musicians - especially Black American R&B groups of the 1960s. More than that, I freely admit I was one of these 'ahistorical' youth, though in most respects I wasn't really ahistorical. We simply hadn't a clue about Liverpool's earlier role in deporting, shipping, trading and enslaving our ancestors and those of millions more African descendants in the Americas. I loved the Beatles' music. I bought their records. I saw A Hard Day's Night. My friend Angeline and I even took Paul and John (Angeline and myself, respectively) as alter egos. Don't ask why exactly, but we really were into it and in a way our respective choices were on target. I think very few people in America "put two and two together" back then. I would be intensely curious to know whether any historian or social critic in any country ever attempted to put into the broader Black Atlantic context various interpretations of the meaning of the arrival in the Americas of a group of young Liverpudlian men. In America, apparently, we young Black, Native American, White, Latino and Asian American youth had no idea we were part of a longstanding socio-historical process between the US and UK - a system which without doubt was postcolonial contrary to opinions of some current observers [see my note below on Deepika Bahri's exclusion of postcolonial experience in the US]. Point of history: Among other settlements, in 1607 English settlers founded the Jamestown colony (Virginia). Over in the UK did the Beatles or anyone else reflect upon all this? It seems that even in the late 20th century and on both sides of the pond we still were part of the uninterrupted Atlantic relationship that conspired to silence and 'not remembering'. In the US there had to be those who knew this history and yet they said nothing, let alone jog public memory and foster discourse. More than a few Black American youth - including myself - were buying Beatles' records, singing their songs, we watched them on Ed Sullivan and stood in long lines to pay them to get into their concerts. We never asked - nor did we have means to do so - what Ringo, Paul, George or John thought of Black people - Black Americans, Africans, African Caribbeans, African Canadians or Black British - and of our post-slave-trade societies. We never asked what The Beatles thought of our history or of their own or of their intersections. Nor did we ask what they knew or thought of Liverpool's wildly lucrative links to Africa and the slave trade. Fast forward to 2006. Like the October 2005 STAMP project on the docks of Lancaster near the Millenium Bridge, does Liverpool have a public memorial to the way this city constructed and equipped itself from wealth acquired through catching, shipping and selling captive Blacks? Do Paul McCartney, George Harrison or Ringo Starr, or Sean Lennon or Yoko Ono Lennon or the John Lennon estate for that matter even care that these roots formed the cornerstone of Liverpool history? It's been almost a half century since four young musicians from Liverpool arrived on the shores of America and received an unbiased and unprecedented welcome. In turn that welcome afforded them the means, if not the responsibility, to contribute and to help make our common future different and better than our common past.

What if FDR met Bush?

A curious thought crossed my mind recently. What might Franklin Delano Roosevelt have thought had he ever met George W. Bush and engaged him in, um, conversation? Possibly even one about public social policy. Can one imagine the elite but also seriously social justice activist (especially in her appreciation of Black Americans and especially right there locally in Washington, DC) Eleanor Roosevelt in the same setting with Laura Bush? Equally fascinating considering that FDR and G.W. Bush share the same East Coast American social class (and no matter how much others constantly spin Bush's 'nouveau working class-cattle ranch' socio-economic and geographic pretentions), President Roosevelt must've known - or at least at some distance - the reportedly rather notorious Bush grandfather, Prescott, who allegedly organised and provided material financial and industrial support to Nazis in Germany - until some branch of the U.S. government "intervened". Are those accounts true? So many questions, so few answers, so little public discussion.

2005: Thank you from me to you

Habari gani? Nia. Purpose. Today is the fifth of the seven days of Kwanzaa 2005. In this sense, Ron Karenga's official Kwanzaa website explains that purpose means "to make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community..." The older many of us get (and perhaps among people across the world), the more we marvel at some mysterious "space" somewhere 'out there'; the place to which months and years and decades and even centuries fly away. Miraculously, 2005 has now done the same thing. And twelve months from now we will already have lived the first five years or 5% - of this still-new 21st century (by "western" time). For me 2005 has been a most amazing year. We began 2005 celebrating Capo d'Anno (while in shock over the tsunami) near Alberobello, in Puglia, in Italia (Italy). Two years ago we ate, danced and celebrated with my Mother, at Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. I sense that for me this New Year's will be one that is more contemplative, and I would like to take this moment to thank God and family, friends, readers and other colleagues for helping to make 2005 as amazing as it's been. We look forward to wonderful and beautiful experiences to come in 2006, and even to some of those not so easy things along with the friendship, love and support we share with each other to get through them. Thank you, also, for reading this blog, Marian's Blog!