Sherry Chandler

Bobbie Ann Mason in the NYTimes:

WHEN you fly over the Appalachians of eastern Kentucky, you can see the gray scars on the mountains, pockmarks reaching far to the north and east that are the results of a kind of strip-mining called mountaintop removal. Most Kentuckians never see that part of the state because it is so isolated, and most people across the nation (which burns the premium coal from these mountains) don’t know how costly their cheap electricity really is. It could break your heart to know.

It takes just a dozen guys with giant D-9 bulldozers about a year to wreck a mountain. They dynamite it, then shove the shattered vegetation and topsoil (called spoil or overburden) down into the valleys, followed by chunks of bedrock.

Everything in this horrific pile dies. Even the streams are buried. Every rain is a flood. Slurry ponds spill black sludge. People living near mine sites hear the cacophony of dynamite, dozers and coal trucks 24-7. Their houses flood and crack. Their children come home from school sick, covered with coal dust. The well water is black.

from the LATimes:

“I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history,” said Friedan, who always kept a sense of wonder about her place in history as the mother of the contemporary women’s movement.

“It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women…. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.”

from the NYTimes:

“Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men,’ ” she told Life magazine in 1963. “It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.”

Josh Marshall has some must-read thoughts on why we have riots over political cartoons:

An open society, a secular society can’t exist if mob violence is the cost of giving offense. And that does seem like what’s on offer here. That’s the crux of this issue — that the response is threatened violence and more practical demands that such outrages must end. It’s back to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses (which, if you’re only familiar with it as a ‘controversy’ is a marvelously good book) — if on a less literary and more amorphous level.

The price of blasphemy is death. And among many in the Muslim world it is not sufficient that those rules apply in their countries. They should apply everywhere. Perhaps something so drastic isn’t called for — at least in the calmer moments or settled counsels. But at least European governments are supposed to clamp down on their presses to heal the breach.

…

I don’t want to imply this is only a Muslims versus modernity issue. I know not all Muslims embrace these views. More to the point, it’s not only Muslims who do. You see it among the haredim in Israel. And I see it with an increasing frequency here in the US.

…

Much, probably most of what gets talked about as the ‘war on terror’ in politics today is a crock — a stalking horse for political power grabs, a masquerade of rage and revanchism, a running excuse for why we’ve made so many stupid decisions over the last five years. In some cases, on a more refined plain, it’s rooted in intellectual or existential boredom. But beyond all the mumbojumbo about how we’re helping ourselves but permanently occupying Iraq and running the country’s finances into the ground, there is a conflict. There is a basic rupture in the world.

Recently, I’ve been reading a book called Who Murdered Chaucer (Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), written in large part by Terry Jones. Yes, Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. The roles of historian and comedian do not always rest easy together but, by and large, I’ve found this book fascinating. Not least for its parallels with today’s social situation.

In the late 14th century, in England under Richard II, life was pretty liberal. John Wyclif was up in Oxford questioning the excesses of the church, the Bible was being translated into English so that it did not have to be interpreted by clerics, Chaucer was writing his satires of priests and pardoners. Then, in 1399, Henry IV stages his coup, Wyclif ’s followers are declared heretics, heretics are burned alive (which they were not under Richard), and Chaucer dies mysteriously. Things clamp down. Hard.

Henry, a usurper, can’t afford dissent. Archbishop Thomas Arundel, who had been exiled under Richard, wants to regain his power and his riches.

This is the story Jones and his co-authors tell. It’s not the one we’re used to, in which good King Henry comes riding in to popular acclaim to replace bad King Richard. But, you see, the victors write the histories — and there is some evidence that Henry IV did some re-writing of histories. Evidence is hard to hide when you’re dealing with parchment texts.

History repeats itself. It seems to me that all over the world, people are retreating from liberal ideas at a dazzling pace – as it must have seemed to Chaucer 600 years ago. The very tools that seemed destined, at the end of the 20th century, to spread liberal ideas – the internet, satellite communications – are now being turned to use by authoritarians.

The war we’re fighting is not one of nation and nation, but as Josh Marshall says, one of liberalism and authoritarianism, modernity and theocracy. Perhaps it’s the same war we’ve been fighting for the last 600 years. Or more. It seems so obviously one we’re not going to win with bombs and armies.

My son, who sometimes astonishes me with his wisdom, is wont to say we’re headed into a new dark ages.

I hope he’s wrong.