Sherry Chandler » Sunday Morning Browsing
Sunday Morning Browsing
I have always admired Susan Sarandon’s work (yes, even her role as Janet White), and I have admired her anti-war stance. Juan Cole has some thoughts today about the death threats she received when she spoke out against war in 2003:
Probably in this generation the practice of calling a signature a “John Hancock” has lapsed. It was a nice piece of folk wisdom. Hancock’s signature on the Declaration of Independence was bold and prominent,and while he did not say the things about it often attributed to him, it is certainly the case that he was signing his own death warrant if he lost. It wasn’t his signing in large script that was significant, but that he was the first to sign. We all have at least once in our lives to sign a John Hancock– to take a principled stance that could get us, if not killed, at least in serious trouble. Otherwise, we’ll have led the life of a timid slave and betrayed our own ethical beings, and we won’t even have anything interesting to put on our tombstones.
Read the rest to find out what John Hancock did say and read what Susan Sarandon said here.
In his Daily Kos Diary, Bob Higgins remembers the 69th anniversary of Guernica, which was Friday:
It is described in Historical accounts as the first time that civilians had been attacked by air power with such wrenching devastation. Devastation by bombing is only a phrase and can’t convey the sights and sounds, the screams of terror and random senseless violence of what occurred in Guernica that day. By morning Guernica would have nothing left but it’s fame.
They came, the Germans in their Heinkels, primitive by our sophisticated standards, they came, the Italians in their Fiats and they hurled their now quaint antique bombs down upon the guilty and the innocent, down upon the cowardly and the valiant, the pure and the profane alike.
They came in the late afternoon and bombed and came again and again and bombed and bombed and bombed and bombed…and returned in the early evening and bombed.
A rubble of ruin, a great hideous forlorn tumble of refuse, of smoke and fire of screams and pain and dust and sun baked rubble cooling in the evening breeze surrounded only by the mournful sounds of dying.
They say that there are conservation laws, that energy and mass cannot be destroyed. Physicists and technicians tell me that other things as well obey these laws, momentum and something called spin.
I wonder about the moans of the dying and the screams of the children, I wonder about the weeping of the mothers and the cries of rage of the brothers, I wonder, are these too conserved?
Are the all sounds of terror and loss from all the wars of history conserved, each war laying it’s grotesque symphony atop the next?
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