Sherry Chandler

One in every 100 U.S. citizen is in prison, we have turned our schools into prison-like institutions, and now teachers want to bring guns to the classroom. I really must weep for my country: Texas school district to let teachers carry guns

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district’s superintendent said on Friday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.

The board of the small rural Harrold Independent School District unanimously approved the plan and parents have not objected, said the district’s superintendent, David Thweatt.

School experts backed Thweatt’s claim that Harrold, a system of about 110 students 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth, may be the first to let teachers bring guns to the classroom.

Thweatt said it is a matter of safety.

“We have a lock-down situation, we have cameras, but the question we had to answer is, ‘What if somebody gets in? What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s just common sense.”

Teachers who wish to bring guns will have to be certified to carry a concealed handgun in Texas and get crisis training and permission from school officials, he said.

Link from Jeralyn.

Have at me, gun supporters. This really is over the line. Are we really this frightened of one another?

As a corollary, read 25 Ways to Life the Drug War Curse

http://view.break.com/536276 - Watch more free videos

Though I don’t think the kid ever get her/his toy.

Via with h/t to Donna Rhae Marder.

You might also enjoy LOL Bush, the President at the Olympics. I think this explains why the man wanted to be president; he really did want to be cheerleader-in-chief. More on this at the Bag.

Well, while I’m pointing the way to famous diaries online, here compliments of Heraclitean Fire, is Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary.

As of this writing, nothing posted for August 12^th. On August 11^th, Orwell’s party seems to have encountered a version of the world tree:

Shortly after passing the first spring we came in sight of the famous tree, which the Indians reverence as a God itself, or as the altar of Walleechu. It is situated on a high part of the plain & hence is a landmark visible at a great distance. As soon as a tribe of Indians come in sight they offer their adorations by loud shouts. The tree itself is low & much branched & thorny, just above the root its apparent diameter is 3 feet. It stands by itself without any neighbour, & was indeed the first tree we met with; afterwards there were others of the same sort, but not common.

Being winter the tree had no leaves, but in their place were countless threads by which various offerings had been suspended. Cigars, bread, meat, pieces of cloth &c &c., poor people only pulled a thread out of their ponchos.

I have at long last finished reading Ernest Freeberg’s Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Harvard, 2008).

All in all, a most edifying read, though I’ll admit that I bogged down in some of the detail, the fine points of Debs’s legal appeals, the many splits in the Socialist Party, and the many splits in and complicated maneuverings of the amnesty movement were all a bit more than necessary for a general interest reader like me.

World War I destroyed Socialism in the United States, most obviously by the Post Office’s suppression of their newspapers and magazines, but also by splitting the party between those who wanted all out opposition to the war and those who wanted to sort of go along to get along. The last relics of the movement were pretty much literally stamped out by the rise, in the 1920s, of the American Legion and the resurgence of the KKK. I mention them in the same sentence because they used the same tactics, though their targets were a bit different. The American Legion went after the Wobblies and unions and anyone they considered disloyal.

By the time Debs got out of prison in 1921, he had become a beloved relic for some and a curiosity for others.

What arose from the ashes of Socialism was the ACLU, the Free Speech movement, and a definition of, push to expand the protections of the Frist Amendment.

Because I am abysmally ignorant of Twentieth Century history, these were all good things for me to learn. But what I enjoyed most about the book were the human interest elements. I enjoyed seeing my beloved literary figures, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, move in and out of the Socialist picture. In 1919, Upton Sinclair even helped put together a protest volume called Debs and the Poets, with contributors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Whitcomb Riley, Sandburg, H. G. Wells, Sigfried Sassoon, and Louis Untermeyer. Needless to say, not their best works. You can sample a few pages at Google Books.

I was also very moved by the descriptions of Debs in prison, in the way he converted his prison experience into a sort of mission. He won over warden and prisoners alike and in both the West Virginia prison and the Atlanta prison, prisoners flocked to him for advice or just to be near him. Here is Freeberg’s description of Debs’s release on Christmas Day, 1921:

Halfway to the street, Debs was stopped in his tracks by a roaring tribute from his fellow inmates. In Debs’s honor, the warden had loosened prison regulations that holiday morning, and the prisoners pressed against all three stories of barred windows, craning for a last look at their beloved cellmate. Most of the two thousand convicts cheered, hollered, and called his name. Debs turned to face them, and for half a minute he held his hat aloft as their applause grew louder. Finally overcome, he bowed his head and wept. This was, he later wrote, “the most deeply touching and impressive moment and the most profoundly dramatic incident in my life.” The prisoners’ ovation continued, still audible a half-mile away, as Debs rode in the warden’s car to the train station. [pp. 296-297]

Another new blog that might bear watching is The Orwell Prize. As with Pepys Diary, this blog will make a daily transcription from Orwell’s journals. The personal diary began on August 9, 1938; the political began on September 7.

On August 11, 1938, George Orwell wrote:

This morning all surfaces, even indoors, damp as a result of mist. A curious deposit all over my snuff-box, evidently residue of moisture acting on lacquer.

Very hot, but rain in afternoon.

Samuel Pepys, who has gotten into the plaque years, wrote this on August 10, 1665:

By and by to the office, where we sat all the morning; in great trouble to see the Bill this week rise so high, to above 4,000 in all, and of them above 3,000 of the plague. And an odd story of Alderman Bence’s stumbling at night over a dead corps in the streete, and going home and telling his wife, she at the fright, being with child, fell sicke and died of the plague. . . . Thence to the office and, after writing letters, home, to draw- over anew my will, which I had bound myself by oath to dispatch by to-morrow night; the town growing so unhealthy, that a man cannot depend upon living two days to an end. So having done something of it, I to bed.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died at 67, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday evening.

Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an Abbas spokesman, said Darwish died at a hospital in Houston, Texas, following complications from an open heart surgery.

Darwish was the world’s most recognized Palestinian poet, and became a Palestinian cultural icon who eloquently described his people’s struggle for independence. He was a vocal critic of both the Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

His poetry is considered to have given voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and won many international prizes.

…

Darwish’s influence was keenly felt among Palestinians. Last year he recited a poem damning the deadly infighting between rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah, describing it as “a public attempt at suicide in the streets.”

From NPR.

From his biography at Poets. org:

About Darwish’s work, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, “Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging….”

His awards and honors include the Ibn Sina Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the 1969 Lotus prize from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, France’s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal in 1997, the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation, the Moroccan Wissam of intellectual merit handed to him by King Mohammad VI of Morocco, and the USSR’s Stalin Peace Prize.

From Nathalie Handal in The Progressive in 2002:

In his latest collection, Judarieh (Mural), the poet finds himself in between love and death, wondering which of the two will conquer. “After the stranger’s night, who am I?” Darwish writes. So, when I speak to him by phone on March 22, I ask him who he is. He rapidly responds, “I still do not know.”

On many occasions he has expressed the notion that only poetry can bring harmony to a world devastated by war: “Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by,” he has written. I ask him if he still believes that.

“I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe,” he responds, “but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.”

Perhaps that is enough. I don’t know.

At about 2 a.m., I had just finished reading Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men (Random House, 2007). Feeling restless and chilled at the heart, I heard the “got mail” chime from my computer. Checking, I found an e-mail from Marilyn Hacker on the Wom-Po list that Mahmoud Darwish had died. Life is a sad proposition folks, but poets like Darwish made me think there is good alive in the world. I am grieved:

The Prison Cell

It is possible . . .
It is possible at least sometimes. . .
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away. . .

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers:

—What did you do with the walls?
—I gave them back to the rocks.
—And what did you do with the ceiling?
—I turned it into a saddle.
—And your chain?
—I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

He came back to see me
In the morning:
He shouted at me:

—Where did all this water come from?
—I brought it from the Nile.
—And the trees?
—From the orchards of Damascus.
—And the music?
—From my heartbeat.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

But he returned in the evening:

—Where did this moon come from?
—From the nights of Baghdad.
—And the wine?
—From the vineyards of Algiers.
—And this freedom?
—From the chain you tied me with last night.

The prison guard grew so sad. . .
He begged me to give him back
His freedom.

—Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Ben Benanni, from Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers, ed. Peggy Rosenthal, Pax Christi USA, 2005.

See also here and here.

But three servants and a free-standing lab with a full-time lab assistant. And of course patronizing friends.

I really didn’t care much at all for Dark Victory, not even for Humphrey Bogart and his faked Irish accent. Sort of fun to see Ronald Reagan playing a drunken playboy, though it’s possible that being incoherently amiable wasn’t a big stretch for him.

I can see that this is a great performance by Bette Davis before she became “Bette Davis” but the plot is so ridiculous and the rest of the cast so lame that I don’t really care much. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen Humphrey Bogart do.

By the way, as a Kentuckian I feel compelled to set the record straight. I’ve seen reviews that say that Bogart is playing a “stable hand.” He is, in fact, the trainer for the heiress’s stable of steeplechasers. Not a lowly job, though it doesn’t exactly make him one of the gentry.

It takes a lot of nerve for George W. Bush to go to Beijing with Henry Kissinger and scold China about its human rights record. He coulda stood home. Little wonder China told him to mind his own business.*

But, on a more positive note, the story of our flag bearer Lopez Lomong is one that we should all celebrate, not just because our country played a very positive role in his life but for what he has managed to survive and accomplish. You can listen to his story on Morning Edition or read a fuller bio at his website.

Lopez speaks from experience about what it is like to be separated from home and family. At age 6, he was abducted from a Sudanese church by a militia faction that wanted to turn young boys into child soldiers. He eventually escaped the militia camp through a hole in a fence with three older boys who carried them on their backs as they walked for three days until they reached Kenya, where police arrested them and sent them to a refugee camp. He spent 10 years in the camp, living on one meal a day.

Those of you who have been reading me here for a while know that one of my great griefs is the use of children as warriors. So I urge you to take time to learn a bit more about Lomong and also to explore the Team Darfur website.

__________
*I’m agreed with Avedon on this one:

It’s not just about whether a bunch of Democrats will be cranky if the criminals don’t go to jail, it’s about throwing away what was probably the most vital resource our nation had for over 200 years - our position in the eyes of the world. Without the rule of law, the only thing we have is bombs.

You can sign Dennis Kucinich’s petition for impeachment here. Likewise, Wexler.

Cindy Sheehan:

You know, I don’t care if it’s not proper for a Congressional candidate to say: “horseshit.” I don’t care if it is not a good “tactic” to get kicked out of a Congressional non-impeachment hearing that was just a bunch of horseshit anyway. I don’t care if I get accused of being too “extreme” for bucking the (cyst)em by doing everything from camping in a ditch in Crawford, Tx to non-violent civil disobedience to, lately, running for Congress as (oh no!) an independent.

…

I am angry. No, I am incensed that hundreds of thousands of people are dead, dying, wounded, displaced from their homes or being imprisoned and tortured by the sadists that reside or work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the approval of their accomplices down the road in Congress. I am furious that I buried my oldest son when he was 24 years old for the unrepentant lies and the unpunished crimes of the Bush mob. Are you incensed? If not, maybe you should ask yourself: “Why?” Hypothetically: “Why am I not enraged that my country has killed or hurt so many people for absolutely no noble cause in my name and with my tacit approval?”

I am steamed that the working class has to, once again, pay for the excesses of the capitalist criminals that feeds its rapacious appetite with the flesh and blood of our children and won’t rest until it owns every penny in this world and has all the power.

You may say, “But Cindy, it is not polite to be angry or to use such strong language in public.” Horseshit! In my opinion, every citizen in this country should rise up in anger and DEMAND that George Bush and Dick Cheney not only be impeached and removed from office, but be tried and convicted for murder and crimes against the peace and humanity!

Cindy is running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi, who has said impeachment is off the table and we have to compromise on FISA and several other interesting things. I really wanted to like Nancy Pelosi.

For some technical reason that I don’t understand, the embedded YouTube video that’s supposed to be above this text is not displaying for me. If it’s not displaying for you, you can watch it here.

It’s the 63rd anniversary of the day we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker quotes Alfred Nobel in August 1892:

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,” Alfred Nobel said. “On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

Mutually assured destruction. That worked out well.