Mourning Rosa Parks * and Remembering Her Real Story

from CNN:

"I think that she, as the mother of the new civil rights movement, has left an impact not just on the nation, but on the world," [U.S. Rep. John Conyers] told CNN in a telephone interview. "She was a real apostle of the nonviolence movement... [T]here was only one" Rosa Parks.

*and this from Paul Rogat Loeb's Soul of a Citizen:

Before the day she refused to give up her bus seat, Rosa Parks had spent twelve years helping lead the local NAACP chapter, along with the union activist E.D. Nixon from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college, and a variety of ordinary members of Montgomery's African American community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the Supreme Court's recent decision in Brown v. Board of Education banning "separate but equal" schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge had won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks's decision didn't come out of nowhere. And she didn't single-handedly give birth to the civil rights movement. Rather, she was part of an existing broader effort to create change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without an immense amount of humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on.
...
Think about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks's historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don't so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

The real story [of Rosa Parks] conveys a far more empowering moral. It suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts by Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruit. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart-as happened with Parks's arrest and all that followed. We can never know beforehand the consequences of our actions.

*Loeb material added 11/10/05
*emphasis mine

2001 reasons to declare victory and come home

U.S. death toll in Iraq reaches 2,000.

Iraqi constitution passes, officials say.

big brother is watching -- this time, at Wal-Mart

I close out the night with another article from The Progressive:

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that's what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster."

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

Duh! Everyone knows that for teenagers today a thumb-tack stuck in a picture is a real threat, the hip equivalent to using a bobble-head as a voodoo doll. Good thing attentive Wal-Mart employees everywhere are on the look-out for the slightest sign of disrespect aimed at G.W. That hippie social studies teacher will probably give the student an A for the semester for this unbelievably sacrilegious behavior.

Honestly, the irony is just too much. It's funny and frightening, sad and scary all at once. If nothing else, it's one more reason not to shop at Wal-Mart (where local economies are liable to fall faster than the store's prices).

Good night and God bless.

an interview with Viggo Mortensen

from The Progressive, Nina Siegal poses a straight-forward question that elicits a sharp response:

Q: Are you anti-Bush, as the pundits say?

Mortensen: No, I'm not anti-Bush; I'm anti-Bush behavior. In other words, I'’m against cheating, greed, cruelty, racism, imperialism, religious fundamentalism, treason, and the seemingly limitless capacity for hypocrisy shown by Bush and his Administration.

Obviously, people will disagree on whether they see these qualities exhibited in the President's and his Administration's behavior. But, if reactionaries can keep their knee-jerk under control for a moment, Mortensen's comments should help them understand why so many people are increasingly upset with the current leadership of our country: it is because lots of different people see some of these same qualities on display. And anyone should agree that cheating, greed, cruelty, treason, and hypocrisy are morally reprehensible. Honesty would go a long way to helping bridge the supposed differences (which I don't believe are as large as some claim) among Americans. For example, we don't have to begin by fighting over environmental legislation. We can begin by agreeing on the fact that calling legislation which will weaken environmental protections of our atmosphere "Clear Skies" legislation is wrong. Then we can talk about whether the need for environmental security overrides the need to give yet another hand-out to certain industries.

news from the other side of the pond

from The Independent:
The headline of the article gives its point of examination: "Are British troops at breaking point in Iraq?" Half-way through its investigation of this question is this curious statement:

Recent comments by the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, that British forces might have to stay in an increasingly volatile conflict for up to 10 more years have exacerbated fears among British forces that the conflict in which they are engaged is open-ended and lacking a credible exit strategy.

10 more years?! I haven't heard Rumsfeld (or anyone else, for that matter) make those kind of statements. But then again, expressing such honesty would make it hard to justify Bush's sunny-optimism and his constant claim that the situation is improving. Given how often an administration official has made this claim, Iraq ought to be Utopia by now, perhaps even returned to the mythic Garden of Eden. Bush & company choose, instead, to speak in vagueries, suggesting on the one hand that troops may begin to come home soon and on the other that the war on terror will be long and require much sacrifice (though who that sacrifice should come from, besides our troops and their families, is also equally vague; it certainly doesn't apply to big oil or any of the BushCo favorites like Halliburton). If someone in the administration actually stood up and said, "We'll have troops in Iraq for the next 10 years," there would likely be an immediate revolt from all over America against any ongoing occupation. Pity the truth is so frightening to the Administration, given that it has the ability to set us all free from the sins of empire, war mongering, and greed.

*emphasis mine

Iraq was to be just the beginning...and Saudi Arabia was in the cross hairs!

from Bush Told Blair of 'Going Beyond Iraq':

George Bush told Tony Blair shortly before the invasion of Iraq that he intended to target other countries, including Saudi Arabia, which, he implied, planned to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Bush said he "wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation, mentioning in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan," according to a note of a telephone conversation between the two men on January 30 2003.

It would've been interesting to hear/see how Bush justified going after Saudi Arabia, given that he's been best-buds with the Saudi royal family, gladly accepting their money for corporate buyouts and campaign spending. No wait, candidates aren't allowed to take foreign money for campaigns. My mistake. He might also have to explain why he helped a whole bunch of bin Laden family members get home to Saudi Arabia in the days after 9/11/2001. Though that probably wouldn't take too much spin on one of his most favorite phrases: "I sent them home so that we don't have to fight them here." So how the President have done it? How would he have betrayed his family's close friends, gone after their leadership and their oil? With the occupation in Iraq struggling and the President's approval rating now at 38%, it appears we will never know.

holding out for "total victory," whatever that is

from the AP, Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged:

"So long as I'm the president, we're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory," Bush said.

The President made these remarks in a "carefully scripted" teleconference, where Pres. Bush played the part of interviewer to a carefully selected and coached group of soldiers. My question for the President: What is "total victory"? I hope it doesn't have anything to do with electoral politics and the timing of the 2006 elections here in the U.S. But I won't bet on it.

As I fill in the title on this entry, another thought occurs to me: I hope Bush's idea of "total victory" doesn't fall in line with total victory related to, say, a game of chess. In a game of chess, you don't have to wipe out every single one of your opponent's pieces before taking the king. It may be fun, sometimes, but it's mostly mean-spirited. To make the same effort when real lives are at stake is, to use a word the President can understand, evil.