I’m probably leaning on the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., far too often these skitzy days, but the man still brings us hope.  When he so confidently intoned, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” he surely must have had August/2010 in mind.

Sunday, August 1.  The Washington Post ignores the serial ethical transgressions of DC Mayor-for-Hype Adrian Fenty, endorses him for re-election, and assures us that City Council Chair Vince Gray will be elected in November to replace him.  Goodbye insouciant adolescence, hello mature moxie. (More)

Comments (2) | Digg It

When Rachel Maddow asked Kentucky GOP U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul whether lunch counters should be allowed to discriminate and asked for a yes-or-no answer, Paul refused and launched into wandering allusions about freedom of speech and gun owners rights versus rights of private business.  Earlier in the interview he’d made it clear he thought “blurring the difference” between private and public businesses was dangerous, and that had he been in the Senate in 1964, he would have “led the debate” to modify the section of the Civil Rights Act pertaining to restaurants.  Maddow revealed him as an artless equivocator, but she could have nailed him for the bogus ideologue he is by confronting him with one undeniable truth: there simply are no “private businesses,” food serving establishments or otherwise, in our society. (More)

Comments (2) | Digg It

This Pulitzer Prize winner (and the basis for an upcoming PBS documentary) is the most horrifying book I’ve ever read.  Written by Douglas A. Blackmon, a son of the South who’s now the bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta, it destroys the myth that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation put an end to slavery in 1863 and replaces it with the reality of a nightmare that for millions of African American families lasted almost another 100 years.  Don’t try read this book in bed — it’s hard to sleep when you’re manacled to visions of beatings, lynchings, murders and rape, and chained to the biggest lie in our nation’s history. (More)

Comments (1) | Digg It

I’m chary about reviewing the work of other writers: I never read a book I didn’t like, and I never met a author I didn’t admire (or at least envy). And when ARK MAGAZINE (official publication of the National Organizing Alliance) asked me to review books by four friends , I knew I was about to get neck deep in a small muddy if I dug in with my usual critical shovel.  Alas, I came up dirtless — these are all must-reads, not only because of superb content and good writing, but because they are written by people who were all organizers at some point in their lives.  I urge you to buy them, lest the authors be forced to give up their inside-jobs- with-no-heavy-lifting and return to their halcyon days of cheap motels and Don Martel wine. (More)

Comments (2) | Digg It

The annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday is always a good time to take stock of our struggle with racism and discrimination, and with Glenn Beck, Pat Robertson, and Rush Limbaugh slinging arrows of hatred daily at our first African-American president, it would seem we haven’t made much progress. But a closer look reveals the Beast is now parading around so ostentatiously in public that we may have a chance to cut out its heart (nonviolently, of course). (More)

Comments (0) | Digg It

 When Studs Terkel copped out on us on Halloween a year ago at age 96, he took from us a hard-left passion for social justice, a bawdy sense of humor and a raspy voice for the working class we’ll never replace.  But he left behind an amazing body of work we’ll be digging into for inspiration and entertainment for decades to come.  On Monday, December 7^th at Georgetown University, Theodore Bikel, David Strathairn, Kathleen Chalfant and a cast of well-known actors from New York, Chicago and Washington, DC, will remind us of Studs’ genius with a concert-style reading (that means singing and story-telling and  Terkel-type jokes)  of Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith, an adaptation of his book of interviews on death and dying which he published in 2001. 

Studs Terkel’s Wikipedia page says he was an author, historian, radio personality and an actor.  They left out blacklisted television star, outrageous curmudgeon, relentless raconteur, open-heart surgery survivor, lawyer, union organizer, sports nut, Obamaphile and generally obnoxious professional Chicagoan.  The son of penniless Russian immigrants, he got his start in broadcasting in the 1930s with the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writer’s project.  His radio program, The Studs Terkel Program, ran for forty-five years on WFMT in Chicago. His 18 books, most of them oral histories taken from interviews he conducted, documented the ravages of the Great Depression, the horror of World War II, and the often savage world confronted by workers and their families.  Somehow, he always siphoned off a mug of hope from the cesspool of capitalism he confronted every day with anger and wit.  For Will the Circle be Unbroken, he followed his lifelong pattern of interviewing regular folks — parents, medics, patients, teachers and clergy — as well as biggies like Kurt Vonnegut, Uta Hagen, Doc Watson and himself. 

 Will the Circle Be Unbroken was adapted, with Stud’s help, by Derek Goldman, the Artistic Director of the Performing Arts Center at Georgetown, which is producing the concert reading in collaboration with Arena Stage. Goldman and Joseph Megel directing.

 For more information, a full cast lineup, and ticket purchases, visit http://performingarts.georgetown.edu/boxoffice/#Terkel

Comments (0) | Digg It

A recent report by Citizens for Tax Justice says the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will cost us over $2 trillion over the period 2001-2010, with half of the benefits going to the richest 5 percent of taxpayers.  I’m no math genius, but even I can figure their half comes to about $1 trillion dollars.  Holy cow — that’s almost exactly the ten-year cost of the health care plan just passed by the House of Representatives!  I’ve got an idea: let’s get our money back by sticking the rich with the total tab for health care reform, while we restore some much-needed progressivity to the federal income tax, and give our economy a huge boost in the process. (More)

Comments (7) | Digg It

The police are buzzing like hornets around Freedom Plaza in downtown DC, on edge and anxious to protect the city from a large labor rally. The chant leader is chanting. Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Rhees and Fenty got to go. But hold it. These people don’t look like a rowdy bunch of angry union members. Angry they are, but rowdy they’re not. There’s one thing clear to me, we stand here in unity. These are the nicest people in our city, the women and men who guide our children every day through a society that is anything but nice. The chant leader gets one backwards, No peace, no justice. No peace, no justice. These are school teachers, about 2,000 of them, and they’re here in the late afternoon to push back at a tone-deaf schools chancellor who just riffed several hundred of their sisters and brothers with very little warning and, in many cases, no justification. (More)

Comments (1) | Digg It