Favorite Quotes from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold

A friend recommended to me Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac. For more information on Aldo Leopold, visit the Aldo Leopold Foundation website.

The book, originally published in 1949, is an excellent exploration of why we need an environmental ethic (Leopold called it "the land ethic.") Here are some passages which struck me. All page numbering comes from the 2013 special commemorative edition.

Review: "Becoming Muslim" Podcast

Meena Malik in February 25, 2022 MuslimMatters.org wrote a review of the series Becoming Muslim on the Spiritual Edge podcast. Hana Baba was the lead reporter.

I haven't yet listened to any episodes.

Recommendation: Empire's Workshop Latin America the United States and the Making of an Imperial Republic by Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin's thesis in Empire's Workshop Latin America the United States and the Making of an Imperial Republic is that the USA "workshopped" & tested its ideas on how to manage its global empire in its dealings with other peoples in the Americas.

#FirstNations in its creation of a 2-ocean coast #WhiteSupremacy state to its commercial gangsterism in #Mexico, the #Caribbean & Central & South America. https://t.co/X41jpXjV2H

— Ayman Hossam Fadel (@aymanfadel) December 25, 2021

I created a Twitter moment with more quotes and thoughts!

Review: Spencer Ackerman - "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump"

 

Spencer Ackerman's Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump aims to convince liberals to stop their support of the Global War on Terror in all its forms. The premise of the Global War on Terror is that the proper response to attacks against the United States, its allies and its interests is escalation of violence and tightening of control. This inevitably leads to the strengthening of illiberal elements within the United States, whether they be the national security state or everyday believers in American Exceptionalism who, despondent at the terrible cost of the national security state and lack of results it produces, seek to use its tactics against ever-widening circles of internal enemies, including United States Muslims, racial and ethnic minorities, migrants and liberals.

Recommendation: India in the West: South Asians in America by Ronald Takaki

 

I remember attending an Asian Students Association meeting at the University of Virginia to hear from the guest lecturer Ronald Takaki, whom I had known about because of his book condemning the United States's use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The students' excitement was as if a diety had entered the room, and it was really the first time I remember considering ethnicity and identity to be important. Professor Takaki was a leading figure in the movement for multiculturalism in education. India in the West: South Asians in America was published in 1995 as part of a series of books designed for young adult readers. It is adapted and reprinted from his 1989 classic Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans.

Recommendation: "Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction" by Maia Szalavitz

I first heard of Maia Szalavitz from the Citations Needed Podcast episode 99, The Cruel, Voyeuristic Quackery of Rehab TV Shows. Her book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction basically contradicts everything I'd ever thought I knew about addiction to mind-altering substances before involvement with supporters of recreational and medicinal cannabis legalization and decriminalization, who opened my eyes to the compound hypocrisies and harms of prohibition and incarceration.

Review: The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase

Marilyn Chase's The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco is an easy-to-read, non-technical history of public health authorities' efforts to contain an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco in the first decade of the 20th century C.E. Reading it during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, brings to mind the adage that "History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme," as Ms. Chase noted regarding a May 19, 2020 column she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The most obvious parallel is the reluctance of business elite and their political lackeys to take public health concerns seriously for fear of a reduction in profits. For years, San Francisco oligarchs used their influence with city and state officials and media to obstruct the work of public health officials. Only the threat of losing authorization to host a large United States naval fleet persuaded these authorities to address the threat of bubonic plague with the seriousness and resources public health officials had long sought.

Review: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz

I attended a trade show in New Orleans or Baton Rouge a year or two after Katrina. There's plenty of down time at trade shows when I would exchange small talk with the people manning neighboring booths. One person shocked me by telling me that the flooding had the silver lining of cleaning out the city. I didn't understand at the time that what he meant was that it would facilitate capitalists' exploitation of the space previously occupied by displaced black residents of the city, whom he and policy makers at all levels viewed as expendable at best and liabilities at worst.

Peter Moskowitz's book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood wants people to understand the following:

• Gentrification isn't an inevitable or natural process. Students of capitalism have long ago noted why, if unchecked, it would occur, but human societies don't have to choose to follow capital's dictates.
• In the United States, racist policies have ensured that the negative impacts of housing crises fall on black and brown people.
• Policy makers at the federal, state and municipal levels have adopted gentrification & suburbanization as vehicles for economic growth and have subsidized these processes.

Documentary: "Border Bandits" by Kirby Warnock

Update: The full film is now available on YouTube for free! Video starts at 1:17.

Border Bandits is a documentary and dramatization of the murder of two Hispanic USA citizens, Antonio Longoria and Jesus Bazan, by the Texas Rangers in 1915 in an area of the border with Mexico near the confluence of the Pecos and Rio Grande Rivers. While USA popular culture has glorified the Texas Rangers, the documentary notes its participation in two waves of violence directed at the people in the path of white supremacist settler colonialism in that region. The first wave was in the mid-19th century, and it was directed against the Apache and Comanche indigenous nations. The second took place under cover of the Bandit War and the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, and it was conterminous with the dispossession of Hispanic landowners in favor of Anglos. The documentary places the 1915 murders in the context of this second wave of violence, where up to 5,000 Hispanics were murdered as corporate Anglo agricultural interests took over the region.

Kirby Warnock's grandfather related in an oral history project that his father, Roland Warnock, had known the two murder victims and had participated in their burial. You can read the transcript.

The documentary explores the events of that day and the subsequent lives of the participants and their descendants. As such, it is a good example of social history.

When I watched the movie, I thought of the following:

1. The importance of oral history. If you have a relationship with an elderly person, ask that person about his or her childhood and record your conversation. Or get them to talk with StoryCorps.
2. The similarities in USA warfare from the original wars the Anglo colonists waged against the indigenous nations on the Atlantic coast of North America, through the Bandit War and now the Global War on Terror. The settler colonialists took advantage of divisions or acts of violence to mobilize its military and militias to seize resources from the indigenous or colonized peoples.
3. The wholescale violence employed in these wars & ethnic cleansings resulted in some blowback as murder replaced peaceful methods of conflict resolution. Roland Warnock, the great grandfather of the film's producer, was murdered in broad daylight in front of his son, who produced the testimony which forms the basis of the film.
4. The pressing need for every parent to read Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen and review their children's social studies curricula.
5. Uncle Karl (Marx) & Uncle Friedrich (Engles) were on the money when they said that police's purpose is to preserve the ruling class's control over the means of production.

The collective Refusing to Forget published an excellent thread on Twitter about an atrocity the Texas Rangers commited in 1918.

#OTD on January 28, 1918, Texas Rangers massacred fifteen men and boys at the village of Porvenir, Texas, in what is perhaps the single most notorious and consequential event in the history of the Ranger Force. 1/ pic.twitter.com/HOAI1v7B20

— Refusing to Forget (@Refusing2Forget) January 28, 2023

Favorite Quotes from "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption" by Bryan Stevenson

This entry contains some quotes from Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Stevenson is one of the founders of the Equal Justice Initiative. His work is profiled in a documentary and a soon-to-be released feature film.

Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person's humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own. p. 12

I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity -- seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions. p. 17

Review: Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America

In Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, Ari Berman describes the events which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, its impacts and the countermeasures its opponents took since then to undermine it through the book's publication in 2015.

I hope reading the book will motivate you to make sure you are registered to vote and actually vote in every election and attempt to understand your options in each election. And when you find your options are limited, then act to improve your options.

The book also is a great example of a phenomenon James W. Loewen identified in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Our public schools, for a variety of reasons, teach students that the United States always improves without explaining that people contested all issues, and some people won and others lost and sometimes those who lost won later. So we have this idea that "Civil Rights" happened in the 1960s, and, well, "problem solved."

Favorite Quotes: Dorothy Day, "The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography"

The best source for information on Dorothy Day is the Catholic Worker website.

These quotes are from the 1981 HarperCollins paperback of the 1952 book.

Some of her description of her mentor, Peter Maurin:

Peter made you feel a sense of his mission as soon as you met him. He did not begin by tearing down, or by painting so intense a picture of misery and injustice that you burned to change the world. Instead, he aroused in you a sense of your own capacities for work, for accomplishment. He made you feel that you and all men had great and generous hearts with which to love God. If you once recognized this fact in yourself you would expect and find it in others. [p. 171]

"Negroland: A Memoir" by Margo Jefferson

I'm sharing a few thoughts on Margo Jefferson's Negroland: A Memoir.

An idea which struck me was her insistence that contemplation of suicide is a civil right or privilege which blacks in America should seek to earn:

But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior. We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a legacy. We were too strong for that. I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair. (pp. 171-2)

I've never been very good dealing with people with depression, and I criticized Jay Asher's Th1rteen R3asons Why.

Here's a passage on housing segregation in Hyde Park, the home of University of Chicago, in the 1960s (p. 147):

Here's a passage about the mental price Margo Jefferson paid as a child trying to navigate the rules of race, gender and class which had been imposed on her and how her adult life has been an attempt to become "a person of inner consequence." (p. 156)

Review: How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom by Jacques Berlinerblau

How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom by Jacques Berlinerblau
Mariner Books, Paperback, 9780544105164, 306pp. Publication Date: September 17, 2013

Professor Berlinerblau's book is a "how-to" manual for activists concerned with preserving secularism in the United States. The key to the defense of secularism is building up a large coalition of people. Some will be committed to separationism, one of secularism's variants which "maintains that [order, freedom of religion and freedom from religion] will be achieved in spades if there is, in effect, no relation between government and religion." [p. 125, emphasis in original] Others will be content with accomodationism, which allows government to establish religion, provided it does not privilege one over another. Some will be atheists who promote the abandonment of religion. Some will be believers who interpret their religion to call for distance from the state. Others will be members of religious minorities who fear persecution by the majority. Astute activists will try to gather all of these under the rubric of disestablishmentarianism.

Review: "Experience & Education" by John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952) wrote Experience and Education in 1938, twenty-two years after his most famous work, Democracy and Education. In Experience and Education, he assumes that the reader has accepted the "new" education model and rejected the "traditional" education model and thus proceeds to warn against mistakes in the implementation of the new education model.

Film: The Stanford Prison Experiment (Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Director)

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a 2015 movie directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez. It is based on Philip Zimbardo's 1971 experiment where 20 college-aged subjects were divided into guards and inmates and simulated a prison in an unused campus building. The experiment is famous for exposing how easy it is for healthy individuals to become abusive and violent. While the movie promotes this as Zimbardo's conclusions, the movie also confirms points his critics made about the experiment, namely that Zimbardo's design and execution of the experiment had as much to do with its results as "human nature."

I particularly remember two scenes. The first is Zimbardo's orientation meeting with the guards, where he told them they were better than other people. In the interview process, all prospective subjects had expressed a preference to be an inmate.

Review: Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut

This collection of short stories by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut reflect his visceral disgust at war, which developed during his World War II experience as a prisoner of war disposing of the corpses left after the British and United States air forces destroyed Dresden in February of 1945. I'd read two of his novels, Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle, a long time ago. Slaughterhouse Five has been made into a movie.

In any short story collection, each reader will like some and dislike some. My favorites were "Great Day" and "The Commandant's Desk." The style, in its satirical humor, reminded me of Mark Twain, who opposed United States imperialism.

Documentary: African-American Pioneer Muslimahs in Washington, DC by Zarinah Shakir

This documentary film uses oral history to examine the lives of African-American Muslim women in Washington, DC primarily during the 1940s and 50s.



Zarinah Shakir is the producer.

I'm still looking for Part 1.

Review: "The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America" by Ray Suarez

The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America by Ray Suarez is a good introduction to policy discussions with religious claims in the United States in 2006, the time of the book's publication. Some of those issues have waned and new ones have arisen, and, if you've read other books I've reviewed on this blog under the tag Establishment Clause, you may not find these chapters exciting.

Mr. Suarez's style, in this age of bombastic partisanship, is frustratingly documentarian. He includes lengthy quotes from people whose positions he opposes. He avoids snarky rejoinders. Maybe his long years at the United States Public Broadcasting System, which depends on funding from the government and thus must garner support from many diverse sectors of our nation, have increased his ability to listen respectfully to others beyond that of those who publish in ideological Internet news sites, corporate media and crazy, egotistical bloggers like myself!

Film "Wilmington on Fire" by Christopher Everett Reveals Important Chapter in U.S. History

Next time you hear somebody say, "Lincoln freed the slaves in 1865. If black people have problems today, it's their own fault," please get them a copy of Wilmington on Fire by Christopher Everett. This 89 minute documentary describes events in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina. There, whites, through the vehicle of the Democratic Party, militias and a sympathetic judiciary, removed from office blacks and whites uncommitted to white supremacy. Black business owners and professionals were ordered to leave with the property they could carry, and the rest of Wilmington's blacks fled into nearby swamps to avoid murderous crowds. Subsequent to these events, the North Carolina legislature passed Jim Crow legislation,which continued to restrict opportunities for its black residents. White supremacist leaders, whose statues adorn Wilmington's public spaces and for whom its main streets are named, acquired the properties of the blacks who fled and even used them to defraud shareholders of the banks they managed through fraudulent mortgages. See the movie.

The DVD and digital download of "Wilmington on Fire" are scheduled to be available for purchase on November 10, 2016 the 118th anniversary of the massacre.

Find more information on the film's website, Facebook page, Twitter account, Soundcloud and Instagram. Dennis Leroy Kangalee has a more extensive review.

Listen to music and poetry inspired by the movie.

Director and producer Christopher Everett gave an interview on North Carolina Public TV's Black Issues Forum.
 
Wilmington on Fire (trailer) from Wilmington on Fire on Vimeo.

The In the Past Lane podcast of September 29, 2018 features an interview the Margaret Mulrooney, who wrote a book on the history of Wilmington, NC in which these events play a significant role.