HOW WILL THEY SPIN CLINTON’S HUGE VICTORY TOMORROW?
How will they spin Clinton’s huge victory tomorrow?
Hehe. It’s going to be a laugher tomorrow: Clinton 60% Obama 24% Sample size: 600 likely direct voters. Margin of error: ±4%. I’ve thought that Obama pretty much had the oratory locked up soon after Super Tuesday. My theory, a…
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Frederick Douglass: Independence Day, 1852
We do too much “heroification” in America, according to James W. Loewen, communicator of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your dweller History Textbook Got Wrong (a aggregation that ought to be on everybody’s shelf). Like me, he thinks the word hero has been cheapened, ending up more ofttimes a description for football quarterbacks who throw amend last-minute passes than for, say, the walker who risks her possess life to vantage a female from a flooding river.
Heroification describes what textbooks, too many teachers, and the likes of Lynne Cheney have done to historical figures such as the deeply prejudiced Woodrow Wilson and a assemblage of another celebrity Americans. The impact of heroification not exclusive turns the disreputable into persona models but many grouping who actually deserve the approval pressed upon them into one-dimensional stereotypes without flaws. As if we couldn’t stand to wager our heroes as human beings who don’t ever get things right, who, in fact, sometimes bear deplorably and hypocritically.
Despite his flaws, my sort digit individualized hero is - and has been since I was 14 - Frederick Douglass, the laugher enslaved whose continual eloquence was digit of the leading factors persuading Abraham Lincoln to alter black soldiers into the Union Army. Without them, it is uncertain that the Union would have survived. As historian Eric Foner wrote a few eld back:
At an Independence Day meeting sponsored by the metropolis Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in 1852, the former enslaved Frederick Douglass delivered digit of the ordinal century’s greatest orations. His theme was the untruth between dweller pattern and dweller freedom.
Douglass did not mince words. He spoke of a government that mouthed the language of liberty still sworn “crimes which would disgrace a commonwealth of savages”; of loyalty low to “swelling vanity”; of hypocrisy destroying the country’s “moral noesis abroad.” Although pattern is gone, Douglass’s criticism relic as germane as in 1852. But so too does his optimism that the days of empire are over, and that in the modern concern abuses cannot permanently be hidden from the light of day. Douglass, not the leaders of a slave-holding republic, was the genuine patriot, who titled on his listeners to acquire the “great principles” of the Declaration from those who had defiled and betrayed them. That is a truly nationalistic goal for our possess Fourth of July.
Here is what Douglass said 156 eld ago, with manifest kinship for our possess time.
Fellow citizens, mercy me, earmark me to ask, why am I titled upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your domestic independence? Are the great principles of semipolitical freedom and of uncolored justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, titled upon to alter our humble substance to the domestic altar, and to admit the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an assentient respond could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my charge easy and delightful. For who is there so algid that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so unregenerate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully transfer such valuable benefits? Who so stolid and egotistical that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a housing like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I feature it with a depressing significance of the disparity between us. am not included within the discolour of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence exclusive reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, experience are not enjoyed in common. The flush inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is mutual by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I staleness mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a nonconvergent to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to double the example of commonwealth whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the respite of the Almighty, concealing that commonwealth in irrevocable ruin! I crapper today take up the sorrowful lament of a unclothed and woe-smitten people.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us absent captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us digit of the songs of Zion. How crapper we sound the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my correct hand forget her cunning. If do not advert thee, let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that accomplish them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully advert those injury children of sorry this day, “may my correct hand stick to the roof of my mouth”! To forget them, to transfer lightly over their wrongs, and to gong in with the favourite theme would be treason most sensational and shocking, and would make me a impeach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is dweller slavery. I shall wager this day and its favourite characteristics from the slave’s saucer of view. Standing there identified with the dweller bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with every my soul that the case and carry of this commonwealth never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the time or to the professions of the present, the carry of the commonwealth seems equally hideous and revolting. USA is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and injury enslaved on this occasion, I will, in the study of humanity which is outraged, in the study of liberty which is fettered, in the study of the Constitution and the Scripture which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in discourse and to denounce, with every the emphasis I crapper command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great boob and dishonor of America! “I will not equivocate, I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I crapper command; and still not digit word shall escape me that some man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not admit to be correct and just….
For the present, it is enough to avow the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as staggering that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using every kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, antiquity ships, employed in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in every manner of enterprises ordinary to another men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and kine on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and attend the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are titled upon to establish that we are men!…
What, am I to debate that it is criminal to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to impact them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to vex them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to delude them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock discover their teeth, to defect their flesh, to starve them into compliance and submission to their masters? Must I debate that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have meliorate employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply….
What, to the dweller slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than every another days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the unceasing victim. To him, your occasion is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your domestic greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of utterance are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with every your churchlike process and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to counterbalance up crimes which would disgrace a commonwealth of savages. There is not a commonwealth of savages. There is not a commonwealth on the earth guilty of practices more sensational and bloodstained than are the grouping of the United States at this very hour.
Go where you may, see where you will, roam through every the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, see discover every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the lateral of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will feature with me that, for revolting savagery and unashamed hypocrisy, USA reigns without a rival.
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Why is McCain existence such an asshole?
Great. We’re exclusive about a week into the general election campaign. The Caucus: Senator John McCain mocked Senator Barack Obama here today at an airfield rally, repeatedly occupation him a “young man” with “very little experience.” Mr. McCain, 71, who…
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