The Furious Spinner

Mario has gone back to work. Our blue car is not working. The wind has died down, somewhat, but it is raining. Clouds drift down low, hanging out with the snowy gorge cliffs. Music plays in the background. I can pretend all is well with the world. And maybe it is, right here, right in this moment. Ahhhhh.

I've been doing research on the U.S. revolutionary war for the piece on Martha Washington I told you about. I've had a very strange thing happen as I've been reading one of Martha's biographies: I find myself rooting for the English! This is extremely disconcerting. I'm not much of a nationalist, you know that. But I admire many of the ideals of this country, despite the flawed beginnings, despite the flawed actualization of those ideals. Yet I'm reading the early history of this country and rooting for the "bad" guys. It is difficult to find a reason to want the wealthy colonial slave-owners to succeed. The British offered the slaves freedom if they would help the British in their fight with the colonists. Meanwhile, the slave-owners killed any slave who tried to escape. Come on. Who would you root for?

Patrick Henry, himself a slave owner, got up and gave his famous speech, "Give me liberty or give me death" to a bunch of slave-owners. The incongruity of this statement was lost on the Americans but apparently not on the British. According Martha Washington's biographer Helen Bryan, in London, Horace Walpole said, "The souls of the Africans hang heavy on the swords of the Americans." The argument that these people didn't know any better than to own slaves does hold any water with me because many of them articulated their conflict over having slaves and many of them predicted a civil war would occur over this very issue.

Not long after the American revolutionary war, in 1791, 400,000 enslaved Africans in Haiti had their own successful revolution. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti a free nation. Today, "opposition" forces in Haiti are attempting to overthrow a democratically elected president. According to IndyMedia and others, this opposition is sponsored and funded by the U.S. Many believe Aristide has been unfairly accused and targeted by the mainstream media and the U.S. government. At least one prominent lawyer in Haiti is accusing the U.S. government of arming the anti-Aristide paramilitaries. Why can't the U.S. ever be on the "right" side of any dispute?

I'm sure you've all heard (ad nauseum) about Mel Gibson's new movie about Jesus. I was so irritated by the coverage that I wrote this piece which was published by Alternet. I thought this James Carroll essay was interesting, too.

Howard Stern has been booted from the air. I think Howard Stern's show is disgusting. I don't care for any of the shock jocks. They're misogynist, for one thing. However, silencing Stern feels a lot like censorship. I'm loathe to defend Howard Stern, but I will defend his right to be loathsome. If they're kicking Stern off the air for being vulgar and hateful, shouldn't they kick Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity off the air for being hateful, too? 0 comments

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