I don’t know if he takes Sundays off. If so, then tomorrow morning he’ll write more music. Can’t embed this, but go to Boosey for a video interview, bio, and to take a look at his estimable art. He’s doing things no one else has ever done, thing that most of us never thought possible.
What an incredible human.
View Larger The Buried History of the Holocaust: How long does it take to change how the world thinks about human history? French priest Father Patrick Desbois has been trying to broaden our collective understanding of the Holocaust for the past eight years—and despite diligent work, constant advocacy, and a spiritual impetus, the light at the end of the tunnel remains dim.
Recently profiled in Jewish lifestyle and culture magazine Moment, Desbois contends that people generally simplify the Holocaust as “trains taking people to death camps.” He gives a number of reasons why, including the iron-fisted Soviet control of Eastern Europe, complicit actions of non-Jewish Europeans, and that Western Jews were more likely survive and tell their story. Although a brutal element of the Nazi war effort in Central and Western Europe, ghettos and gas chambers weren’t nearly as common on the Eastern front. In the bread basket of Europe, guns were the executioner’s weapon of choice, and “the rule became one Jew, one bullet.”
View Larger Three months after the King declared every rebel a traitor, and with a reward posted for the capture of certain prominent rebel leaders, the delegates to Congress adopted these strict rules of secrecy to protect the cause of American liberty and their own lives.
This document bears the signatures of eighty-seven delegates; thirty-nine signed on November 9, and the other delegates signed as they reported to Congress.The Agreement of Secrecy, November 9, 1775; Papers of the Continental Congress- 1774-1789, Item 6A: Rough Secret Journal, 1776-79, p. 1; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention; Record Group 360; National Archives
What is America, and what is an American? If anything binds us together across space and time, it is our ideals and the stories we tell about our pursuit of them. From the beginning, we set ourselves against Europe’s hierarchies. We exalted democratic government, equality of opportunity and individual freedom. We conceived of our experiment as “the last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s words.
But ideals don’t live in a vacuum; they take root in the soil of institutions. Beginning with our first experiments in self-government, the dissonance between our ideals and our institutional practices—especially the tolerance and extension of slavery—created tensions that finally tore us apart.
The South’s alternative vision of the good society was defeated in the Civil War, and our 20th-century history can be told as a narrative of halting progress toward greater tolerance and equality. The major plot points include regulations on corporations in the early 1900s; women’s suffrage in 1920; a social safety net in the New Deal; the Supreme Court’s rejection of Jim Crow laws in 1954; the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s; the gay rights victories since the 1970s.
This narrative suggests that our democratic experiment is working, albeit slowly. If we have never been entirely unified in our ideals, the Civil War at least re-unified our institutions. A century and a half later, we rally around the same flag. Or so we think.
The deeper truth is disquieting. The rhetoric of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry about the “real America” is not imagined: They and those who oppose them live in different Americas, embodying different ideals and meaning different things to their loyalists.
A very interesting read, not too long. I’ve been fascinated by recent attempts to “explain” the history of the modern Right, religious or otherwise. I think this explanation does a good job of at least providing a narrative for many on the Religious Right. I’d love to compile the various perspectives into one. The history of Chicago School Economics (grace à Naomi Klein) as a response to Keynesian economics, the history of confederacy as a response to federalism, Christian fundamentalism to modernist trends, and all of these movements (and many others, i.e. white nationalism, doctrine of discovery/anti-indigenous attitudes, etc.) are put under the banner of the Right. This is the trouble with the “Big Tent” (was that term originally for democrats?) approach to American politics: you can’t name your enemies.
Female homosexuality did not jeopardize Germany’s future
because women were reproductive Boy Scouts, “always sexually prepared,” while homosexual men were far more likely to become “psychologically
impotent.
— Robert G. Moeller, on Nazi attitudes to Homosexuality.
Women especially were subject to dual pressures as commodities themselves and as consumers: while they were disoriented by negative images associated with their GDR identity, they were offered an alternative model of success that depended on their sexuality and their willingness to market it.
— Ingrid Sharp, writing in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 13, No. 3 (July 2004) on the Sexual Unification of Germany
World War ll: Women at War | In Focus
1. These Northwestern University girls brave freezing weather to go through a Home Guard rifle drill on the campus in Evanston, Illinois on January 11, 1942.
2. Mrs. Paul Titus, 77-year-old air raid spotter of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, carries a gun as she patrols her beat, on December 20, 1941. Mrs. Titus signed-up the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. “I can carry a gun any time they want me to,” she declared.
There’s something simultaneously terrifying and awe-inspiring about these pictures.
