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Daily Bloggerback
Best of Blogs Round-Up: Wednesday, April 12, 2006
EDITED BY PIERRE TRISTAM/Candide's Notebooks
| QUOTE OF THE DAY |
PROTEIN WISDOM |
| In the time it takes you to read this post, pop-star and movie sex kitten Jessica Simpson, on the brink of preparing to tell yet another glossy mag reporter about her heroic refusal to meet with the President, will suddenly realize she can’t remember the President’s name—and even with some quick thinking by her press secretary (who helpfully points to her crotch) all Ms Simpson can manage is to mumble her condemnation of both the Iraq war and “President Culottes” for “dragging us into such a hurtful fagmire.”
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Today's special: At least four continents covered.
Featured Blog, I: Barber's Cut & Shave
America’s Black and Arab Uncle Toms
Middle East memo, April 11, 2006
[Yesterday's Bloggerback included a link to LaShawn Barber's flirtation with an indictment of the "Duke stripper," whose charges of having been raped and racially insulted by the Duke lacrosse team LaShawn relates to Tawana Brawley-like inventions. DNA evidence, or at least the absence of DNA evidence, has not linked the white lacrosse players to the black woman at the party. No such exonerations for the tenor of the debate over the story.]
 The Neocon’s favorite feminine “Uncle Tom” figure these days is undoubtedly La-Shawn Barber, a self described “former liberal and current renegade supporter of conservative ideals” which is a pretty accurate description…if you define “conservatism” as an ideological brew combining Billy Graham’s bigot activism and Attila the Hun’s moral ethics, or vice versa for that matter!
Yesterday, she wrote a particularly racist and sexist post that made it to the Washington Post’s media notes section (Ron, thanks for drawing our attention to this):
“As I mentioned before, black men raping white women is much more common than the other way around, but when was the last time a football team canceled its season? Other college rapes, that is, black-on-white rapes, don’t get a fraction of coverage, such as this one or this one. Remember thuggish Lawrence Phillips, a black football player who had a penchant for beating up white women? The media barely reported those stories.
And what about “hate crimes?” Although whites are the most likely hate crime victims, the only so-called hate crimes that get blanket coverage involve black victims and white perpetrators. By the way, this is what I think of “hate crimes.” ”
I’m sure La-Shawn Barber’s KKK handlers are quite proud of her for she is now to blacks and feminists what professor Fouad Ajami is to Arabs and Mohammedans: an immoral Neocon drone preprogrammed to always lay the blame on his own community in the name of “critical objectivity” and “independent thinking”… funny how this sounds hollow, for underneath the fake libertarian veneer lays a masochistic propensity to systematically blame the victims be they black, brown or yellow…all in the name of “freedom” of course!
More generally, it seems to me that Neocon and “Christian” Coalition-type commentators raise an interesting moral issue here: is a poor African-American stripper (or even worse a “lowlife black prostitute”…) essentially guilty in advance because of what she is- as opposed to say being admitted into a level playing field where her testimony would be treated with the same reverence (or skepticism) as that of a Church-going rich WASP kid from Duke?
Wahhâbi Islamic fundamentalists and other (Dixie and Israeli) followers of the Old Testament would probably say the “morally bankrupt” lady is guilty until proven innocent.
It seems to me the whole point of our civilization is to give straying souls like her the chance of a fair trial…
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Featured Blog, II: Pride in Prejudice
Pope Benedict’s Inner Scalia
The Currency Lad / April 11, 2006
WEEKS before the anniversary of his election to the papacy, assessments began being filed by those eager to summarise the essence of Pope Benedict XVI's pontificate. These coincided not with the 19 April anniversary of the decisive conclave but with the memorials heralding the one year since his predecessor's death. That jumping of the gun really symbolised the extent to which Benedict's reign is powerfully connected to, if not overshadowed by, Pope John Paul's. The 'changed man' theory on the former Holy Office prefect has emerged as the pre-eminent orthodoxy in the press. As with a lot of analysis of ecclesiastical affairs, this notion is the result of spurious assumptions and selective reporting. Joseph Ratzinger was always known to be a gentle, courteous and very reserved man. In his former office, he worked to ensure the faith was propounded in a manner not antagonistic to what the Church teaches. Certainly, it may have been confronting for some to defend the novel and the heretical in his presence but nobody ever accused him of being a martinet. The man himself has not changed.
In an article published on April Fool's Day, James Button and Desmond O'Grady began with the standard Ratzinger caricature - the Grand Inquisitor, God's Rottweiler etc - before going on to imply that the cardinal known to be an "implacable opponent" of artificial birth control, gay marriage and so-called liberation theology had changed course. Since his election, in fact, Benedict has been more inclined to denounce and criticise than his mystical predecessor. The new pontiff has condemned the new anti-semitism, condemned abortion, condemned RU-486, condemned the culture of death, condemned gay "marriage" - and stated the Church's opposition to it is "non-negotiable" - and encouraged Catholics to have larger families. Not exactly a Bohemian agenda.
Other statements and enterprises make nonsense of Button and O'Grady's claim that Benedict has been more likely to disappoint "the right" than the left. Rapprochement with Lefebvrists has been prioritised and liturgical innovation is these days being officially discouraged. The Vicar General of Vatican City - chosen by the Pope for the task - has prepared Good Friday meditations that will brand attacks on the traditional family a "diabolical project." On Islam - Button and O'Grady note that Benedict has met Kung but forgot to mention he also met Fallaci - an historical shift is underway to challenge unnecessarily apologetic interpretations of the past. The Pope has also reminded all Catholics that their Church is one of both love and truth and that "drastic severity" against those who would poison the latter has firm biblical foundations. Liberals seem to like Benedict because he's bookish, urbane and supposedly stylish. Narcissists, they love in him only what they love in themselves. In Rome, it's Benedict's 79th birthday and His Holiness has been given a piano-shaped chocolate cake. By Opus Dei.
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| THE DAILY JOURNAL |
VANPOEM |
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As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat
Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.
On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.
It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into
before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.
Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown. |
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—Van Foreman |
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