March 31, 2005
In Memoriam: Fred Korematsu
He was a civil rights icon of the 20th century, and deservedly so.
My wife and I had dinner with him last November, just after what now turns out to be his last public address. His speech that day was witty, moving, humble, noble--just as he himself was.
It was a privilege to know Fred Korematsu. Any life that brings to the world even a fraction of the inspiration that Fred Korematsu's life brought to us all is a life well lived.
Posted by Eric at 2:22 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 30, 2005
"Academic Bill of Rights" introduced in NC
Posted by Eric at 9:25 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
Signs of change
Trivia question: What now-familiar household brand owes its name to ingenuity in getting around a London sign ordinance? You might be surprised.
Posted by Eric at 6:07 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Bracing for victory
NCAA Final Four Notification 2005-- Parking meters on the 100 block of East Franklin Street, all of Henderson Street and North Columbia Street will be bagged for No Parking starting at 3:30 P.M.March 29, 2005
Plans are underway for this weekend’s NCAA basketball games and the street celebrations following UNC victories. The Town of Chapel Hill has plans to provide for the safety of revelers and for the protection of property. There are several ways that you can help make the event safer and more controlled.
Streets will close by the end of the games Saturday April 2nd and (if needed) Monday April 4th. The closed area will be Franklin Street from Raleigh Street to Church Street; and Columbia Street from Cameron Avenue to Rosemary Street. No vehicular traffic will be allowed in the closed area. Access to the residential areas immediately around the Central Business District will be restricted to residents.
The following information is of special importance to merchants and property owners in the central business district for both games.
-- Vehicles parked on the 100 block of East Franklin Street, Henderson Street and North Columbia Street after 5:00 P.M. will be subject to ticketing and towing.
-- If your establishment sells paint, please restrict sale of CAROLINA blue paint for the next week.
-- Discourage employees and customers, from parking in North Alley and South Alley. When the streets close, vehicles parked in these alleys will not have access to the street until early morning hours following the games.
-- No alcoholic beverages will be allowed in the closed area.
-- If your establishment sells alcohol, please restrict all servings to paper or plastic cups and all bulk sales should be in cans so that glass can be kept out of the area.
-- If your establishment has an awning or any removable signs, we recommend removing or securing them in order to keep them from being damaged.
-- If possible, ensure that interior and exterior rooftop doors are secure to keep people off the roof.
-- Many businesses keep extra staff on the premises during celebrations to prevent or report problems. Make sure that the Orange County Communications Center (919) 933-2600 has an up-to-date emergency call back number.
If you have questions contact Officer Phil Smith at The Chapel Hill Police Department (919) 968-2760 Extension 134 or by e-mail at psmith@townofchapelhill.org
Posted by Eric at 7:37 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 29, 2005
Finger food's not what it used to be.
Posted by Eric at 4:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
It's about more than food.
Posted by Eric at 9:10 AM | TrackBack
Sharlet on Mahler on megachurches
. . . the story here is for most part the official one, the narrative of religious change in America told by "church-growth" authorities. And that, it should be said, makes it unusual for the secular press. Mahler has made several very smart moves. . . .Posted by Eric at 7:40 AM | TrackBack
March 28, 2005
In memoriam, Virginia Woolf
Thanks to wood s lot (a beautiful blog), I'm reminded that today is the anniversary (the 64th) of Virginia Woolf's death. The short biography that he links to, by Stuart Clarke of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, is a good introduction to her life. Although pop images of Woolf are almost as widespread as those of the Mona Lisa (and let's not forget the current revival of Albee's play), there's a core Woolf that some of us find enormously inspirational.A couple of weeks ago I had a house guest, a friend from when we were both in grad school. Having written a dissertation on Woolf and the Renaissance, I published a collection of essays on that subject. Rebecca Laroche was one of the contributors, and she became a friend. Rebecca is a Renaissance scholar whose work, now, has nothing to do with Woolf: she writes about women of the Renaissance period and the particular ways in which they used the rhetoric of the household (specifically the vocabulary of the "herbal") to express their hopes and longings. My own work has gone in a radically different direction toward subjects much closer to home.
But we agreed that we both felt driven, in some way, by Woolf's own practice of critical writing. Woolf, who wrote hundreds of critical essays in addition to her fiction, had a way of engaging with her subject where she found it--not from above it or outside of it, but where it is, and on its own terms. "The lives of the obscure" were always of interest. Here she is on a London street, ducking into a book store:
Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.As we know, Virginia Woolf didn't just die on this day in 1941, as Hitler prepared to invade Yugoslavia and Greece. She took her own life, and it wasn't the first time she had tried. But she too was full of life, and, like all of us, experienced moments of frustration and fear, but also of pure exaltation and delight.
Posted by Eric at 11:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Civil procedure made fun (at least interesting)
The thing about Cornell Law Library's listserv is you never know what'll be next. Today, a pointer to a fabulous legal resource:
Here are backstory documents to 14 "greatest hits" from a basic civil procedure class.
The section on Hansberry v. Lee caught my attention. This was Lorraine Hansberry's story: A Raisin in the Sun is based on her family's attempt to integrate a Chicago neighborhood in the face of a race-based restrictive covenant. But although her play is about much more than that, it would seem that the court case is about much less. The Hansberrys won "on a technicality" as it were: they were allowed to show that the covenant was invalid because the requisite 95 percent of the affected property owners had not signed the document. More precisely, they were allowed to raise this issue even though a lower court had found as a fact, erroneously, in a case that didn't involve them, that the 95 percent requirement had been met. A victory! but hardly a discussion of the merits, or not, of race-based restrictive covenants.
In the course I'll be teaching this fall on the law and rhetoric of the civil rights movement, I'm going to teach A Raisin in the Sun. My idea had been that I would teach it alongside a later case on racial restrictive covenants, Shelley v. Kraemer, because that case goes a little farther toward addressing the real issue head-on (though not really very far; and by giving the definition of "state action" such an amazing stretch that it could apply to almost any contract action, it created problems enough for whole generations of legal scholars). That is, my thought was that Hansberry v. Lee was so technical, so far removed from the real subject that it was about, that there wouldn't be much to gain by teaching it--at least where the purpose of the teaching is to talk about the various ways in which literary narratives and adjudicatory narratives address common issues of civil rights.
But this treasure trove of source documents is causing me to reconsider.
Posted by Eric at 9:01 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
March 27, 2005
Justice DeLayed
The Los Angeles Times has a previously unpublished account of the tragedy of Tom DeLay's brain-damaged father, the agonizing decision the family made, and their medical malpractice lawsuit. (Thanks to a faithful reader for the tip.)Posted by Eric at 9:11 PM | TrackBack
Come as you are.
It's hard to imagine a more effective method of religious outreach, which is, after all, the goal of evangelical churches like Radiant. As McFarland told me: ''I'm just trying to get people in the door.'' To that end, Radiant has designed its new 55,000-square-foot church to look more like an overgrown ski lodge than a place of worship. ''For people who haven't been to church, or went once and got burned, the anxiety level is really high,'' McFarland says. '' 'Is it going to be freaky? Is it going to be like what I see on Christian TV?' So we've tried to bring down those visual cues that scare people off.''In fact, everything about Radiant has been designed to lure people away from other potential weekend destinations. The foyer includes five 50-inch plasma-screen televisions, a bookstore and a cafe with a Starbucks-trained staff making espresso drinks. (For those who are in a rush, there's a drive-through latte stand outside the main building.) Krispy Kreme doughnuts are served at every service. (Radiant's annual Krispy Kreme budget is $16,000). For kids there are Xboxes (10 for fifth and sixth graders alone). ''That's what they're into,'' McFarland says. ''You can either fight it or say they're a tool for God.'' The dress code is lax: most worshipers wear jeans, sweats or shorts, depending on the season. (''At my old church, we thought we were casual because we wore mock turtlenecks under our blazers,'' Radiant's youth pastor told me.) Even the baptism pool is seductive: Radiant keeps the water at 101 degrees. ''We've had people say, 'No, leave me under,' '' McFarland says. ''It's like taking a dip in a spa.''
When the church was under construction, people would occasionally ask McFarland if it was going to have stained glass or a steeple. ''No!'' he'd answer. ''We want the church to look like a mall. We want you to come in here and say, 'Dude, where's the cinema?' ''
What would Flannery O'Connor make of this Church of Christ Without Christ?
Posted by Eric at 6:55 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
Every picture tells a story
More to the point, a series of tiny pictures tells a story now in each issue of the New Yorker. Who knew? (Do check out the slide show.)Posted by Eric at 5:11 PM | TrackBack
March 26, 2005
Room of her own
In 1974, when I was a mere slip of a girl, I was in the Louvre--and the Mona Lisa wasn't. She did return from her trip to Japan, and she's been there ever since. She'll be away again on April 4, for one day only, and after that, she'll have a room of her own. It's speculated that she may never leave.As Walker Percy said of the Grand Canyon, it is almost impossible to see the Mona Lisa for the first time. My memory of the time I did get to see her, on a second trip to Paris years later, has more to do with forbidden flash bulbs going off than anything else.
Well, what the heck, accept the fluster. Sample the "interactive Mona Lisa" (from the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie). Try this experiment (from San Francisco's Exploratorium). Awash yourself in Mona images! Verily, it's inspirational.
Posted by Eric at 9:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Curious coincidence
Just as I was thinking about linking here to an interesting discussion of a movie we just watched at my house (we missed "Quiz Show" the first time around), I came across this item: Howard Bashman at How Appealing notes that a forthcoming article in the Georgetown Law Journal bears a distinct resemblance to one of his blog posts from 2003. Quoting from the article (as found at Volokh),. . . This Essay represents the fruits of my own daydreams, combined with the fact that lately I have spent my lucid moments mulling over one particular forgotten constitutional provision. . . .I guess it's just a coincidence. Or if the author did get the idea from Bashman's blog, perhaps he felt under no obligation to give a non-scholarly source any credit? There's at least some irony in the fact that the 2003 HowAppealing entry in question begins: "There is not a word on this blog that someone is not thoroughly studying, analyzing, and cogitating over. It took me a little while to get used to that, but it's the burden of having a Web log that people read."
UPDATE: Author Brian Kalt writes to explain that although he did see Bashman's post, and other references to "the odd boundary line on which [his] article was based," his analysis involves Sixth Amendment implications whereas "Bashman . . . mused about the implications for cout of appeals boundaries." That difference is why Kalt did not feel obligated to cite Bashman's blog. My apologies to Prof. Kalt. It is a fine, fun essay. Congratulations.
Posted by Eric at 3:42 PM | TrackBack
Welcome a new green to the table.
Ihad to go to Texas to find it, but there's a great new blog up on the Blue Ridge: the Bitter Greens Journal. The author is a sustainability-promoting farmer and a former financial writer--quite a deadly combination for taking on the international agricultural-industrial complex.Here, taste a sample:
Strains within the system are starting to show. Simply put, industrial food is making the people who rely on it sick and fat, to the point that U.S. life expectancy looks set to decline for the first time in two centuries.In a nation whose biggest employer (and grocer)--Wal-Mart--hangs its business model on its ability to low-ball workers, it's difficult to see how people are going to start, en masse, paying top dollar to niche farmers at farmers' markets.
Evidence of class-based distribution of diet-related maladies abounds. This recent AP article shows that in rural areas the child-obesity rate is even higher than the brisk national average. The evidence dispels "a long-held belief that in farm communities and other rural towns, heavy chores, wide expanses of land and fresh air make leaner, stronger bodies," the article says. . . .
And for those who still wonder, as we do at our house, what's happened to the honey bee, bittersweet news.
You're off to a great start, Tom Philpott. Keep on dishin' it out.
Posted by Eric at 10:50 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 25, 2005
Babylon Revisited
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This is a photo of Babylon taken by the U.S. Army Coalition Forces Land Component Command in April 2003, when American forces turned it into a military camp: "The walls of Nebuchadnezzar's Southern Palace give off a golden sheen as seen from the air, while the Lion of Babylon statue sits in the lower left. Saddam Hussein had the palace reconstructed during his regime, and he had the bricks inscribed with his name."Two years later, according to a report done by the British Museum, the ensuing damage and contamination "must rank as one of the most reckless acts of cultural vandalism in recent memory."
"And so we beat on . . ."
Posted by Eric at 6:36 PM | TrackBack
March 24, 2005
Classical gas
Two-part inventions for the 21st century; or, how to induce a fugue state."We're considering an offer to put up CCTV cameras; also the idea of playing classical music, which has been used in various other situations, to stop these people congregating," Mr Libby added. "Apparently Bach and Handel can be effective."Posted by Eric at 7:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Into the Woods, again
Being from Texas, I know William Murchison as a conservative mainstream newspaper columnist: very conservative, to be sure, but mainstream.So when Eric began rooting around into Thomas Woods' past, I was surprised to notice Murchison's name on this list. The long-time editor and columnist at the Dallas Morning News, now a distinguished professor and chair of the journalism department at Baylor, is also, it seems, "League of the South Texas Board Member, Dallas, Texas, CSA."
In addition, he writes for Chronicles, the magazine of the Rockford Institute, and for the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan. His views as a conservative Episcopalian are well known. But he keeps his ties to the neo Con's curiously quiet (as noted here). How else to explain this, from a column as posted on dixienet.org
This discrepancy dawned on me as I sat before the fireplace, glancing over the periodical mailed by a chicken-fried organization to which I belong, the [League of the South]. The league encourages Southerners in the exercise of their indefeasible right to be Southern, never mind Northern reproaches and sneers.with the way it was first published in 1996 in the Dallas News:
This discrepancy dawned on me as I sat before the fireplace, glancing over the periodical mailed by a chicken-fried organization to which I belong, the Southern League. The league encourages Southerners in the exercise of their indefeasible right to be Southern, never mind Northern reproaches and sneers. [Lexis/Nexis]Ah, yes, the Southern League! How quaint. I can just smell the magnolia and the KFC.
Posted by Eric at 6:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
My Home (?) Away from Home
Ihave just learned that the French University I am visiting, université Jean Moulin, Lyon III, named for the murdered French leader of resistance to the Nazis, has, over its 30-plus-year life, been the French academic hotbed of Holocaust denial.The university was created in the early 1970s, in overt reaction to the leftism of the French university system at the time. It was designedly a right-of-center university at its founding. Unfortunately, this orientation seems to have brought to the faculty a more-than-healthy crop of Holocaust deniers.
The latest problem is a faculty member named Bruno Gollnisch, a professor of Japanese civilization who is also the number two man in Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right political party and a member of the European parliament.
Back in October he was quoted as saying that while he did not deny the existence of gas chambers, he has seen no persuasive evidence that they were actually used on Jews. He also thinks the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust is exaggerated and open to debate. These strike my sensibilities, as a Jew and a descendant of Holocaust victims, as outrageous.
On the other hand, the university has reacted by suspending him for five years ... which strikes my American sensibilities as outrageous.
And here I thought this was just a fun place to teach, drink good wine, and eat good bread and cheese...
Posted by Eric at 9:46 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Cheney Flip Flops On Flip Flopping.
The other day, Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a eulogy for his old friend Dave Nicholas, a Democratic state senator from Wyoming.To illustrate Nicholas' "love of debate and oratory and his nuanced intellect and flexibility," Cheney shared the following memory:
"Dave stood up on the Senate floor and gave a lively, impassioned, eloquent speech for this particular bill. And then he gave a lively, impassioned, eloquent speech against it."
Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Where have I heard Cheney talk about that sort of thing before?Oh, right. In his speech at the Republican National Convention, about John Kerry:
"But Senator Kerry's liveliest disagreement is with himself. His back-and-forth reflects a habit of indecision, and sends a message of confusion. And it is all part of a pattern. He has, in the last several years, been for the No Child Left Behind Act and against it. He has spoken in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement and against it. He is for the Patriot Act and against it. Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. It makes the whole thing mutual America sees two John Kerrys."
I wish the Vice President would make up his mind about people who can't make up their minds.Posted by Eric at 8:36 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
There Goes That Liberal Press Again.
Just spotted this AP headline:"Schiavo Case Taking on Political Tone"
How cynical.
Posted by Eric at 8:23 AM | TrackBack
My Aphrodisiac Qualities
Just taught a really fun class here in France about proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the presumption of innocence, the American criminal jury, and a bit about the privilege against self-incrimination. (Sort of a "Greatest Hits of Distinctive Features of American Criminal Justice").A young woman in the front row spent much of the last 15 minutes or so of the class with her hand in the lap of the young man next to her. And I mean in his lap. At the end of the class, I grabbed my books to leave and looked up, and there were in complete liplock.
Ah, to be young and in France and in love and in Eric Muller's criminal law class.
Posted by Eric at 8:03 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Still relevant after all of these years
Anthony Lewis reviews a new book about the Penatgon Papers.Posted by Eric at 7:54 AM | TrackBack
Wherein I Have An "Oliver Sacks" Moment In France
Ihave been in France for a few days now, teaching a mini-course in American Criminal Law at the Institut de droit comparé of the Université Lyon 3 - Jean Moulin.My internet access is spotty and at times expensive, and almost always via annoying French keyboards, which explains my minimal blogging. Well, I suppose the wine and cheese and bread and museums also explain it.
I did notice something quite interesting last night, however. I speak French very well. At dinner last night, there was just one other group of people eating in the same restaurant, and they were around a corner. It was a large group of young women. What I noticed was this: it was possible for me to hear their conversation quite clearly without actually understanding any of it. This might seem obvious, but it would be absolutely impossible for me to do this in English, and I suspect it would be for you too (if you're a native English speaker). That is, it would have been impossible in this situation for me to relegate an English conversation at the table around the corner to complete background noise--the way a conversation in Chinese or Urdu would be for me. I just cannot entirely "turn off" my English language comprehension.
Yet--even though my French is really good--it was possible for me not to understand anything the women were saying, and to go on reading the rather complicated English-language book I was reading without being in any way distracted. If I wanted to understand them, I actually had to pay conscious attention (at which point I understood virtually everything).
Isn't that odd? I did not start learning French until I was a teenager, so I guess that a foreign language acquired at that point gets wired into the brain differently from the way a native language gets wired.
Posted by Eric at 3:51 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 23, 2005
Take a walk.
Surprisingly (it it because of Ballston?), Arlington, Va., is at the top of the list. Atlanta outranks Austin, Raleigh is somewhere between the two, and what's Irving, Tex., doing on here?Posted by Eric at 10:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Edwards, in first podcast, embraces bloggers
John Edwards, who kicked off his new career here at UNC yesterday, has published his first podcast. Calling Social Security "one of the greatest anti-poverty programs in American history," he praised bloggers for their part. "I know bloggers have really taken a leading role in this effort to protect Social Security," he said. "We need them. We are depending on these leaders to speak out and continue this fight because it's really important for the country."Elizabeth agrees.
Posted by Eric at 3:47 PM | TrackBack
The operative word is "err."
There is nothing rational about the Schiavo situation. Nothing. It is a politically motivated tragedy. Rather, "a tragedy compounded," as goes the headline on an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (http://content.nejm.org/):The story of Terri Schiavo should be disturbing to all of us. How can it be that medicine, ethics, law, and family can work so poorly together in meeting the needs of this woman who was left in a persistent vegetative state after having a cardiac arrest? . . . Distortion by interest groups, media hyperbole, and manipulative use of videotape have characterized this case and demonstrate what can happen when a patient becomes more a precedent-setting symbol than a unique human being.The journal also publishes a legal analysis that puts the case firmly in line with the cases of Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan. The legislature had no business getting into it. And at least according to Justice Scalia in the Cruzan case, neither do the federal courts:
While I agree with the Court's analysis today, and therefore join in its opinion, I would have preferred that we announce, clearly and promptly, that the federal courts have no business in this field; that American law has always accorded the State the power to prevent, by force if necessary, suicide - including suicide by refusing to take appropriate measures necessary to preserve one's life; that the point at which life becomes "worthless," and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become "extraordinary" or "inappropriate," are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory. . . .. . .
What I have said above is not meant to suggest that I would think it desirable, if we were sure that Nancy Cruzan wanted to die, to keep her alive by the means at issue here. I assert only that the Constitution has nothing to say about the subject. To raise up a constitutional right here, we would have to create out of nothing (for it exists neither in text nor tradition) some constitutional principle whereby, although the State may insist that an individual come in out of the cold and eat food, it may not insist that he take medicine; and although it may pump his stomach empty of poison he has ingested, it may not fill his stomach with food he has failed to ingest. Are there, then, no reasonable and humane limits that ought not to be exceeded in requiring an individual to preserve his own life? There obviously are, but they are not set forth in the Due Process Clause. What assures us that those limits will not be exceeded is the same constitutional guarantee that is the source of most of our protection - what protects us, for example, from being assessed a tax of 100% of our income above the subsistence level, from being forbidden to drive cars, or from being required to send our children to school for 10 hours a day, none of which horribles is categorically prohibited by the Constitution. Our salvation is the Equal Protection Clause, which requires the democratic majority to accept for themselves and their loved ones what they impose on you and me. This Court need not, and has no authority to, inject itself into every field of human activity where irrationality and oppression may theoretically occur, and if it tries to do so, it will destroy itself.
We know who the President was talking to when he said he would "err on the side of life." And the err is very apparent, including, now, the political error.
Links via Majikthise, a/k/a Lindsay Beyerstein, who has a nice post on the subject up at AlterNet.
Oh by the way: Eric's friend Michelle Malkin say the polls are flawed because they represent that Schiavo is "on life support," when in fact she is not on a ventilator, only on forced feeding. This is a distinction that the Supreme Court in the Cruzan case found to make no difference:
Six of the nine justices found that no legal disctinction could be made between artificially delivered fluids and nutrition and other medical interventions, such as ventillator support; none of the other three justices found a constitutionally relevant distinction.(Quoting from New England Journal of Medicine article cited above.)
Posted by Eric at 2:09 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
I need this.
Atimely invention from the MIT Media lab.Posted by Eric at 11:17 PM | TrackBack
How not to be a pawn of the irrational right
Posted by Eric at 5:10 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Not so famous last words
Astute readers recognized the Gatsby line right away. Here are some less familiar last lines.Posted by Eric at 11:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
"Southern Sources" III: Civil War skirmishes
One of the more interesting issues to come up during Saturday's discussions was the yawning gap between academic and "amateur" studies of the Civil War. It will not surprise readers of IsThatLegal? that the interests of academic historians, especially since the 1970s, have tended to differ from those of the Civil War "buffs" (as they were gently called).According to William Blair, who edits the journal Civil War History, somewhere between 50,000 to 70,000 books have been written on the war--"closing in on nearly 2 books for every hour." But there are still gaps, he claims:
Despite the emphasis on states' rights, scholars understand the national government far better than they do the state governments. Despite the unpopularity of the war in the north (90,000 Americans moved to Canada), scholars have not talked about the opposition. . . . There is no comprehensive book on the meaning of treason or the handling of this issue by the courts or lawmakers.While these gaps and fissures may be a function of recent politics, Blair said, even at the time of the war there were "two wars." He cited Jimmy Carter, who recalled that even though he was born more than half a century after the war ended, it was a "living reality" in his life: he was very conscious that "his people" had been "conquered," though he also became conscious that his black neighbors "had been liberated in the same conflict." So there's plenty of room for new historical work there too, like for example Tera Hunter's book about uppity black washerwomen in Atlanta in 1881.
But it kept coming back to the fact that whle academics may prefer obscure, bottom-up histories like Hunter's, the "buffs" remain on the battlefield (in more ways than one). One academic who has chosen to join them there is Ed Ayers. His phenomenal digital documentation project about life in two counties, one northern one southern, has already provided source material for one of his books, In the Presence of Mine Enemies. The sheer level of detail that he challenged himself to deal with seems to have commanded a different kind of history--about as far from the "guns and trumpets" Civil War battlefield story as you can get.
What he found was that his historical subjects on both sides had more in common than we might imagine, that they had very little control over the large events that were playing out upon their own lives, that their views were partial and constantly subject to change, that nothing was inevitable. From the preface:
Simple explanations, stark opposites, sweeping generalizations, and unfolding inevitabilities always tempt us, but they miss the essence of the story, an essence found in the deep contingency of history. To emphasize deep contingency is not to emphasize mere chance, all too obvious in a war, but rather the dense and intricate connections in which lives and events are embedded. . . . The brute operations of economy or government continually interacted with the more subtle but no less potent power of culture and ideology. Sometimes people acted from personal or local motivations while at other times distant events drove their actions.Ayers wrote the preface in January 2003, in the shadow of another war.
Posted by Eric at 8:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 21, 2005
With love; fro, Frqnce
The French qre blq,ed for ,qny things: But their greqtest crime is surely this outrqge of q keyboqrd thqt their co,puters all hqve!!!!!Posted by Eric at 5:15 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
"Southern Sources" II: John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin is a national treasure, a local icon, and one of my personal heroes. On Saturday night he had his own tales from the archives. For his Harvard dissertation that became the landmark book The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, in 1939 he came to Raleigh to work.I went to the Department of Archives and History; the first morning there I spoke to director Christopher Crittenden. I didn't anticipate any problem, but when I looked up at him I saw that there was a problem. I was a problem. He said when they built the building they didn't anticipate that there would be anyone like me; the architects hadn't designed the place for me, and there was no place to work.When I came on a Monday to his office I saw a large search room. There were people in there, but that wasn't the place for me, it became quite clear. He said he had no objection to my working there, and he really wanted to have the opportunity to prepare a place for me. He asked if I would come back the following week. I just looked at him because I had an adding machine in my head and I knew that my expenses were going to accumulate. So I said nothing. He said, how about three days. I said I'll be back Thursday.They had prepared a place for me. A small room had been cleared of exhibits, and in it were a table, chair, and wastebasket. He presented me with a key to the stacks since presumably the white pages would not choose to deliver manuscripts to me. So I made the adjustment. I went to my study across the hall from the search room, looked at the wastebasket and table and chair, and thought that it might work, despite the fact that it carried some message of humiliation and of course discrimination. But there was some compensation too, for I had a library wagon, dolly, and I had the keys to the stacks. I could go through the main reading room, the search room, stick my key in the door and go in past the white people in the search room, and I would emerge 30 or 40 minutes later with a wagon just loaded with material. That went on for about two weeks, whereupon there was a crisis. Dr. Crittenden called me and said he'd have to take my key.
What was the matter? He said I've had a delegation from the white researchers who complained that they were being discriminating against and they were demanding a key. He couldn't let them have a key to the stacks without the whole rules breaking down, and I would have to give up my privileges. I would have to bring my requests to the searchroom desk and then retreat to my room and wait there for that one box of materials which would be brought to me--and that's how it was. I gave up those privileges and all was peaceful for the remainder of the time I worked there not only for that year but for several years after I had finished my Ph.D.
That taught me a great deal about the problem of doing research in a southern state, but I hadn't learned everything yet, for as the days weeks and months went by and I had to go to other repositories in Raleigh I found out how the contradictions and inconsistencies in race policies existed. It persuaded me that there was nothing consistent except that they were practiced in ways that made sense to people who wanted to discriminate against people like me. At the archives, segregation was complete. In the state library, "adequate" accommodations had already been prepared for blacks from Shaw, St. Augustine. Then in the Supreme Court library of the state, I made a request and a lady brought it to me and placed it on a table there in the main reading room and I used it. There was no segregation in that library. Within three blocks there were three different arrangements.
After relating even more outrageous stories from Baton Rouge and Montgomery, he offered this conclusion:
I learned that the South was utterly and hopelessly confused about what it should do about race, and you could find as many different arrangements as there were places or states or archives. The vagaries and inconsistencies and contradictions were endless. One had to be careful about making any conclusions or any generalizations about the South. I did not go to the South to do research to change the South. I went to do research to explain to the South what life was like even if the South did not understand it itself. I went to prove to the South that as my mother told me when I was six, regardless of what the arrangements are, regardless of what people tell you, just remember that not any of them are any better than you are, and that you should spend your time proving to them that you are as good as they are. You can do whatever they are doing, and you can prove to them how perfectly ridiculous are the arrangements that they call segregation.Dr. Franklin called "Southern Sources" a model conference, and that is high praise. For he himself had laid out the terms of such a conference in a speech he gave on April 3, 1969, the eve of the first anniversary of Dr. King's assassination (found in this collection):
The history of the United States is not one great success story. And it is not the recounting of deeds of perfect or near-pefect men. Many of the military triumphs were purchased at a fantastically high price: at the price of segregated armies, discrimination in the treatment of black soldiers, insults by white civilians of the black men who were giving their lives to protect those white citizens. Many of its industrial triumphs were purchased at a remarkably high price: at the price of low and discriminatory pay to Negro workers, the inhuman discriminations by labor unions and the exploitation of defenseless Negro labor that was used only in disputes between management and white labor unions. Many of its advances in civilization have been purchased at the price of creating a society that is racially exclusive; where housing, educaiton, and even the means of survival ahve qualifications of race, rather than of reason or of human capabilities. These triumphs, bought at so dear a price, are not the work of perfect or near-perfect men; they are the work of men bereft of the warmth of humanity and brotherhood.We ought to have a history worthy of the principles of truth. We must revise our way of looking at our own history--that is, the history of the United States. We must be willing to criticize the past, incluidng our own institutions and the men who made them. We must be willing to re-write our textbooks in the light of the abundance of available materials that deny the exclusive role of one race of Americans. We must be willing to teach a history that is itself revisionist. The search for truth is never-ending, but the way to begin is to be willing to seek it. Only in this way can we arrive at a point in our writings, and in our teachings, and in our study, where what we tell about our past is inspired more by justice than by pride. And where truth, though strange, is more important than fiction.
Thirty-six years later, this challenge still lies before us.
Posted by Eric at 2:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The suffering of those who look like us
After the tsunami Eric asked, "Is it that white people suffer more than non-whites, or just that the suffering of white people is especially moving?"This is an old question, as a current discussion on the H-Slavery listserv shows. They're talking about images of "white slaves" that circulated in the decade or so before the Civil War and how they helped the abolitionist cause.
Posted by Eric at 7:43 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 20, 2005
Preaching, or meddling?
Jump, don't bumpIn Texas, they take cheerleading very seriously. It'll be interesting to see how this morality ploy shakes out.
Posted by Eric at 8:24 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Ironies, Ironies
It is always heartwarming to see Republicans working hard to drive a divisive legal issue on individual liberties out of the state courts and into the federal courts.Posted by Eric at 2:57 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
"Southern Sources" I: Information needs to be free
Dan Carter, author of prize-winning books on George Wallace and the Scottsboro case, gave a sobering talk about a distressing trend: lack of access to public documents. I'm highlighting his talk first, among the many great talks at the "Southern Sources" conference, because it seems rather urgent: today's News & Observer tells of a move afoot by North Carolina cities--and UNC--to seek the right to sue citizens first when they ask for information that the cities, in their wisdom, think it inappropriate to give out.Carter began with a tale from his Scottsboro research in Alabama. At the state Supreme Court, he was told by the court librarian that since he was not an attorney he had no legal interest in the case and could not examine the trial transcripts. He appealed this decision to the head of the state archives, who picked up the phone and said to the court librarian: "However distasteful you may find this, these are public records."
And even with that, the court librarian put him through an inquisition. Why was he interested in the case? Did he think the boys were innocent or guilty? A good historian, he said he had not "firmly" reached any conclusions. He felt his broad accent returning; he felt her weakening. Since he was from South Carolina, the librarian said, "Then you understand that we treat our nigras fairly in the South."
But this was amateur, Carter said, compared with the Nixon papers. He told the familiar story of how Congress had to pass a law to take Nixon's presidential papers out of his hands and put them in the federal archives, explaining his own interest:
When I was researching my biography of Wallace, I was interested in a number of Nixon records, for example the decision not to prosecute Wallace for corruption. I still think there was an informal deal in which Wallace agreed not to run a third-party candidacy in 1968 in return for the dropping of federal prosecution against him and his brother. But I was particularly interested in a series of tape recording from May 15, 1972, the day Wallace was shot. I knew from interviews Seymour Hersh took off the record with archivists that during a meeting the afternoon of the shooting they learned the identity of the man who shot Wallace.Charles Colson came up with a plan to send E. Howard Hunt to Milwaukee to plant McGovern material in the apartment of that man. A typical Nixon kind of plot which never took place, because they couldn't pull it off. But I wanted to hear the recording. I was never able to examine any of this material because Nixon and his lawyers kept saying these were personal papers. This story is still going on. Now Congress has appropriated money and arranged for the transfer of these papers, even though taxpayers paid $18 million for them already. So we will see more of the same.
Shifting to FOIA, Carter contrasted the Clinton administration, which after a brief rocky start, in 1993 laid down guidelines under Janet Reno that held "a presumption of disclosure." When in doubt, the agency was told to release the documents, and if the agency were to be sued, then the agency had to foot the legal bill.
Conceding that Sept. 11 changed many things, Carter said that W's administsration was no friend of open records even before that--and even when he was governor of Texas for that matter. We all know this, but the details are depressing.
The history of this administration is marked by a focused and disciplined policy of restricting access on a wide range of interests in domestic and foreign policy. It has slashed the budgets of FOIA offices. It more than doubled the number of documents annually classified as secret: and that began before Sept. 11. Documents which once would have been labeled as "secret" are now called "sensitive but unclassified." That's not an improvement. They can be kept from the public like "top secret" documents, but the difference is that if you label it "top secret," you have to go through a process to destroy it. Not so for "sensitive."We shouldn't be surprised at this. Bush has always had a penchant for such secrecy . . . it's just better to absolutely control access to information in order to shape your public view. When he left the governorship, there the procedure is to put your records in the state library. But Texas has one of the most expansive sunshine laws in the country. The moment it goes in there, everything is open to the public. So where did he put his records? In his father's presidential library at Texas A&M!
Again Carter emphasized that what has happened after Sept. 11 was not a new thing, only an acceleration. As soon as the Bush administration came in, he said, they were
faced with the prspect that the Reagan administration's records would be opened that year. The law says that 12 years after an administration, all the records must be available. I don't know what they thought they might find, but think about all the people in Bush II that had served then. So within 30 days after Bush became president, Alberto Gonzales issues a temporary halt to the release of all such materials. Three weeks after Sept. 11, Exec. Order 13233, under a typically Orwellian title of "Further Implementation of Presidential Records Act"--Orwellian because it was an evisceration of that Act--was issued. Former presidents and vice presidents, even their delegates after their death, can bar their release for a whole variety of reasons, some of which never existed before, including "the deliberative processes. . . ." At the same time, the AG issued a memo prepared by Gonzalez reversing Reno's memo: far from telling agencies they should worry about whether they have to defend lawsuits, it said, we will defend you to the last.Carter tried to sound optimistic at the end--empahsizing that it's a political process and therefore subject to change, and adding, "We need to reach out and grasp at least some of these voices before they fade into the silence that unfortunately enfolds so much of our past." That was his parting wisdom.March 13-19 was "National Sunshine Week." Smile.
Local follow-up at GreeneSpace.
Posted by Eric at 8:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 19, 2005
"Creation public" scores in latest round
As the project to roll back the Enlightenment rolls on, this just in: "Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures."The movie in question is "Volcanoes," which has "brief references to evolution, in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the undersea vents."
A Ft. Worth sampling audience called it "blasphemous." And elsewhere: "'We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public,' said Lisa Buzzelli, who directs the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, a commercial theater next to the Charleston Aquarium."
Posted by Eric at 9:17 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Ceaselessly into the past
Haven't had time to unravel my notes from the sessions yesterday at the "Southern Sources" conference, and now it's almost time to go back to Wilson Library for many more hours of discussion. Here are the questions that Tim West, curator of the manuscripts collections here at UNC, posed at the outset:1. What can archival collections reveal, and at the same time what do they conceal, by accidental or conscious omission?
2. How can we use existing sources more creatively or to better effect? As instructional materials? As stimulants to political action? How can technology be brought to bear?
3. What new paradigms will help us gain more insight from archival materials? How about connecting in creative ways the researcher's own life experiences with the resources, perhaps allowing emotional responses to seep in, not just rationality?
4. What is not in the archives that we should be collecting now? Should we be harvesting the web in certain ways? seeking documentation of the experience of new immigrants in the South? searching futher in old attics? Should we focus our limited resources on material like textile mill material that seems abundant now but may disappear soon? How important are audiovisual and electronic sources?
Extra credit for the title.
Posted by Eric at 8:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Concerned Citizen
Not one of my constituents, but this guy looks kind of familiar.Posted by Eric at 7:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 18, 2005
Good grief
After half a day pleasantly spent in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room dwelling in the realm of those dead and gone, I'm trying to get my mind around l'affaire Volokh, as Matthew Yglesias is calling it. The only response I can muster is grief.Eugene Volokh has a brilliant mind, but his style is always something of the scholastic: elaborately reasoned arguments based on what, ultimately, are articles of faith. In this case the irreducible claim, the irrefutable proposition (because he will not allow of refutation or would say it cannot be refuted, when at most, it only can't be proved), is this: "People, it seems to me, have a natural desire to inflict pain on moral monsters." Either you grant that or you do not. I do not, but I fear that many Americans do. With Susan Sontag, dead and gone now, and for her still, I grieve.
Posted by Eric at 9:30 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
A Strange Libertarianism
Icontinue to be astonished by Eugene Volokh´s defense of sadistic torture as criminal punishment.I will not catalogue the legal and moral problems I have with his position; others have already done this well, and Eugene has responded.
What I understand least, though, is something a good deal more personal than what others have raised. Perhaps it is none of my business.
But I ask myself, over and over again, how a person with Eugene´s background, whose family suffered under Soviet repression, and who knows far better than most the brutality of Stalin, could possibly countenance an assertion of a power in any state--even the good old U.S. of A.--to torture a person in this way.
Posted by Eric at 4:42 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
Weight a minute.
Short people got every reason to live.
Unless they blow it.Posted by Eric at 12:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Southern sources: hiding in plain sight
Today and tomorrow I'll be at a conference put on by UNC's Southern Historical Collection: "Southern Sources." Part of an ongoing celebration of 75 years of the SHC, it brings together a great collection of historians.As Jacqueline Hall said in her talk at a related event, the archives may stay (more or less) the same, but what we find there, how we interpret what we find, is new for each generation. Language itself, in fact, is an archive waiting to be tapped.
In southern studies especially, interpretation is everything: finally that can be said. The notion that there is such a thing as a collective memory of the South and that it might have an uneasy relationship with actual history came rather late. Works like Fitz Brundage's essay collection Where These Memories Grow (2000) tapped into a larger discourse on collective memory, and the field really hasn't been the same since. Maybe it was just a matter of time: the myth of the Lost Cause finally bit the dust.
After an odyssey in the archives that lasted years, I've just finished an essay about a 1950s Mississippi novel, the actual lynching that it almost unwittingly invokes, and the sorry history that the South has wanted for so long to forget.
"Of course he wants to vote the Democratic ticket!"
Harper's 1876, reprinted in Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Brook Thomas (1997)The fascinating thing is that the historical event happened in the home town of the author, Elizabeth Spencer, before she was born, but nobody would talk to her about it. What she didn't know she made up. It took till now for someone (me) to follow slim clues until old records were recovered. Out of the archives. The story of a dozen black men gunned down in 1886 in a courthouse in a small Mississippi town, some jumping out second-story windows, all of it in graphic and wildly contradictory detail, was there in old newspapers all along.
I wrote this essay (in English!) for the French journal Profils Américains published by the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier. I'm in a conversation with the editor about getting it published. In the meantime, an advance copy just for you: the essay and bibliography (.pdf).
See more at GreeneSpace.
Posted by Eric at 6:28 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Victoria's Gem Found In Somebody's Hell
Ihad a marvelous day in London yesterday. The weather was spectacular, and that led me to follow an itinerary proposed by one of my readers.
