Yesterday, the radio opera was Rúsalka, sung in Czech, by Antonín Dvořák (there’s not actually an accent on the u -I put one there to remind myself that’s where the stress is.) Like every other culture, the Czech cultur is rich in fairy tales. But, if you think the Brothers Grimm are grim, don’t look up the Czech ones, because they are grimmer. A Rúsalka is a female water spirit (it isn’t her name), and her story is that of the Llittle Mermaid, only darker. She is a fresh water being, she doesn’t go to a sea witch, but a lake or river witch called Jezibaba, and forfeits her voice to become human. The prince falls for her but everyone in his castle is terrified of this speechless woman who seems so cold (she didn’t get a soul in the deal, you see.) A foreign princess comes to visit, and the Prince is tempted, and the Rúsalka fears all is lost and goes back to the water. The prince tries to stop her but it is too late. She has become a different kind of water spirit, one who exists to lure human men and kiss them, which condemns tham to hell for eternity (she did get her voice back, so she tells him this – she doesn’t want to doom him.) But he chooses to kiss her anyway. Not exactly a happily ever after ending for sure. The one aria from it which is often concertized is the “Song to the Moon,” about how much she loves the prince and wants to be with him. The role is for a soprano, but this aria isn’t high, and a mezzo-soprano can sing it, and in fact the best, IMO, I ever heard it was done by a mezzo, Frederica von Stade (also, Joshua Bell did a lovely violin version). But I digress. Dvořák also used Czech fairy tales as the bases for some tone poems, of which the three I can remember are “The Noon Witch,” “The Wood Dove,” and “The Golden Spinning Wheel.” All the music is lovely, and all the stories are gruesome.
Cartoon – 25 0925Cartoon.jpg also Rosh Hashanah loaded
Short Takes –
CPR News – Elijah McClain’s autopsy report changed to death by ketamine
Quote – “The forensic evidence revealed that the cause of death was undetermined. Specifically, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy stated that he was unable to conclude that the actions of any law enforcement officer caused Mr. McClain’s death. In order to prove any form of Homicide in the state of Colorado it is mandatory that the prosecution prove that the accused caused the death of the victim.” Even with this new cause of death being ketamine, it is unclear how prosecutors move forward with holding those who touched McClain that evening accountable for his death without a homicide declaration on the death certificate. Click through for updates. We pretty well knew this. But now it’s official – but the manner of death is still wrong. I think our AG tried hard for accountability, but has been stymied, as usual, by law enforcement sticking together regardless.
Crooks & Liars – Ukraine Returns 215 POWs, Including Azovstal Defenders In Prisoner Swap
Quote – An amazing swap, as in total Ukraine returned 215 prisoners of war, 205 Ukrainians and 10 foreigners. The entire leadership of the Azov regiment appears to have survived and were freed, including commander Denys Prokopenko. British national Aidan Aslin, sentenced to death by Russian proxies of Donetsk, also swapped. Ukrainian medic and songstress Kateryna “Ptashka” Polishchuk aka “Birdie” was also among those released, just days after Russia released an interrogation video of her. Click through for more details. This is astonishing, particularly since Putin has started conscripting. But I’ll definitely tke it.
Yesterday, it was a pretty unexciting day until the word came out that the Inflatin Reduction Act had been passed by the Senate. I picked up a very short, graphic short take about it, figuring there will be plenty of time to discuss it at length.
Cartoon – .(which forgot to insert before posting, but went back and added later)
Short Takes –
Letters from an American – August 6, 2022
Quote – “Gentlemen,” [Garfield] said, “ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory. But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet tonight as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought…. [W]e will remember our allies who fought with us,” he told them. “Soon after the great struggle began, we looked beyond the army of white rebels, and saw 4,000,000 of [B]lack people condemned to toil as slaves for our enemies; and we found that the hearts of these 4,000,000 were God-inspired with the spirit of liberty, and that they were all our friends.” As the audience cheered, he continued: “We have seen white men betray the flag and fight to kill the Union; but in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in a black skin.” Click through for the background and what happened next. White supremacy = corruption. President Garfield was ambidextrous, multilingual, and so good at multitasking that he could write in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other at the same time. That means nothing – but this speech meant something. So, of course, they killed him.
Yesterday, I read Robert Reich‘s and Heather Cox Richardson‘s fourth-of-July essays, which cam in, one late the previous night, and one very early in the morning. In a way they say the same thing in different words. And in a way, both are wrong – not in the wrong direction, but not going far enough. It was this that struck me in Richardson’s piece (referencing the Gettysburg Address): “the Civil War was ‘testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.’ It did, of course.” No. It didn’t. The same issues which divied us in 1776 and 1865 and 1964 have never gone away. We just managed to push them underground for a few years (a trifle longer the second time). And Trump** did not bring them to a boil. They were always at a boil. All he did was give the wrong side permission to speak.
If we are ever going to heal this divide, we have to do more than trying harder, because that isn’t working. The most recent time around (the 1960s), psychology had become a science, and there have been all kinds of psychological studies about perceptions which have provided new information about the states of mind of Americans – but not one (and no combination) has given any insight into what to do to make it go away. Now, again, some states are talking about seceding. And some progressives are saying (and more are secrtly thinking) perhaps we should let it happen (at least some of us are talking about the need to rescue sane people from the departing states, and how difficult that would be) We already have a Civil War on our hands now – right now. It’s not yet a shooting war. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be. And way too few appear to realize it.
Oddly, it may be Steve Schmidt who puts it the most clearly: “Then [the beginning of the Civil War, speaking of Congress] like now, there were some who looked at the empty desks and saw crisis in the absence – not [in] the cause of the absence.”
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Short Takes –
Crooks and Liars – Double Whammy: Trump Media Group Subpoenaed Twice In One Week
Quote – Digital World Acquisition Corp. said in a filing Friday that Trump Media and Technology Group received a subpoena from the grand jury in Manhattan on Thursday. The Trump company also received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding a civil probe on Monday, DWAC said Click thrpugh for details. Two different subpoenas by two diferent entities. Good.
Democratic Underground – Robert Hubbell has an idea for getting control of the Supreme Court.
Quote – It is debatable whether Congress can force Supreme Court justices to adopt an enforceable code of ethics. But the Constitution provides that Congress can restrict the appellate jurisdiction of the Court, as provided in Article III, Section 2: [T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. Click through – This could be, not IMO a permanent solution, but a powerful stopgap until the Court can really be fixed (not that it shouldn’t stay in effect – it should always have been in effect. But we also need more)
Glenn – J6 committee subpoenas WH Counsel Pat Cipollone. Will he testify or coverup Trump’s crimes?
Meidas Touch – Michael Cohen REACTS to Trump attacks on Cassidy Hutchinson
Robert Reich – The Supreme Court’s War on the People (yes, I also used the text article.)
Beloved Community Talks | The Replacement Theory and White Fear: It Starts in Our Minds
This is a seminar produced by The King Center through “The Beloved Comunity Speaks” program, and it is 45 minutes even after I cut off some intro. I don’t expect anyone to watch it without setting aside time to do so, and I understand anyone who doesn’t want to do that. I share it mainly because I have a long online relationship with Scott. When he first “came out” on LinkedIn as a “reformed racist” in 2010 (and asked for advice how best to help eliminate racism from anyone willing to give it), I was new to LinkedIn myself but I felt I had to respond with support, and we have been LinkedIn contacts ever since. It hasn’t been easy for him (racism is not the only thing he is recovering from) but he has never wavered. He works with The King Center at least annually now. I’m proud to know him.
Puppet Regine – CoVid-19
Beau – Let’s talk about Elmo and a phrase I never thought I say….
Yesterday, I went to see Virgil at the facility in Denver. The traffic was, I suppose, not all that bad; it was not bad enough to slow my speed, but it was ha=eavy enough to cause me concern about the potental danger of changing lanes (parts of I25 in Denver now have six lanes going one direction, and I thought I remembered how th junction with I225 worked, but I wasn’t positive – and it’s been so long since I’ve driven through there, it might have changed.) Fortumately my meory was correct and it hadn’t changed. The I225 junction with I70 was even easier – I225 just ends there and merges. The Havana Street exit was simple. I did turn the wrong way on the street the facility was actually on, but since I turned into a “no outlet,” it was quick to realize and quick to turn around. I arrived in good time and getting in went smoothly. Virgil was knd of late (they had to wake him up, and someone had to come with him.) He came with his walker, didn’t have a cast, and neither leg had any sign of swelling, but he said that both legs were still in pain, though somewhat improvred. So I think he’ll recover. I left before I saw all the good wishes, but I will share them with him and I know he will appreciate them. I will be watching the DOC site so that when I next visit I’ll know where to go. They may keep him there for some weeks or more, or they may return him to Fremont, or they may assign him to a different facility. But if I keep up with the website I won’t drive to the wrong place. Coming home, I knew where I was going, but there was a little rain so I still had to stay on my toes.
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Short Takes –
Crooks and Liars – NM County Won’t Pay Capitol Rioter Couy Griffin’s Legal Costs
Quote – His defense sparked laughter from members of the audience Friday as he made the case for county legal representation and said it was time to take a stand against “tyrannical Marxists” who want to take away freedom. “Look this is hard enough without you all laughing,” Griffin said at one point in the meeting. Click through for setup and details. There are probably more important stories out there, but I needed a chuckle and figured you all did too. (If anyone cares, “Otero” is pronounced “oh-tear-oh” [tear as in rip up, not as in a drop,] accent on the “tear.” Not trying to insult anyone’s inte;;igence, but I have seen it in various news stories with various misspellings recently.)
Wonkette – What The Hell Is Happening In Wisconsin?
Quote – This week, the Wisconsin high court ruled 4-3 that Republican political appointees can refuse to leave and hold their offices for as long as they want, at least until a Republican is elected governor. Yes, quite literally. The outcome in Wisconsin v. Prehn is a rule that will only benefit the justices’ fellow Republicans. Click through. This is like the Garland appointment on steroids.
Glenn Kirschner – Judge Luttig, darling of the right, says Trump “clear+present danger.” Trump proves it in TN speech
Meidas Touch – Real Seniors REACT in HORROR to GOP Plan to eliminate Social Security and Medicare
The Lincoln Project – Juneteenth
Don Winslow Films – #HowToConvictTrump
MSNBC – Why The Jan. 6 Committee Hearings Are ‘Exceeding Expectations’
Beau – Let’s talk about sharks, screens, shifting thought, and Hollywood…. (Beau has been on fire recently. I cut one I had peviously selected, but am still abit behind.)
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
This is not the first time I (or TC) have written about Juneteenth, but I don’t like to let it slip away. Confederates of the 1860’s (and earlier and later) could certainly give today’s Republicans a run for their money on delusion and denial – and mean spirited arrogance. “Well, just don’t tell them they’re free, and they’ll have to stay enslaved.” I apologize if that prompted a Barf Bag – especially when there are so many delicacies to celebrate with.
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Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too
Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900, held in ‘East Woods’ on East 24th St. in Austin, Texas. Austin History Center
The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.
The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.
The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.
As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.
There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.
In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.
As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.
The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.
The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.
The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.
The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.
In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.
Emancipation myths and realities
On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.
The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”
At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.
After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.
Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.
All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.
President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. Getty Images
Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.
After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.
Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”
Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
The meaning of Juneteenth
Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.
A Black woman raises her fist in the air during a Juneteenth reenactment celebration in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 2021. Mark Felix /AFP/Getty Images
On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.
They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.
Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.
At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”
The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I know you’re busy, but if you can manage, you might just want to track down some of those slaveowners in the underworld and give them a piece of all our minds. Not that they probably haven’t heard it – but those are mighty thick heads to try to get it through to.
