12 Years A Slave

This is no "sentimental Gone With The Wind kitsch" as David Denby of the New Yorker Magazine observed, but a stark and powerful story of slavery in the pre-Civil War South and how it brutalized not only the slaves but the people who owned them.

The story is based on the book written by Solomon Northup, a free man from Saratoga Springs, New York, who was kidnapped and sold into bondage and endured the dehumanizing effects of slavery for 12 years.

I had recently read Frederick Douglass's memoirs and recognized much of what he suffered as a slave in Northup's story. Although Douglass was born into slavery and escaped to freedom, unlike Northup, who was born a free man and was forced into slavery, both men's stories of unimaginable suffering and humiliation remind us of this country's horrific original sin and how the South was unwilling to give up its barbaric addiction to a culture that forced its people to dehumanize their slaves so they could justify keeping them in unspeakably cruel and brutish conditions.

David Denby called 12 Years A Slave "...easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery."

After having seen Django Unchained and The Butler, I have to agree.  This is a radical film that challenges the viewer to confront the stark reality of "America's primal wound," and refuses to sentimentalize the savagery that was practiced in the pre-Civil War South.  And it is presented with elegance and historic clarity I rarely see in Hollywood films of this kind.

Do yourself a favor and go see this.  And take your children. This is real American history and all its bloody truth in the lash and the chain, brought to the screen by British director, Steve McQueen.

British Shakespearean actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Northup, is outstanding.


New York Times Review:

“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it’s been hawking for more than a century. Written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen, it tells the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American freeman who, in 1841, was snatched off the streets of Washington, and sold. It’s at once a familiar, utterly strange and deeply American story in which the period trappings long beloved by Hollywood — the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest — are the backdrop for an outrage.

(O)CT(O)PUS Will Be Off Grid

I have a family milestone to attend and will be away until next Wednesday.  Meanwhile, I am sure Captain Fogg and the fabled critters of this realm will keep you enlightened and entertained.

My last post until I return, here is a short video that caught my fancy (for reasons that will become obvious to you).  Enjoy.

Musicotherapie from Beakus on Vimeo.

A short film created by Clément Picon, Manu Javelle and Beakus director Amael Isnard when graduating from France's prestigious school Supinfocom. In a mental hospital for animals, four patients start making music with every object they can find. Featuring music by Tambour Battant the film was shown at Pictoplasma, OneDotZero, Anima Bruxelles, NYCFF New York, and Animafest Zagreb, picking up several awards along the way.

Wing Dings

An exchange that took place in Cyberspace within the hour:

----------------------------------------------------

On Ignorant Leftists; Octopus

His avenue for uncovering "the truth"? Thumbing through the pages of the New York Times. I shit you not. 

POSTED BY WILL "TAKE NO PRISONERS" HART AT 1:41 PM

2 COMMENTS:

(O)CT(O)PUS said...

Will,

When you disparage a person on your weblog, at least have the decency to provide the link so readers can adjudge for themselves the subject conversation; otherwise all you have accomplished is a gratuitous argumentum ad hominem in a churlish and cowardly manner.

OCTOBER 25, 2013 AT 7:36 PM

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Fuck you.

OCTOBER 25, 2013 AT 7:44 PM

----------------------------------------------------

Classy!

Song of the South

" If it hurts a bunch of lazy Blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” 

Said North Carolina state GOP executive committee member and precinct chairman Don Yelton, about the new, more restrictive voting laws  --  and there you have it, the cornerstone, the key assumption, the basis of Republican philosophy.  I can't say, as much as it might seem otherwise, that there's been no progress in the old, old, quest for recognition of people of color as fully human; as real citizens with the same rights and privileges and responsibilities as white, Anglo-Saxon Americans.  After all when I was a kid, he wouldn't have said "lazy Blacks."

Barack Obama is of course all about buckets of chicken, watermelons, welfare checks and leering at white women, or at least he is in the imaginations of people like Yelton who is after all, the sad remainder of what was once a political party.  All else, all that purports to be principle, philosophy, policy and patriotism is simply camouflage. It's not a coincidence that what others might think of as undeserving categories of white people aren't mentioned, the kind of folks that a previous generation subjected to forced sterilization so that they wouldn't pass on their inferior genes. Undereducated, malnourished, uncivilized, unmotivated, intoxicated made dependent by welfare and ill-suited for informed citizenship, they're nevertheless white and at the very least more nearly all right.  In fact so many of them vote Republican they're needed, if for no other reason.

People that may have been Dixiecrats back before the civil rights movement alienated them from the Democratic Party,  have been feeling sorry for themselves since before the Civil War, burdened by the requirements of modern civilization which they see in terms of their hard earned money and privilege being taken away by the damn Yankees and given to the "takers."

And now one of "them" has taken the presidency. Ain't gonna let that happen again!

I often think of Republicans like Winnie the Pooh without the charm: as creatures of very  little brain, but of course they have their wicked wizards, smart enough to fire people like Yelton who make too much noise from behind the curtain and expose the game.

The County GOP Chairman, in firing Yelton's ass this week said in a statement to a local TV station that Yelton's statements were:

“offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party.
“Let me make it very clear: Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon, This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party.”

Except of course in practice.

Texas Wants To Disenfranchise Women Voters. Do You Know Why?

Voter ID laws have been passed in eleven Republican-controlled states since the 2010 midterm elections; yet studies have shown that alleged cases of voter fraud are virtually nonexistent. The voters most likely to be turned away at the polls for not having valid state-issued IDs are groups targeted for suppression - African Americans, Latinos, students and younger voters, senior citizens, and now women -- groups that traditionally support Democrats.

In an effort to build support for voter ID laws, the Republican National Lawyers Association published a report that identified only 400 prosecutions for the entire country during a span of ten years. That’s not even one prosecution per state per year. Yet, an estimated 5 million voters will be disenfranchised - enough to alter election outcomes nationwide year after year.

Do you smell a rat?  In the state of Wisconsin alone, voter registration hours were lengthened in Republican districts and shortened in Democratic districts. This is a fact. Smell the rat! And Texas intends to go one step further:

"What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote," said District Court Judge Sandra Watts.  Imagine that!  A District Court judge who is not allowed to vote!  Watts has voted in every election for the last past 49 years; the name on her driver's license had been unchanged for 52 years; and the address on her voter registration card has remained the same for two decades.

Imagine her surprise when District Court Judge Sandra Watts was told by voting officials that she would have to sign an affidavit confirming her identity.

Why? The middle name printed on her driver’s license is her maiden name. The middle name printed on her voter registration card is her original middle name recorded at birth. It was enough to raise a red flag under new and more restrictive laws.

Is this an unintended consequence of new voter ID laws in the Lone Star State?  Hardly!  This is why:

Meet Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for Governor in Texas. In case you haven’t noticed, Wendy Davis is a woman, and the good ole boys of the Lone Star State don’t want women to vote for her. 

Nothing stays in stasis forever. Once you establish election chicanery as standard operating procedure, it metastasizes cancer-like through the entire system. Today it may be Republicans doing this to Democrats; tomorrow it may be the Manchurian candidate from Chargoggagogg-manchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg doing this to Republicans.

This year, I am writing a book on voter suppression. I have interviewed canvassing commissioners of both parties, Democrat and Republican. There is no daylight between them on how to run a fair and honest election. Politicians, however, are another story and especially notorious for chicanery and corruption. 

In Florida last year, Governor Grifter-Scott ordered the purge of 180,000 names from state voter rolls. Canvassing commissioners, both Democrat and Republican, examined these lists and found all to be bogus - not even one name.

How can you have full faith and confidence in the legitimacy of elections when results are rigged along party lines! The question is rhetorical: You can’t.  How can you vote in good conscience for a candidate or party that wants to deprive you of a fundamental right?  The question is rhetorical: Don’t!

(More references with commentary in the comment section below)

Feeling the Elephant

Ur-Zababa King of Sumer
Ur-Zababa King of Kish
Ur-Zababa had a nightmare
Ur-Zababa had a dream
Sargon in a raft of rushes
Sargon of the floating basket
Pours the wine for Ur-Zababa
One last time.

________

The parallels between the literature that eventually became the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and other ancient legends in all their versions are inescapable, even for a beginning student of ancient history:  the eye for an eye of Hammurabi, the Story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, the story of the infant Sargon found floating in a basket on the Tigris, like Moses on the Nile.  Such observations are striking at first glance to the untrained eye, but sometimes that untrained eye may also be the unprejudiced eye.

 Does anyone not recall the first time they saw a globe, how obvious was the fit between the European and African coast of the Atlantic?  Studying Geology ages ago, we were taught that it was only a coincidence and Plate Tectonics was a radical, almost heretical concept.  The world, of course was still just as it was made, only cooler and with mountains perhaps thrust up by contraction. Of course, Eppur si muove, as Galileo may or may not have said about the 'stationary' Earth. And still it moves, or at least the continents do. Did that plucked turkey look like a dinosaur?  Coincidence. That ape like a man?

Was the Moses Story embellished with older folk tales?  There are so many other examples of plots and even phrases in Bible stories that it's tempting to say so and it's hard to say that it isn't so.  It's hard, at least for history buffs and students of ancient literature to deny it and yet easy, if perhaps the desperation shows a little, in the always condescending and often irrelevant or fallacious dismissals written by Biblical certainty advocates.

Yes, there are minor differences.  Moses' mother was not a princess; he was adopted by one. The Tigris is a fast river, the Nile is a slower one. the Atlantic coasts do not exactly mesh. Jesus is not an exact copy of Mithras or Osiris or Ganesh or any of the many other Biblical or extra Biblical sons of gods or resurrected saviors of nations or souls. Noah and Ut-Napishtim are different.  None of the myth makers whose stories appear in the Bible could have read the Popol Vuh with it's resurrection of Hun-Hunahpu -- but as Joseph Campbell said, when you get down to the deepest well of myth you find a deeper one at the bottom.  Such stories are archetypes perhaps; rooted in our basic human desire or propensity to concoct explanatory stories about what we cannot know or understand. Each culture creates the same stories in its own image.

Perhaps the Sargon story, in it's obviously mythologized form, comes from the same instinct or from the same primordial urge or instinct we all share that produced the obviously mythologized Moses tale.  We do have hard evidence for Sargon of Akkad, conqueror of Sumer, scourge of Elam. We have none whatever for Moses and we have so many contradictions and no evidence whatever in that story. yet look at how fiercely we defend it's inerrant accuracy!

All this is just another stanza in my long lament about the illusion of reason and truth and objectivity in the way we humans see reality.  Some of us do so more than others; more often that others do and about more things, but we are what we are. Like the blind men and the elephant we see dimly if at all, but the tragedy is not in our blindness, but in the fact that in gaining sight, we cling to the things we became comfortable with back when we were blind, even as the elephant laughs.

Turning a Glitch into a Gotcha

With the threat of debt default delayed until February, Tea Party Republicans remain determined to win in defeat what they lost by blackmail.  Unbowed and undeterred, the anti-abortion party wants to abort ObamaCare, exploit every glitch to turn public opinion against it, and sabotage reform at all cost. SNAFU! See, they told you so!

An error of attribution, real fault points in the direction of government contractors and the procurement process.  In this case, one culprit is Booz Allen, a legacy contractor with deep political pockets – the same corporation at the center of the Snowden mess.

An estimated dozen or more firms won ACA contracts - stalwarts such as Booz Allen, Rand, CGI, Deloitte, Xerox (a $72 million contract to build the Nevada exchange and $68 million for the Florida exchange), and Vagent (a vagrant subsidiary of General Dynamics).

On the lobbying and political contribution side of this mugging are QSS-United Health ($10 million in lobbying and direct political contributions), Vagent ($24 million), and Verizon Business Services ($$35 million), as examples.  Did I say lobbying and political contributions?  Oops, perhaps I should have used the words bribery and graft:

Some 17 ACA contract winners reported spending more than $128 million on lobbying in 2011 and 2012, while 29 had employees or political action committees or both that contributed $32 million to federal candidates and parties in the same period (source).

Every glitch feeds the narrative of an inept government, a favorite stalking point of the Tea Party Republicans.  Of course, mainstream media reports all controversies as high drama for entertainment but fails to investigate the creepier things lurking under rocks:

• Legacy contractors and their culture of overarching entitlement (meaning guaranteed profits with no obligation to be held accountable for the integrity and timeliness of their work),
• The incestuous relationship between the captains of capitalism and the politicians who sleep with them. 

In short, here is your free enterprise system at work - in secret and behind your back.

Remember Halliburton, the company that won billions of dollars in no-bid contracts and honored American taxpayers by moving corporate headquarters to a tax-free zone in Dubai? How quickly the public forgets the outrage expressed by Senator Patrick Leahy (D. Vermont): "This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years" source.

Those who blame glitches in implementation on President Obama or Kathleen Sebelius miss the point.  No amount of partisan pandering or intellectual dishonesty will get you to the root of the problem unless you are willing to dig deeper.

Facts lie

So what did we learn here?  Oh come on, we're Americans, we already know everything we need to know and if fact and experience differ from received wisdom?  Facts lie.

What did experience have to say about the shutdown?  That we love our National Parks says CNN, but did we learn that Democrats want to shut them down and keep veterans from seeing veterans' memorials?  Depends on whether you're a Palinist or not, because veterans weren't actually kept out of such places even if she did the dance of the Sugar Plum Furies at the WW II memorial. If you saw it on Fox you'll do doubt see it that way - a humiliation for Obama.

We believe what we want to, and if you think Obama was "inflexible" in refusing to bend over and let the minority party nullify the law,  you still think so. Why should a false equivalence be anything but false?   If you still think the failure of years worth of legislative initiatives and court battles and seditious propaganda crusades against the Affordable Health Care Act means the will of the people is not served by Democracy you still think so.  If you think a system of providing universal care opportunity at lower cost using private insurers who compete in the free market  is Marxism, then you must think the Swiss are Marxists who hate Capitalism and  will sleep soundly through the cognitive dissonance.

And you know, people who can support the plan designed by Republicans  as long as a Democrat isn't selling it never have a problem with that dissonance, now do they?  Losing in the courts, losing in Congress, losing in public estimation isn't a learning experience for people like Rising Star Ted Cruz. He wants to do it all over again, because after all doing something than has never, ever worked needs to be done until it does. If you think that's stupid of him, you probably never supported him in the first place.

No,  Instead of acknowledging error, instead of recognizing that the public doesn't share their double-thinking delusion; instead of admitting that the principle of nullification has been rejected by the courts for over 200 years as being unconstitutional, the Republican Berserkers will simply reformulate their views in some new way.  A way that still supports their old opinions and makes true their old lies, and with the confidence that comes from blind stupidity we'll see it all again.  It's America and November 2014 is a long, long time from now.

Disaster Averted. Government Reopens

In the Cephalopod Book of Etiquette, it is considered bad form and bad Karma to rejoice in excess after a contest is over.  A boorish and uncouth winner does not ingratiate himself to a sore loser.  So I shall not gloat.

I shall not gloat.

I.shall.not.gloat, period (!)

ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  ROFLMAO  GLOAT  GLOAT  ROFLMAO

Default Averted? Meanwhile, Man Arrested for Keeping Illegal Alligator

Indian River County Florida — A local man was arrested Tuesday for keeping an alligator in his hot tub, according to a Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission report.

Tony Wells, Jr., 32, was arrested at his home when FWC found an alligator kept illegally in a hot tub after serving a search warrant, according to authorities. He faces charges of possession of an alligator without a tag, and has been released on $500 bond.

When asked about the charges, Wells replied, “There are people making allegations against me, and I’m going to find out who those alligators are!”