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Books by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Living History /
It Takes a Village /
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy /
An Invitation to the White House
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Hillary
Turns on the Demo Light
By Rudolph Lewis
33% of the American
people believe that Congress should be Bush's rubber
stamp. 33% expected Congress
to bring the troops home
yesterday. 33% haven't the foggiest notion what they
want.—Anonymous
That statement captures the American
situation well—the present and the immediate future.
It’s not a hopeful picture for those down below.
There exists indeed a measure of
enjoyed comfort for a substantial number of Americans.
As bad as it is, say, for the major cities with their
black poverty and “high” crime rates, the American
dilemma is not the murderous mayhem and starvation of
the Sudan; nor even Israel/Palestine. So Americans are
in no rush to roll up the Republican carpet of war and
exploitation. The Demos are more concerned with
recapturing the White House than with the impeachment of
Bush. Furthermore, some of the congressional okayed
fascist techniques might come in handy in stripping away
Republican lies and Republican sway.
Look at
John Conyers and his Party
discipline. Demos know too (as well as McCain) that you
can't screw peoples' lives up and not expect them to
retaliate (that’s too unrealistic). Once you start the
game; you must play to win. If not that, you must get
even. So while you got the enemy down, you should keep
him down. These sayings are commonsense Americana.
Bush and the Bushwhackers might have
screwed up in how they played the game. But the game has
been started and must be played out once it is started.
Moreover considerable expenses and lives have been
invested. One cannot just walk away from the table after
you done spent Mama’s money. Somebody has to pay up. The
game is now in Demo hands and the Demos have to clean up
the Bush mess, his over-optimism of a clean sweep, and
that cleaning can't be done by "cutting and running." So
don’t hope for a quick Democratic withdrawal; the nation
is deep into the Middle East (and good) as never before
and some think they might get to enjoy it as much as
Bush and the Bushwhackers.
Personality has become important as a
determining qualification for the presidency. That's the
reason McCain and other capable politicians will never
become president. They’re into game logic with deadly
conclusions. It’s brutal and cruel. Politicians rather
than artists imagine that such games possess the whole
of life’s reality rather than just a metaphor of
limitations.
McCain and his ilk just do not have
the personality. Courage, endurance, focus, yes, they
have that in abundance, maybe even on the battlefield.
Yet such men and women are dull, lacking imagination,
that is, they lack personality. Satellite radio
listening and TV watching Americans have been
conditioned for some time, however, on the importance of
personality and presence. American political
decision-making fell to this superficial level as our
nation aged because the politics of the nation became
too complicated, too complex, too modern, for any
citizen to comprehend, or at least made to be so.
The majority of the electorate does
not have the leisure or the inclination to puzzle
it out, especially starting out where they are, the
handlers tell his or her political candidate
(personality, celebrity). Can’t you see the picture?
They drill their future Prince or Princess. That is, he
or she learns to deal with American limitations if that
knowledge is not already instinctive: American voters
possess few ideological principles, not related to race.
Race, Americans know; they’re experts
in such matters—three centuries of savage experience has
made it a permanent feature in their blood meditations.
They know how to read race and religion and sex. So
people look for related signs (like attitudes toward the
Negro) in the candidate. Americans are willing to make
hunches and gambles, like playing the horses or the
numbers, in these matters of who is most suitable and
who will make them feel at ease (with a measure of
judicial grace) in dealing with issues of race,
religion, and sex.
Hillary has more personality than the
lot on both sides. She’s been through the sex thing.
She’s done had her say about the “Village”—wrote a book
on it. Clearly, she’s more American than an Arab, more
Christian than a Muslim. And that’s that. There’s no
doubt about that. She can sweetly twist a knife in your
back and smile. McCain can't do that. He’ll want to ask
his victims questions that Hillary doesn’t need to ask
for she already knows the answers as well as her
victims. Hillary does not have a conscience, I’m afraid:
she has goals. With millions of how-to books published
yearly, Americans are clearly goal-oriented.
Hillary is cool (tech-cool) and the
nation knows she is cool because Americans have seen how
she handled Big Bill the Smoozer and the wild bended
knee of pornographic images exploding wires around the
globe after his bedroom transgressions. Tolerant,
cosmopolitan, a moral relativist, maybe, but she was not
amused. And she didn’t crack and there were no tears.
A lot of women admire that because
they’ve been there. And some men too, if they give it a
bit of thought, they'd want their woman to respond
likewise. Of course, such deliberate personal
calculations are in no way the best way to choose an
individual to run a nation-state. It has not always been
like that. Often it had to do with what principles were
involved. But our contemporary is a postmodern world
grown global. The nation’s running is on “automatic” and
we have yet to find one who can truly steer the Ship of
Freedom. But that's not going to change anytime soon.
Yeah, you got to be willing to get
your hands bloody at home and abroad to win in American
politics, and you have to know how to be racist, as
well. In a poll, people rated Kennedy and Reagan as the
top two presidents in the last 50 years. Kennedy had his
Castro and Reagan had his Gorbachev. There was national
drama, personal drama—personality (at a celebrity
level), that operates over and above the bureaucratic
operations of government. Little or none of this fame by
poll is based on political accomplishment, but rather on
celebrity and personality. George Bush and his
Bushwhackers have clearly lost their charm over
Americans. They no longer sparkle.
America is in the dark. She wants to
feel good about herself. Oprah-good! Hillary-good! These
women know how to turn on the light.
posted 15 August 2007
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous scholarship, historian Lewis (Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits the ragtag band of young men and women who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Impatient with what they considered the overly cautious and accommodating pace of the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr., the black college students and their white allies, inspired by Gandhi's principles of nonviolence and moral integrity, risked their lives to challenge a deeply entrenched system. Fanning out over the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins, voter registration drives, Freedom Schools and protest marches. Despite early successes, the movement disintegrated in the late 1960s, succeeded by the militant Black Power movement. The highly readable history follows the later careers of the principal leaders. Some, like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, became bitter and disillusioned. Others, including Marion Barry, Julian Bond and John Lewis, tempered their idealism and moved from protest to politics, assuming positions of leadership within the very institutions they had challenged. According to the author, No organization contributed more to the civil rights movement than SNCC, and with his eloquent book, he offers a deserved tribute.— Publishers Weekly |
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
1950
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1965
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1980
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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posted 7 November
2007 / update
14 January 2012
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