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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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The People are the
Change
By John Maxwell
I’m sure it is
possible to second guess Barack Obama. I’m sure it is
possible to outrun Usain Bolt. I’m pretty certain I
won’t be around to witness either event. The real value of
Barack Obama is the fact that millions of people round
the world have incorporated Obama into their own dreams,
almost into their own personas.
After the foul
miasma of the last few years has begun to clear it was
almost inevitable that when our most outlandish wish
came true, against all the odds, we would bundle all our
hopes and aspirations into the skinny kid with the funny
name who spoke of change as if it were important and—that he meant what he said.
In this atmosphere
of swirling myth and springtime tears, it is easy to
forget Bismarck’s apothegm: politics is the art of the
possible. “Politics is the art of the possible, the
attainable
—the art of the next best” said the founder
of Germany; John Kenneth Galbraith’s apparent dismissal
of Bismarck is in fact a confirmation—”Politics is not
the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between
the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
Thousands of
bloggers and people supposedly learned in the craft of
politics, have been having conniptions because Barack
Obama has not chosen to break out of the American
political system in some revolutionary expedition to
wipe all slates clean and to dry every tear.
Obama, like Lincoln
and Roosevelt before him, or Bismarck himself or Fidel
Castro or Jean Bertrand Aristide—is not a freak of
nature but the perfectly logical crystallisation of his
people’s dreams. And these dreams have always been
various, coalitions of desire which can never be wholly
fulfilled because some are always at odds with others.
The most fundamental ideals of all, Freedom and
Liberty, mean many different things to any different
people. Harmonising these contradictions in the interest
of the greater good is the essence of what we call
politics.
Some pundits have
declared that in choosing Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates
and Lawrnce Summers among others, Obama has sold out.
Sold out to the past, to the Clintons, to the status
quo. They don’t
understand Obama—who does?—and they don’t understand
politics.
In the American
presidential system it is the President who makes
policy: foreign policy and domestic policy, social
policy and economic. When a President Obama assembles a
team he is choosing people who understand that the US
has one President at a time—even when that President
is as totally unfitted for the position as was George
Bush. I am not being wise after the event: I said so
when Bush was about to be appointed to the job by the US
Supreme Court.
As I wrote almost
exactly 8 years ago, on Friday December 8, 2000 in a
column published in this paper on December 10, two days
later:
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Most of us
still know nothing about what is going on
[in Florida’s Supreme Court] of course,
because our media is too busy congratulating
itself to notice the titanic struggle taking
place an hour’s flying time from Kingston.
Like the people of the United States, we
have been carefully screened from the truth.
The real George Bush, if he is appointed
President, will use his time to destroy the
integrity of the country he rules, starting
with the Supreme Court. Then he can start on
dealing with the rest of us. That’s his
job, and as the American Press has made
plain, nothing needs to be known about him
and his multifarious incapacities because
Big Brother in the giant corporations will
tell him what to do.
We are all in a for a very rough ride. |
We’ve had the ride, and I forecast
some of that too, in the same column:
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The approaching triumph
of Greenspan/Ayn Rand capitalism may just be
slowed down by the latest developments in
the US economy, but that is not cooling down
the ardour of the ‘Cognitive Elite’ to gain
a handle on the whole business of corporate
control of the economies and governance of
the world. |
Some of us find it
really easy to forget unpleasant experience particularly
at the hands of someone we were told to trust. This
forgetfulness allows us to survive all kinds of
horrors, but makes it difficult to appreciate just how
far the world has travelled since November 4, and how
much farther we have to travel.
If we have really
observed Obama we might have noticed that he is a man
who writes his own script and that he likes to stick to
that script, because he knows it makes sense. And he
understands too that the best leaders make the best
followers, because, more than most, they understand what
is to be done. And in Obama they have a leader who they
know, from personal experience, is not easily diverted
and not willing to surrender his mandate to anyone.
Barack Obama’s and
Hillary Clinton’s most significant triumph will, I
predict, be in Palestine, followed by Darfur, Cuba, and
Haiti. Just as the anti-communist Republican Richard
Nixon was peculiarly qualified to come to terms with
China, so, I believe will Hillary Clinton find it
possible to secure in the Middle East the peace that
Obama wants and the world thirsts for. Barack Obama’s
grandfather was tortured by the British in Kenya on
suspicion of being tied to Mau Mau. It will be
impossible for Obama, with his history, to condemn any
people or nation to be the chattels of any other nation.
Even in the highly
unlikely event that Mrs Clinton wished to design her own
foreign policy she would find it impossible in a Cabinet
that also includes Joseph Biden, Bill Richardson and
Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the UN. These people
know how the world works and they all understand as Bush
never did, that the United Sates needs, especially at
this juncture, to work with the world.
Great orchestras
often contain several maestros, but their pride is in
the music they collectively produce under a great
conductor. But the same orchestra can sound quite
different with another great conductor.
‘We are the change
we seek …’
Earlier this year I
wrote a piece for the University of South Africa’s
“African Renaissance Journal” prompted by Obama’s March
speech “Towards a more Perfect Union.” In that piece I analysed Obama’s reaction to the kitchen sink assaults
on his character, particularly the episode involving the
Rev Jeremiah Wright. I commented then that Obama had
moved
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… away from defending
himself to a defense of his country, with
all its faults, as a state which could be
made a more perfect union if its citizens
moved together to concentrate on the goals
that united them, rather than the grievances
that divided them. Neither blacks nor whites
had a monopoly on grievances against the
other, and it was time for each to
understand the roots of their grievances and
to use that understanding to create a more
perfect union.” |
I concluded by
commenting that ”Americans may at last be becoming more
interested in what unites, rather than what divides
them.”
At that time I was
counting no chickens; the nomination let alone the
election, were still months away.
As it turned out,
however, the speech was a tactical and strategic
masterstroke that, in my view, accomplished something
that even Martin Luther King could not have done, nor be
expected to have done. It ripped away the political
burkas behind which Americans were hiding from each
other, exposing them to each other and to the fact, as
King had prophesied, that the time would come when a
man’s worth would be judged by his character rather
than by the colour of his skin. George Bush and Dick
Cheney had a great deal to do with that epiphany.
History was changed
when Americans recognised, for the first time at last,
that there was no white or black America, no blue or red
America but possibly, and with Obama as their
singer-man, probably, hopefully, there could be a United
States of America
They began to
understand that they needed above all, a community
organiser who could restore their humanity and their
community; who could and would deal with their divisions
and their weaknesses as well as their strengths.
The rest is up to the people.
Copyright©2008
John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
John Maxwell of the University of the
West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999
single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to
build houses at Hope, the nation's oldest and best known
botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize in the
2000 Sandals Resort's annual Environmental Journalism
Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is also
the author of How to
Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and
Journalists. Jamaica, 2000.
posted 7 December
2008 * *
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The Bridge The Life and
Rise of Barack Obama
By David Remnick
A conversation with Gwen
Ifill of PBS
and author of
The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the
Age of Obama
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
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
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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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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