ETHOS

I know it’s about a week old by now, but I thought it would be worth having in the ETHOS archives:

His name is Muntadar al-Zeidi and he is my hero.

Out with the old, in with the new is what they say I guess. Check out this long-ish sober (scary) assessment of what the new has to offer us from al-Jazeera English (yeah, al-Jazeera – contrary to popular belief they actually have some of the best coverage of U.S. politics and Middle East policy. Oh yeah, and they are also your one stop source for the latest Osama Bin Laden video).

The second part of the segment – a debate between Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford and some activist preacher – can be found here.

Over and out,

Eric

Editors Note: This is a review I did over the summer that was withheld due to a conflict of interests relating to the employment situation of one of our bloggers. I am publishing it now because it has been several months, and I doubt Dyson would give a shit about a scathing review of one of his books on a blog as irrelevant as this one. But, if you are reading this Dr. Rev. Mr. MC Dyson PhD (or whatever it is you call your bespectacled self), if you don’t like the harsh reviews, start writing better books. Translation: If you can’t stand the heat, get out the kitchen.

April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr’s Death and How it Changed America

Michael Eric Dyson

Basic Civitas Books, 2008

270 pages, $25

Review by Eric Augenbraun

I intended to write this review sooner, but my principles interfered; in a word, I refuse to pay for books that I expect to be worth far less than the cover price. So, given the fact that professor, ordained minister, and self-proclaimed activist/public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson’s latest waste of paper book, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr’s Death and How it Changed America, was checked out of the University of Pennsylvania’s library until about a week ago, I couldn’t get around to reading and commenting on it until now. Despite not paying a cent for this cute little mess—aside from Penn’s $50,000 tuition which includes library privileges (imagine that!)—after reading it, I still felt compelled to go back to the library and demand a refund of the time I had just wasted. But alas, the library has yet to invest in a time travel device—I can only urge them to look into it.

Many will recognize the date April 4th, 1968 as the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while standing on the balcony outside of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The year 2008 thus marks the 40th year since King’s tragic death. On this somber anniversary, Dyson’s deceptively short 270-page volume is an “effort to grapple with King’s death—in [Dyson’s] own mind, and in the life of the nation.” With ten chapters sandwiched between a short prologue and a lengthy afterword, this book is divided into three parts, each with a somewhat distinct area of inquiry. Part one explores how King understood his own mortality and dealt with the looming threat of his death as he rose to prominence in lockstep with the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Part two is an examination of the state of black America in the post-King, post-Civil Rights, post-Voting Rights Amendment years. Finally, part three is a look at black leadership since King’s death—namely, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Dyson’s book delivers very little that could be considered new or particularly insightful, and where it strays from the beaten path it arrives at several conceptual and methodological cul-de-sacs.

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By Eric Augenbraun

I will start by saying that from the very little I know of TV host Rachael Ray, I find her incredibly annoying and rather stupid, possessing the personality of a Jack Russell terrier or a similarly excitable small animal. I also know that my mother owns one of her misleadingly titled 30-minute meals cookbooks that contains not a single recipe that could possibly be prepared in 30 minutes or less. I get the impression that Ray’s audience (like that of most daytime talk show/cooking show hosts) is generally composed of middle-aged, middle-class, women of the white variety. So, given the demographics of her audience and her own dim-wittedness, I find it hard to believe that either Ray or those who follow her (or the vast majority of the American population for that matter) had even the slightest clue to the significance of the keffiyeh that she donned in a recent Dunkin’ Donuts ad.

That’s not a Dunkin’ Donuts Iced Mocha Latte she is holding, it’s a fully functional bomb!

Naturally, there was a backlash to the advertisement, eventually resulting in it being canned. Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin took a break from defending the internment of Japanese-American people during World War II to chime in: “The keffiyeh has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.” I guess one person’s “murderous Palestinian jihad” is another’s “struggle for national liberation against a brutal apartheid regime.” We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one Michelle. In any case, this situation has brought to the fore a few issues I have wanted to write about for a while now:

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By Eric Augenbraun

As I write this more than 23,000 people are dead and an estimated 37,000 are missing in the wake of Cyclone Nargis’ landfall over Burma (also known as the Union of Myanmar) on May 2^nd. Many expect the death toll to reach a staggering 100,000 by the final count. Just to put this in perspective, as a result of the September 11^th attacks and Hurricane Katrina 3,017 and 1,836 died respectively. I do not point this out to suggest that these two tragedies are in some way less significant than what has happened on the other side of the world, nor do I wish to let our government off of the hook for the unnecessary hell that Huricane Katrina wreaked and continues to wreak on the people of New Orleans—you know me, that is the last thing I want to do. I make this comparison merely to remind people that in the insulated media market that is the United States, it is easy to lose sight of the pain and suffering that goes on in the parts of the world that most people would be hard pressed to find on a map.

In case you slept through geography class…

So what can we learn from the devastation that resulted from this Cyclone and Hurricane Katrina?

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By Eric Augenbraun

Check out this Good Morning America interview with Hillary Clinton from Tuesday:

Clinton’s hard line on Iran shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone at this point, but I do find this nonsense about an attack on Israel rather disconcerting – meant only to stir up people’s fears and provide a pretext for actually beginning to have a discussion about OBLITERATING an entire country (for the record, Iran, contrary to popular belief, does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel does). As an aside, Obama too has made his intentions clear for Iran, and they don’t stray too far from Clinton’s path. I do think, though, that sometimes Clinton’s position as a female candidate competing against men for an office that has been held by nobody but men forces her to perform certain rituals of masculinity – hence, the tough talk about murdering 71 million people on a whim.

But obliterate is a REALLY strong word and I can only assume that a Clinton presidency will look something like this

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By Eric Augenbraun

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” -Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” -Barack Obama at a San Fransisco fundraiser, April 6, 2008

Can’t you see the resemblance?

By now, you would have to be living under a rock not to have heard the media backlash over Obama’s recent comments at a San Fransisco fundraising rally in which he ascribed the embrace of religion, guns, and bigotry among small town whites to their “bitterness” over being screwed by American capitalism over the last 25 years. While the media, HRC, and Old Man McCain have blasted him for being ‘elitist’ and ‘condescending’, as a self described Marxist I was more struck by the eery similarity between Obama’s statements and Karl Marx’s now (in)famous materialist analysis of religion. Of course, Obama added the nuance that people turn to guns, too, out of bitterness – though I can think of reasons other than bitterness that people might own guns.

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By Eric Augenbraun

“Why should I, as a progressive, vote for Obama?” I recently asked an Obama supporter desperately trying to compel me to change my party affiliation from Independent to Democrat. Of course, I had no intention of switching. I have heard all the arguments before and have yet to be persuaded.

“I serve as a blank screen…on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” -Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

“Well, Obama is the only candidate who has opposed the war in Iraq from the outset,” the Obamamaniac began.

True indeed! Though isn’t it convenient that he was also the only candidate who was not in the Congress in 2002 to vote on the war. This is, of course, beside the point. What the Obama man was trying to say was that his candidate is the true “anti-war” candidate. It has a certain Orwellian quality that in this country someone who has voted for every single war spending bill, has stated repeatedly that he would consider using nuclear force on Pakistan, has stated that he would crack down on Iran, has refused to commit to any plan to remove troops from Iraq by 2013, and has stated that he is in favor of increasing the size of the military by 100,000 troops can position himself as the anti-war candidate. Obama, like his party, is thoroughly committed to maintaining U.S. domination of Middle Eastern resources and politics. He may be against the way the war has been executed, but one must be a skilled in the art of intellectual contortion to believe he is at all “anti-war.” Meanwhile, more than 4,000 U.S. troops and likely over 1 million Iraqis have been killed over 5 years of this unjust occupation. The anti-war movement can’t repeat its mistake from 2004 and throw its support behind another pro-war candidate.

“Okay, but he supports universal healthcare,” said the campaigner, slightly flustered.

“Oh really? So he supports single payer healthcare?” I replied.

“Well, uh, no. Not exactly.”

No. In fact, Obama voted against the single payer health care bill HR676. Obama is not interested in challenging the healthcare and pharmaceutical corporations who make healthcare so unattainable for the more than 50 million without it and the service so poor for working and middle class people who have it. While he has said he wants to make healthcare more affordable, his plan for reform operates on the corporations’ terms. This is understandable as he tries to position himself as friendly to the corporate agenda and attempts to attract their support.

“Fine, but he is a better candidate than Hillary or McCain.” I could hear the first signs of desperation in his voice.

Alright, sure. My dog is a better candidate than McCain. As for Clinton, from what each candidate has revealed about their respective platforms, it’s hard to distinguish Obama’s positions from the largely party-line centrism advanced by Clinton. However I think Ralph Nader’s formulation says it best: “The problem with voting for the lesser of two evils is that at the end of the day you still have evil.”

“I just think it would be an historic change to finally have a black president. It’s a sign that there is hope for the future.”

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