Friday Open Thread ~ "What are you reading?" edition. Volume 7

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Linda Sarsour is an organizer and activist who has been on the frontlines of every major battle against creeping fascism, the Trump administration, state violence, and attacks on all marginalized communities. Along with Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Bob Bland, she organized the Women's March in Washington D.C. on January 21, 2017, the largest protest in American history. Since then, she has been fighting the administration on it's Muslim ban, on criminal justice reform, along with her continued advocacy for Arab and Muslim Americans and for the Palestinian people.

She joins Michael discuss the urgent need to remove Trump from office, how Democrats should (and should not) bring out Muslim and Arab voters in key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Florida, and her decision to move to Louisville, Kentucky in the middle of a pandemic to fight for justice for Breonna Taylor.

[video:https://youtu.be/FWbpBrz9ogU]

[video:https://youtu.be/BxNYSkfxDl8]

The entire world became acquainted with the Palestinian-American-Muslim activist for racial justice and civil rights when she co-organized the Jan. 21, 2017 Women’s March on Washington, the day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Her inspiring speech urged marchers to find causes in their local communities to be a part of. “We have no choice,” she said. “We can no longer be complacent in this country. We can't be apathetic. We cannot stay unengaged.”

Sarsour’s riveting memoir, We are Not Here to Be Bystanders, traces how she first learned this lesson, watching her immigrant father treat all his diverse customers like family in his small market in Crown Heights. She also witnessed injustice in her high school as police hauled away scuffling black students and ignored similar infractions by white students.

Sarsour described the horrible 9/11 attacks, and the aftermath for her community: “In a matter of weeks, we all had been transformed from ordinary, everyday New Yorkers who happened to worship as Muslims to a suspect class.” Unmarked cars watched mosques and Muslim men started disappearing, rounded up for questioning by authorities. Sarsour began working for the Arab American Association of New York, locating and advocating for the missing men. She translated for the Muslim men over the age of 16, from 25 countries (all but one Muslim-majority), who were forced to check in with the National Security Entry-Exit Registry System (NSEERS) or face deportation. 

“I understood my place perfectly now. In the shadow of unimaginable tragedy, and the fear and suspicion of Muslims that had followed in its wake, a new flame was ignited inside me, and is burning still.”

Sarsour also began to speak out for the black and brown men killed every day in acts that are never called terror if the shooter is a white man. The recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man jogging on a residential street near his home in Georgia, brings home Sarsour’s message that it is the obligation of all Americans to be outraged at every shooting and insist that “Black Lives Matter.”

Sarsour recounts the highs of her advocacy work, including looking out at the Women’s March and seeing the sea of Shepard Fairey posters of the Muslim woman in an American-flag hijab with the message “We the people are greater than fear.” She recalled, “My skin tingled at the sight of her, because in my country, on this day, a Muslim woman in a hijab had become a potent symbol of American freedom.” Sarsour truly believed that “together we would change the world.”

Then came the backlash, as “far-right Islamophobes” claimed Sarsour was a radical anti-Semitic terrorist in order, she said, to “neutralize any influence I might have gained through my visibility as a co-chair of the Women’s March...and to make me so radioactive that no one would have anything to do with me.” In fact, all the constituencies she’d worked with encircled and protected her, raising her national profile. Ultimately the smear campaign failed and, in fact, Sarsour was asked to be a campaign surrogate for Jewish presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

The Women’s March, she is proud to say, “helped to harness the collective power of women to elect public servants who were guided by the values that seven million people across the globe had marched for two years before.” As a result there was “an unprecedented number of women and people of color elected on Nov. 6, 2018.”

This is a book to encourage every person fighting for justice who may be facing threats, slander and alternative facts. In fact, this book should be in every public library and required reading in schools to ensure that no one is here on earth today to be bystanders.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP4nJMgqjqw]

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enhydra lutris's picture

and her book. Sometimes one can donate a copy of a book such as this to one's local library, but usually, at least here, it winds up being sold at the annual book sale to help fund the place. An alternative is to write a dedication in it "to whomever finds" it to read it and then pass it on by leaving it in some public place, like a coffee shop, bus or light rail seat, etc. One can actually write such an inscription inside and also put it on a post-it-note on the outside.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

I just finished Black Noon: The Year they Stopped the the Indy 500 by Art Garner.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18404192-black-noon

I'm from Indianapolis and I went to the 500 with him for years. In fact, the 1964 race was the first one he attended. The short version of the story is two drivers died in a fiery crash on lap one, but there were a whole host of things leading up to that moment. It was kind of a perfect storm of factors that ended terribly.

'64 was also a transitional year with the rear engine style of car running for the first time which would change the race forever and the last win for the old front engine style. This was also seen the beginning of the track's golden years and there's a lot of changing of the guard kind of stuff going on at the same time.

Obviously, this is probably going to be a tough read if you don't care for racing. As someone who has had this ingrained into me since a kid, I've always been fascinated with this period and I knew about the accident but knowing the whole story gives it so much depth.

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Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

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snoopydawg's picture

They should impeach him. Putting together a dossier on Biden is bad enough, but in giving it to only Republican senators, he’s acting as an agent of the GOP, but using the powers of the State Department.

Didn't Hillary's campaign create a dossier on Trump and then give it to the FBI to investigate him? Why yes they did and then they did and they not only lied about it as well as other things to get their warrants to wiretap Carter Page who was an CIA source, but then used the warrants to wiretap every person in Trump's campaign. The ignorance in this comment is unbelievable.

But then many there are absolutely giddy over the Lincoln Project created by Bush era neocons that pushed for the Iraq war and the other regime change resource wars in the Middle East. Today lots of Bush era military members have come out supporting Biden and was met with cheers.

I saw a tweet how the republicans are more welcome in the democratic party than the people who were hugely responsible for Obama's presidency. Obama kept Bush's secretary of state Robert Gates as his SOS and wasn't hammered for it. That should have been their 1st clue that Obama was not going to be any different than Bush on foreign policy.

This guy was listed in the diary on the ex Bush era repubs and I saw not one person upset by any of them. Including Michael Hayden.

And now William Hague.

Arch-Conservative warmonger William Hague endorses Joe Biden for US president. Is anyone surprised?

Sitting, of course, in the House of Lords, he's forever opining from that dungheap about events in other people's countries, quite unabashed about his less-than-glorious period as leader of the Conservative opposition (one of the few who never became prime minister) and a disastrous spell as Britain's foreign secretary.
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Caitlin Johnstone: The modern US war machine kills more like a python than a tiger Caitlin Johnstone: The modern US war machine kills more like a python than a tiger

Hague likes to kick around Johnny Foreigner, usually the dusky ones and, crucial this, when they are not in much of a position to defend themselves.

But this time he has taken the unusual step –for a Tory grandee– of launching a bit of foreign interference in the upcoming American elections.

Even more surprisingly –for a Tory grandee– Lord Hague has awarded the much coveted Hague endorsement to... Joe Biden, the Democratic Party challenger to Donald Trump.

I can think of no other time in history when such a senior Conservative has endorsed any presidential candidate openly, and certainly not a Democrat...

Trump has tuned up the violence in the 7 wars that he inherited from Obama/Biden, but he has stopped trying to remove Assad from Syria. He has put murderous sanctions on the country as well as on Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries which is still a war crime. I am curious what all the republicans that endorsed Biden over Trump want Biden to do on foreign policy? Are we going after Russia or pivot to China which Trump is hassling on a daily bases.

Either way we are going to see our murderous US hegemony continue no matter who wins. The anti war movement that went to sleep during O's tenure are still sleeping during Trump's. Not that they were able to do much about our wars anyway, but it at least kept them in people's minds. We see the daily total of US deaths from COVID, but we rarely see how many people over the pond are dying from our bombs or from our sanctions. Last number I saw was 40,000 Venezuelans that have died from sanctions.

Any ex pats want to adopt Charlie and me so we can escape this country?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

TheOtherMaven's picture

and I'll tell you why.

I'm not going to be reading the Green Lantern 80th Anniversary 100 Page Special - not although, but because I'm a longtime diehard fan of the original Golden Age Green Lantern.

DC first messed with the concept a few years ago, in an ultimately-failed alternate universe reinvention of the Justice Society, where they were on another planet in another dimension (hence the title "Earth-2", in homage to the Silver Age crossovers with the JLA). Since everyone was all new and all different, they could and did play fast and loose with established history - Wonder Woman was the first "superhero", so all "superheroes" were instead called "Wonders"; Jay was dumped by Joan in the first issue and never got her back; PowerGirl had been Supergirl and Huntress Robin(! - and yes she was the daughter of Batman and Catwoman); there was no Hawkman (never had been one) and only a Hawkgirl; the original Mr. Terrific was a villain; and Alan Scott was gay. He had a boyfriend, they were going to be married, they went on a train trip - and if you know the original origin story, you know the rest. But that was the last time his sexual orientation mattered....

Well, NuEarth-2 came to a succession of bad ends, until the survivors were finally able to create their own "happily ever after".

So now, after all the recent revamping and revising and tweaking with time and reversing it again, DC in its Infinite Wisdom (snark!) has decided to make the original Green Lantern have been gay all along.

Effectively, this erases his 80-year history and replaces it with a blank void. As invented by Martin Nodell and Bill Finger, with some assists from editor Sheldon Mayer, Alan Scott was not only standard-model straight, he was an outright horndog. He met Irene Miler in his third story, helped her out of a jam, and ended the story with an explicit, blatant pass! They became coworkers, and deeply interested in each other, and he kissed her on several occasions - both as Green Lantern and in his "secret identity" (which probably tipped her off, but she never let on). There was at least one instance, at the end of a particularly long and strange adventure (Green Lantern #2, 1942) when they were strongly implied to have gone farther than that - Doiby Dickles (GL's comical sidekick) was standing guard, pointedly not watching them, and wishing he had someone besides his faithful taxicab "Goitrude". But even though he had a main interest, and even more so after the relationship faded away, Alan still had an eye for a pretty girl, even if she was a costumed villainess (Molly Maynne, aka The Harlequin, and numerous others who got at least a brief ogle). He was married twice (the first time, although brief, resulted in twins Jennie-Lynn "Jade" Hayden and Todd "Obsidian" Rice, whose existence Alan knew nothing about until they were grown), the second time, when they were both older and wiser, to Molly Maynne. Molly was prominently featured in stories in Green Lantern Corps Quarterly and the aborted Straziewski-Parobeck 1992 Justice Society of America run (10 issues, and the zine was canceled before the first issue came out!), in which it was shown that she and Alan were very deeply and passionately in love.

While it's true that DC has done numerous "soft" reboots on its universe since then, some things remained constant...until now.

So what's wrong with what they have done?

1. They picked the third-LEAST-appropriate oldtime JSA member to do it to (couldn't possibly have done it to Hawkman, with his permanent attachment to and partnership with Hawkgirl; couldn't believably have done it to Jay, who's been happily and solidly married to Joan since the late 1940s).

2. It reinforces the NeoPuritan belief that any and all personal relationships between adults of similar age MUST be based on SEX SEX SEX - they can't just be friends, or pals, or partners, they HAVE TO be sharing a bed! Even, or especially, if they're the same gender!

3. There was a much stronger candidate all along, not as prominent, but with at least as much history - and as long as they were playing fast and loose with continuity, they could have fixed his. Charles McNider, the original Dr. Mid-Nite. Fan speculations have long swirled about him, fueled by his peculiar relationship (or lack of it) with his pretty nurse-assistant Myra Mason (he frequently tossed verbal barbs at her, but never ever kissed her) - by an obscure remark by Roy Thomas, whose meaning even he has long forgotten - and perhaps most of all by his extreme reaction to Brain Wave's psychological torture in All-Star #33. Hawkman, Green Lantern, and Flash all went amusingly delusional (ditzy Johnny Thunder took it all in stride, and wound up saving the day), but Mid-Nite reached such depths of despair that he broke down and wept, believing himself a carrier of death and destruction. Yes, he supposedly was killed off in Zero Hour nearly twenty years ago - but since this is supposed to be a reconfigured "new continuity", did Zero Hour still happen? If it did, was he still a victim of it?

It has been reported, and I'm inclined to believe it, that this was Dan DiDio's final "Fuck You!" to JSA fans, even after being forced out as Editor-in-Chief at DC. (The Justice Society has not been treated well by DC Editorial since 1951...to put it very mildly.)

I've seen just enough of the 80th Anniversary Special to say that, in the words of "Linkara", "This! Comic! Sucks!" And I have tried to tell you why.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

Pluto's Republic's picture

@TheOtherMaven

...I've ever seen from you.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
TheOtherMaven's picture

@Pluto's Republic @Pluto's Republic

What graveled me most about the whole thing was Point #2. DC wrenched the opening scenes of the *very first* Green Lantern story out of context, turned them inside out and upside down, and used their deformations as an excuse to erase or radically rewrite every other Alan Scott/Green Lantern story ever written.

All because, in the Post-Modern view, two guys cannot just be friends or partners - if they share ANY kind of emotional connection, they MUST be gay lovers. Beee Beee Beee Beee Beee

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

Thanks for the front line fighters vid. Go front line. solidarity fist

I am reading Frame-up by Curt Gentry, 1967. The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. Page 194, the end of a prepared speech by Tom Mooney and the response from my grandfather the judge:

"I am under sentence of death. Whatever may be the legal equivocation, the crime of which I have actually been convicted is not that of having thrown a bomb in to a throng of innocent people... but that of having striven with what strength I had for the alleviation of industrial wrongs that labor has suffered, and the establishment of the rights which naturally belong to labor. I do not believe - I cannot believe - that because I have exercised the simple privilege of a human being I must meet death on the gallows. The fury engendered by industrial strife may defeat justice in a given locality, but so deeply imbedded in the hearts of the people is the desire for justice that it must inevitably find expression in a court of review. In that faith I am content."

Judge Griffin didn't let him deliver it. The occasion was difficult enough for Griffin already, as it was the first time he had been called upon to sentence a man to death.

"It is the judgment of the court and the sentence of the law in this case that you, Thomas J. Mooney, be delivered by the Sheriff of the City and County of San Francisco to the warden of the State Prison at San Quentin to be by him and put to death on the 17th of May, 1917, in the manner provided by the law of the State of California."

Griffin had dispensed with the traditional wording which ended "that you be hanged by the neck until death, and may God have mercy on your soul."

I never met my maternal grandpa, and nobody in my family ever mentioned one word about The Mooney Billings case that I can remember, perhaps they were too ashamed. He had to sentence Mooney to death twice, even after he knew it was a frame-up. I still have Oxman's statement on my bookshelf, it is over a hundred years old but holding up well. Good paper. Big lies preserve well.

The other book is The Mooney Case by Richard H. Frost, Stanford University Press 1968. Chapter Twelve gets to the trial, and so introduces the judge.

Judge Franklin A. Griffin presided at Mooney's trial. Griffin's background was Progressive. As a young lawyer in Sacramento he had worked with Hiram Johnson, had moved with him to San Francisco, and campaigned for him in 1910. After Johnson's election he became his executive secretary. A member of the Native Sons of the Golden West, a society of native-born Californians, Griffin once tried to have a Grand Parlor of that organization endorse the Johnson administration, but the proposal was howled down as an "unprecedented attempt to foist politics on a nonpolitical and highly respected organization." *

* Martinez, Contra Costa Gazzette, April 25, 1914. The Native Sons of the Golden West, traditionally concerned about California pioneer history, was in fact influential in California politcis in the 1910s as an organization anxious to keep the state a "White Man's Paradise."

griffincard.jpg

So grandpa was a mad racist too. Thanks goodness I did not inheret those genes, but the Progressive genes I think I definitely got those defective strands. Heh.

I need some funky Pigmeat now. Have a kickin' weekend y'all. Hopefully otc is bbqing on the porch chilling after the Laura mess. What next? Think good thoughts. PEACE BROTHER

Pigmeat Markham - Here Comes The Judge + The Trial - 1968
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvMBxlu62c0 width:420]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mooney
Tom Mooney
Tom Mooney as a young socialist, 1910

No justice? No peace.

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