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Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

I think this time it will work...here is the article. Love, Joanie

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-racism-white-nationalism-republicans/2020/07/04/2b0aebe6-bbaf-11ea-80b9-40ece9a701dc_story.html

I might add that Trump has a long history of racism....for instance I don't know how anyone cannot recognize it when he said "<Mexicans are rapists."

and when he said in Charlottesville,  there are good people on both sides...really good people that are in the Ku Klux Klan march....and when he started the birther movement against Barach Obama, and when he and his father Fred refused to rent to blacks, etc....well, I guess there are those that will still defend him.

Jack Mallory

Glen, I'm confused. What does Llareta have to do with the Sussman baobab photo you referenced?

I had to excavate memory neurons to remember where I was in the summer of 76, Jay. I was on a little island in the mangrove swamps of Chiapas. Sounds better than being on the Mall! I'm not much of a fireworks kinda guy: ear plugs, two fans, sleeping meds last night.

Another tree species for you, Glen--Rhizophora mangle! Los manglares, in Spanish. Stilt rooted, adapted to brackish water, mayor barrier to erosion especially during hurricanes. They will be of major importance to low-lying coastal regions as sea levels rise. 
 

No need for me to do the homework for anyone really interested in Biden's record on race. Easily accessible in a google search. Similarly, uncountable Forum posts have provided info on Trump's bigotry. No need to claim deafness because one link failed to open. 

Helen Lambie (Goldstein)

That link Joanie provided opened fine for me, but then I wanted to read it. Maybe the internet is so smart it can tell when one really wants to read something or not. Before Joanie provided a second link for you, Nori, I made a copy of the article and saved it as a PDF, as it was rather long and didn't want to take up pages and pages of the Forum. If you can't open the second link please send me your email address and I will be happy to send you the PDF of the article. I know you were so disappointed not to be able to read it.

BTW Nori, I don't think the Washington Redskins letter was any funnier today than when it was written three years ago. MAybe the classmate who sent it to you can explain the humor.

Jack Mallory

Opened fine for me, too. Here's a brief excerpt from two African American scholars. I think they're real. 

I don't have the gift that Nora has, being able to identify "Real" vs. whatever she might call unreal Blacks. Could you help us out, here, Nora? Bolding this to get your attention, because I've asked for help with this kind of thing before, got no response.

Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who has studied civil rights and written about the history of black Republicans, said there is a clear pattern in Trump's behavior and rhetoric.

"Trump is pretty predictable with his racism and his racialized take on things," Wright Rigueur said. "Every once in a while the Trump administration and campaign have flashes of what look like sincere outreach efforts to various racial communities . . . But that's the part that's insincere, and he always circles back to his core, and it renders all of this other stuff around the economy and criminal justice reform completely invalid because there's no way of ignoring the central component of his campaign."

Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on race and politics, said Trump's latest outbursts are the culmination of his nearly decade-long effort to remake the GOP in his own image, going back to his racist "birther" attacks on Obama's credentials and love of country.

Trump's racism, she said, "is not subtle at all. Every step he takes, every comment about human beings, murders or killings, he can't hold back. Even as Mississippi and other parts of the country remove Confederate symbols, he goes in the opposite direction as hard as he can."

Jack Mallory

The President is very concerned about statues--the ones coming down, the ones he wants to put up.

Where is his interest in the systemic racism that is producing grossly disproportionate Covid 19 case numbers and deaths  among people of color? Why do we not hear him telling us about this issue and his plans to mitigate the damages occurring throughout the country he should be leading?

"Latino and African-American residents of the United States have been three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors, according to the new data, which provides detailed characteristics of 640,000 infections detected in nearly 1,000 U.S. counties. And Black and Latino people have been nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as white people, the data shows."

"Experts point to circumstances that have made Black and Latino people more likely than white people to be exposed to the virus: Many of them have front-line jobs that keep them from working at home; rely on public transportation; or live in cramped apartments or multigenerational homes. 

“You literally can’t isolate with one bathroom,” said Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II, who leads Michigan’s task force on coronavirus racial disparities."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americans-cdc-data.html?referringSource=articleShare
 

People in this country have got problems that aren't going to be resolved by a statue of Davy Crockett. 

Jay Shackford

Glen -- Watching the fireworks from the roof of the Kennedy Center -- cool, very cool. The view must have been awesome.   Did you guys go down for the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976?  Bests....Jay 

Glen Hirose

Jay,

No, we did not start this 4th of July tradition at the Kennedy Center till 1984. However my company did the exhibition of the 1776-1976 Presidential gifts from around the world at Union Station... It was a nightmare for me and the reason I am now totally gray.

     BTW my platoon sgt. Terry McCaffery a gifted graphic designer created this 1976 stamp.

Oops,

Sorry Jack; I had intended to credit Rachel Sussman for her image, and inadvertently named the wrong plant. The road to hell is paved with "Good intentions".

    One of the desserts I expect to see when I get there.

Jack Mallory

Memory lanes! Nora's Haitians with machetes, where was I in 1976 . . . 

Machetes--or whatever the local equivalents--are everywhere in rural parts of the world. In Panama in the 8th Special Forces I produced a sort of farmer's almanac--​La Guía del Campesino--full of veiled warnings about the evils of socialism and Cubans and designed to be handed out to peasants throughout Latin America. One piece of advice it contained was an admonishment NOT to take your machete when you went drinking on the weekend! 

Doing archaeology in Mexico and Honduras we hired local folks as guides in the jungle and as workmen on our excavations. Every one was as likely to have a machete as they were to have a hat. Used to clear brush, kill snakes, open a coke, peel an orange, whittle a toothpick. Sort of Swiss Army Machetes.

Campesinos with scarred ankles from machete accidents weren't uncommon. Every once in awhile, a guy missing a foot but with a great story to tell.
 

Chiapas archaeological survey, late 70s or early 80s. My machete over my left shoulder. Workman with his machete in right hand, sheath over his shoulder. Steve wasn't much of a machete kind of guy (Long Islanders don't get much chance to use them), but Andrea (archaeologist's trademark Brunton compass on her belt) could swing a machete as well as I could. Ah, archaeology field season romances! Still a good friend.

Andrea with a handful of pot sherds, and the ubiquitous machete.

Machetes--maybe that's why I have right-shoulder rotator cuff problems! 

Glen Hirose

Jack,

Sherds? not Seeds?

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Hi everyone, here is an article by E.J. Dionne that explains that all Trump has left is a culture war...how the sad the situation is. Love, Joanie

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-vicious-culture-war-is-all-trump-has-left/2020/07/05/4ca0986c-bca1-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html

Jack Mallory

Sherds, Glen. Best place to find them is a farmer's field, where plowing brings them to the surface, we can date the site from the pottery or the stone tools. When walking I still catch myself staring at the ground much of the time!

*******

Good E.J. Dionne article, Joanie. I don't understand when the WaPo paywall is going to let me through, but this time it did. Yes, when all else fails turn to the culture wars by slandering your critics in the way most likely to make your base drool.

Reading Mayday 1971 reminds me of the similarities between Dick and Donnie. "Goddamit these people are thugs, vandals, terrorists . . . dope addicts . . .“ That's Dick, describing protestors. ". . . roving gangs of wise guys, anarchists & looters . . .” That's Donnie, describing protestors. Mayday's author only mentions Trump once, parenthetically. But for me Trump is a constant presence as I recall Nixon's similar bigotry and paranoid conspiracy fears that fueled his betrayal of the Constitution.

********

I see Bone Spurs tells us that 99% of Covid cases are "totally harmless."  That's like saying that serving in Vietnam was totally safe because only 1% of our troops were killed or wounded. And he's ignoring the 15% or more of Covid patients that end up hospitalized, many with long-term recovery issues. And, of course, he's also ignoring the great differences in Covid's impact on people of color. 

Glen Hirose

    Never leaned to speak Havetos, but could do shots of checha with the best of them...

Jack Mallory

I was an archaeologist before it was hip, Glen. And before the whippersnappers turned it into archeologist. Is nothing sacred?

Joan Ruggles (Young)

While we're all reminicing on July 4th 1976, here's my memory. 

It was the 3rd of July 1976. I was living in Philadelphia. Three friends and I had gone out to dinner and decided to walk over to Independence Hall. We arrived and it was deserted. As we stood there looking up at the building, the clock struck midnight. It was now July 4th 1976 exactly 200 years since the original Independence day on this very spot. We all got chills. The door was open so we walked inside Independence Hall and there was a lone African American park ranger on duty. He began to tell us the story of Independence Hall. It was just the four of us and him. Later we marveled that more than likely, the park ranger’s ancestors had been in slavery 200 years earlier and what an honor it was to be hearing the story from him on that particular day.

Speaking of being an archaeologist before it was cool. I was a free lance photographer beore it was cool and as a woman, I was one of very few women photgraphers in Philadelphia at the time. Then along came the film Blowup and everybody got themselves a 35mm camera and everybody was a photographer. 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Jack Mallory

Great Fourth of July story, Joan. At least they didn't change the way photography is spelled. And then the world went digital!

*******
Good article on history and memorials in the New Yorker.

"The statues really need to go, first of all. And they’re going. It’s a symbolic act, but an important symbol. And the idea that the statues are about history or heritage is ridiculous. We don’t memorialize every piece of our heritage. We pick out what we want people to remember. Monuments are visible values. They portray the men and women who embodied the values that we want our community to share, that we want our children to learn. So they have to go. And hopefully that process should be a democratic and public one. They don’t all need to go into the harbor. Contextualization can be an option in some cases. It really needs to be decided case by case. But we have to acknowledge that we’re not upholding history, we’re upholding values, and those are not the values that we want in the twenty-first century."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-confront-a-racist-national-history

Nora Skinker (Morton)

Jack Mallory

Tucker Carlson joins Trump's attacks on critics by describing Tammy Duckworth and other Democratic leaders as people who "actually hate America."

Carlson is more specific in calling Duckworth a "deeply silly and unimpressive person." 

Not sinking to the depths of profanity that I would resort to, the silly and unimpressive Senator Duckworth invited Carlson to "walk a mile in my legs and then tell me I don't love America."

Do those Trump supporters who are decent human beings feel like they should wear masks to protect themselves from human scum (to borrow Trump's words) particles given off by supporters like Carlson?

Attacks on POWs in 2015, wounded veterans in 2020.  Making America Great Again.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tammy-duckworth-blasts-tucker-carlson-patriotism-2020-7

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Nora Skinker (Morton)

 Is that the same Tammy Duckworth who said just last week that she'd block more than 1000 military promotions unless & until Vindmann was granted a promotion? Her reasoning had something to do with "no Commander In Chief should meddle in military affairs"? Hmm. Are we to assume it's ok for a Senator to meddle? 
  Or am I a bad person for pointing out her hypocrisy since she was badly wounded for bravely serving our country? If she thinks it troublesome to be criticized, she really ought to get out of politics. 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Good for Tammy Duckworth standing up for Colonol Vindman, who did nothing wrong but was subpoenaed to testify about what he knew. For that he is being punished by Trump. If he is not promoted to Colonel, it would in effect end his military career...this is a travesty. Duckworth holding up the promotions would not be permanent but make it more time consuming to process them...she is taking a stand for this travesty going on with the treatment of Colonel Vindman by Trump. Love, Joanie

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/02/886896695/senator-puts-rare-hold-on-military-promotions-over-ousted-army-officer

Nora Skinker (Morton)

Yes. Good for her. Not so good for the 1000 others who earned promotions, however. It's hypocritical meddling ..when all she had to do was call an investigation into Trump's decision to thwart Vindman's impending promotion IF HE EVER DID such a thing, which he hasn't. Her statement feeds the impeachment emotions still swirling among Dems.  
That might be good politically but, if she winds up on the ticket, she loses 1000 votes come November. That there is politics! 

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Here's another very good article. Love, Joanie

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/888044443/senator-waiting-for-white-house-promise-not-to-block-promotion-of-impeachment-wi

Glen Hirose

I have been watching golf for years, but it just lacks that little touch of violence a good bench clearing brawl in Baseball, Football, or Hockey give each of those sports. 

   How much more exciting would Golf be if honors at each tee were determined by the golfer whose knee hits the ground first?