The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on July 01, 2013, 09:41:26 am ---My "duty articles" are the ones I never quite get around to. Finally, when I weed through a stack of old issues, I rip out the duty articles and staple them and keep them in a pile and still never get around to them. If all goes well, by the time I go through the pile again there'll be a new president in office, the issues will have changed or been resolved, and I can throw the duty article into the recycling.
--- End quote ---
;D
serious crayons:
The Jill Lepore piece in the July 8/15 issue is another gem. She alternates between accounts of her mother's life, her own, and that of Jane Franklin, Ben's sister, to suggest ideas about how women's family responsibilities, historically, have constrained their lives and limited their potential achievements.
I also started reading the one about voting rights in the South and the one about an epidemic of self-immolation in Tibet. Both important subjects, both with interesting openings, but both have gradually wandered into duty-article territory. I haven't quite given up on them, though.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on July 11, 2013, 08:43:56 am ---The Jill Lepore piece in the July 8/15 issue is another gem. She alternates between accounts of her mother's life, her own, and that of Jane Franklin, Ben's sister, to suggest ideas about how women's family responsibilities, historically, have constrained their lives and limited their potential achievements.
I also started reading the one about voting rights in the South and the one about an epidemic of self-immolation in Tibet. Both important subjects, both with interesting openings, but both have gradually wandered into duty-article territory. I haven't quite given up on them, though.
--- End quote ---
Jill Lepore is always a good read.
The voting rights article was not a duty article for me, but for some reason right now it was very depressing to be reminded of the things that were done within my own lifetime by Americans down South just to prevent other Americans from exercising their right to vote. :(
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on July 11, 2013, 09:16:20 am ---The voting rights article was not a duty article for me, but for some reason right now it was very depressing to be reminded of the things that were done within my own lifetime by Americans down South just to prevent other Americans from exercising their right to vote. :(
--- End quote ---
Depressing and shocking. Even though I've watched Eyes on the Prize, and heard about those days time and time again, every new account -- and this piece includes a number of incidents I hadn't heard about before -- is sort of freshly astonishing. What racists got away with back then. How could people -- I don't mean just racist murderers, but the police and judges and juries that ignored or acquitted them -- live with themselves?
And I certainly didn't realize how blithe the Kennedy Administration was about the situation until it became internationally awkward. I just assumed, or felt I had been told, that the Kennedy Administration considered civil rights a moral priority.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on July 11, 2013, 09:37:37 am ---Depressing and shocking. Even though I've watched Eyes on the Prize, and heard about those days time and time again, every new account -- and this piece includes a number of incidents I hadn't heard about before -- is sort of freshly astonishing.
--- End quote ---
I can't say why, but as I was reading this I kept thinking things like, "Wait, I was 6 when that happened," or, "Wait, I was 7 that year." This isn't "history," this is "current events"--"current" to my own lifetime.
--- Quote ---What racists got away with back then. How could people -- I don't mean just racist murderers, but the police and judges and juries that ignored or acquitted them -- live with themselves?
--- End quote ---
Got me. Another thing I was thinking as I read it was that these people must have been operating from some very deep-seated fear--fear of what might happen if they lost control because they knew that in so many places they were in the minority.
--- Quote ---And I certainly didn't realize how blithe the Kennedy Administration was about the situation until it became internationally awkward. I just assumed, or felt I had been told, that the Kennedy Administration considered civil rights a moral priority.
--- End quote ---
Me, too. I guess they did once it became internationally awkward. :-\
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