On this site, on August 14th, 1881, nothing happened. A brass plaque on my neighbor’s stone fireplace.
[Southern California] is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.
Michele and I went to L.A. to go museum shopping last weekend; it was our first trip since we went back East last fall. While we were on our trip back East – as everyone called the East Coast while I was growing up – we drove through and around the Delmarva Peninsula, stayed with Tom and Linda Melton in Dickeyville (Baltimore), and visited Harper’s Ferry. Three places where the past is still alive.
That presence of the past is, to my mind, other than the topography and weather – which, OK, are big deals – is the biggest difference between the East Coast and the West Coast. Harriet Tubman performed her first act of resistance at the Bucktown General Store in 1835. A slave tried to escape, and the overseer yelled at Tubman to stop him, which she didn’t. The Bucktown General Store is still there.
We stayed with Tom and Linda in Dickeyville, and it was almost like being on a movie set. Some of the buildings date back to the late 1700s, although most are originally from the 1800s. I say originally because many of them were rebuilt in the early 20th Century.
On our drive from Washington DC to Pittsburgh, we passed by farms that were there when John Brown was still alive, farms he must have passed on the way to Harper’s Ferry, where he played his part in ending slavery. Everything feels the same. The past is still alive.
L. A., where the oldest building – downtown, at least, the Bradbury Building, is known for being the location of the ending of Blade Runner – is not like that.
Julia Roberts lors du Festival de Cannes le 19 mai 2022. (Photo by Laurent Koffel/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
George Washington gave us our independence. Abraham Lincoln cemented our unity. Equally significant, Dr. Martin Luther King glorified America’s spirit! As our greatest spiritual leader, Dr. Martin Luther King more than deserves a national day of permanent recognition! Edwin Cooney
Part of me doesn’t think that Martin Luther King Day is a real holiday. It has always seemed like sort of a consultation prize given to African Americans in lieu of treating them as well as White People are treated.
The Reverand King was a powerful and consistent advocate for African American rights but was not celebrated in the White community for that. He was beaten and jailed for it. To quote Representative Ayanna Pressley, “Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history…He didn’t become an American hero until after he was dead and no longer a threat to White supremacy.”
The animosity against King wasn’t just in the South, it was also at the Federal Leval; the FBI wiretapped King and harassed him. This was not J. Eager Hoover going rogue; the wiretapping was done with the knowledge and permission of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms, hoping to record King’s extramarital activities. They wanted to discredit him. The FBI spread misinformation throughout the government as well as to journalists and church leaders, saying that King was a communist and a moral degenerate.
Reading all the accolades for King over the last couple of days, all this seems shocking. Still, the most shocking thing I’ve recently read about Martin Luther King Jr. is that he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, paid the hospital bills for Julia Robert’s birth. The backstory is charming and worth Googling.
What I like about the story is that it flatters everybody involved. That King was a nice guy as well as a powerful leader is worth remembering.
Surely, the most chilling part of the film is an audio-only clip: a terrorist calling home to tell his parents that he is in Israel and killing Jews — 10, he boasts, including a woman whose phone he is using. “Their blood is on my hands,” he cries, joyously. “Your son’s a hero.” Charles Lane, a Washington Post column writer, describes a collection of film clips made by Hamas agents and shown by the Israeli Embassy.
The Hamas killers who attacked Israeli unarmed men, women, children, and babies are cowards. Yes, they are also unbelievably nasty homicidal maniacs driven by hate and fear, but at their core, they are cowards. Their hate and anger are so strong, so pervasive, that it has oozed out and corroded them as human beings. Israel has released a series of clips made by the Hamas killers themselves, and it is ugly. They are ugly people who, somehow, think they are heroes because they killed helpless people. There must be a better word than disgusting when describing such inhumane behavior, but none comes to mind.
I like to think that I am a practical guy, not necessarily in my real life but in my giving advice to countries-that-didn’t-ask life; even though I am a liberal, I think that my solutions – answers? opinions? – for most of those, and our country’s problems are based on practicability rather than how liberal they are. In that vain, I think what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is wrong. Wrong because it will not solve the problem. When I say solve the problem, I am assuming that most – with most being the operative word here – Israelis want to live in peace, and I don’t think stealing land from the Palestinians for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and bombing the shit out Palestinians in Gaza will result in long-term peace.
I keep reading about the Israeli-Hamas War as if it were a real war. But it is not a war any more than the October 27, 2018, Pittsburgh synagogue slaughter was a shoot-out. On the first day, Hamas’ cowardly attack killed about 1,200 people and injured 6,900 others. Israel killed that many Palestinians in the first half an hour of their retaliation. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, as of December 30, 2023, the death toll in Gaza is 27,681 civilians, including bout 9,077 children.
When this is over, the majority of the survivors will be beaten into submission, but not all and not forever. A sizable number of survivors will join Hamas, or the next Hamas-like resistance movement, willing to kill and die for what they consider a just cause. The numbers that I see don’t paint a promising picture for Israel: there are about 6.8 million Jewish people living in Israel and 2.5 million Arabs – whatever that means – and 5.35 million self-identified Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank of what, for all practical purposes, is now greater Israel.
As I sit here staring at my computer screen, I realize that I have been here before, and I’ve written about this over and over again. (The Tragedy of Israel. Israel in the West Bank.) The difference, I guess, if there is any difference, is how the world is reacting. Increasingly, the world is acknowledging the deaths of Palestinians. Today’s Washington Post’s front page had an article that started, Settlers killed a Palestinian teen.Israeli forces didn’t stop it. A review of the deadliest settler attack in the West Bank since the war began shows how increasingly violent tactics have gone unpunished. Today’s Los Angeles Times front page says – asks? – Is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians a form of apartheid?… Video appears to show Israeli army shooting 3 Palestinians, killing 1, without provocation. Right now, the Israelis seem to be reacting to that by killing pro-Palestinian journalists who are acting as witnesses, still the world does seem to be changing.
That this can not be the way Israelis want to be seen by the world gives me some hope.
