Aaron Barnhart's Blog, page 5
January 25, 2018
Is DACA the new Japanese internment?
“Japanese internment was initiated by the California farm lobby,” writes Dr. Sarah Taber, a food scientist in the aquaponics industry. “Japanese farmers’ success came from having tight management skills, and that threatened their white neighbors. White farmers had a choice: level up their game, or play dirty.”
The head of the Salinas Valley vegetable growers’ association actually said, “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.”
...
January 24, 2018
Pay attention to the footnotes
More evidence that the movement made Martin, not the other way around, from reader and former newspaper colleague Paul Wenske:
“The reckoning with integration that began after World War II in the United States certainly found a voice in Martin Luther King, Jr. — but, as you point out, it was realized in dozens of other less conspicuous places and in less dramatic scenarios across the nation,” Paul writes.
“I recall as a kid in Torrance, Calif., in the 1950s my father causing a mild stir, cov...
January 23, 2018
The force behind ‘Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’
“I knew Joan Rivers, and while Midge is said to be based on her, I don’t see that as working,” writes Susan Silver, a comedy writer from the Norman Lear-MTM sitcom era, about the historical inspiration for the lead character in Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
The show, which we’re enjoying hugely, just picked up a couple of Golden Globes — worthless trophies in my view, but Amazon is now making the show available to non-Prime members, so that’s a win.
“The series tells the story of a 19...
January 22, 2018
Another president who was winning
Think this past year was a train wreck for a certain U.S. president? By any measure, the first year of Andrew Jackson’s administration was every bit as embarrassing.
“His most trusted advisors were bitterly divided; the whole government stood at a standstill. But after reviewing all of the evidence, exploring all of the charges, and hearing the testimony of witnesses, the president announced the conclusion that he hoped would place the ship of state back on course: Peggy Eaton, the wife of Se...
When government breaks and you don’t want to fix it
We have an ongoing crisis of faith in this country. It’s a crisis of faith in our institutions.
In poll after poll most Americans, often a vast majority of them, say they no longer trust government, corporations, organized religion, the news media, the sciences (including medicine), or just about any other institution that only a generation or two ago commanded the near total respect of We the People.
It’s a good time to be an “anti,” whether an anti-corporate crusader or anti-government libe...
Why we have no choice but to fix our broken government
We have an ongoing crisis of faith in this country. It’s a crisis of faith in our institutions.
In poll after poll most Americans, often a vast majority of them, say they no longer trust government, corporations, organized religion, the news media, the sciences (including medicine), or just about any other institution that only a generation or two ago commanded the near total respect of We the People.
It’s a good time to be an “anti,” whether an anti-corporate crusader or anti-government libe...
"The Force" and what happens when government institutions break
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We have an ongoing crisis of faith in this country. It’s a crisis of faith in our institutions.
In poll after poll most Americans, often a vast majority of them, say they no longer trust government, corporations, organized religion, the news media, the sciences (including medicine), or just about any other institution that only a generation or two ago commanded the near total respect of We the People.
It’s a good time to be an “anti,” whether an anti-corporate crusader or anti-government lib...
January 11, 2018
Why we must continually demythologize Martin Luther King Jr.
It is almost inconceivable to us today — more than six decades after he hesitatingly accepted the leadership of the group organizing the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott — that Martin Luther King, Jr., could ever have been an “ordinary and average man.”
And yet, as David J. Garrow’s landmark 1986 book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reminds us, the future icon of the civil rights movement was just one of thousands of everyday black...
“An ordinary and average man”: Why we must continually demythologize Martin Luther King Jr.
It is almost inconceivable to us today — more than six decades after he hesitatingly accepted the leadership of the group organizing the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott — that Martin Luther King, Jr., could ever have been an “ordinary and average man.”
And yet, as David J. Garrow’s landmark 1986 book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reminds us, the future icon of the civil rights movement was just one of thousands of everyday blac...
January 5, 2018
“Two Towns of Jasper” and the “invisible veil” between the races
Twenty years ago, three men with ties to white supremacist groups chained 49-year-old James Byrd Jr. to the back of a pickup truck. They dragged him for miles, strewing his remains along the backroads of Jasper, Texas.
It was a grisly crime that seemed to come out of a different era, when black men could be lynched with impunity.
But by 1998 times had changed. The suspects were rounded up by the white sheriff. They were arraigned by the white district attorney and put on trial. Their cases we...
