Slavery, Property, and Miscegenation

In 1662, the Virginia legislature passed a law that read, "Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother." Seems otherwise innocuous, but this statute reversed English common law under which the status of the child frollowed that of the father.

The implications were huge. It meant that slave owners could impregnate as many slave women as they wanted secure in the knowledge that the children that resulted would become their property, increasing their wealth and slave population. This provided a huge incentive for white men to sleep with their slave women.

This intertwined sex and race and led to the powerful taboo of black men marrying or even looking at a white woman. The long-term result of this taboo was the epidemic of the lynching of black men.

Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson

KISS

"There's no doubt in my mind as a soldier that part of the responsibility for Abu Ghraib and for Afghanistan belongs with the secretary of defense and the president of the United States. There's an old aphorism: Keep it simple, stupid. KISS is the acronym. You always have personalities in uniform--I had them in Vietnam--who will take advantage of any ambiguity, any lack of clarification in the rules of engagement, and kill people, or whatever his particular psyche is liable to do. You don't have rules for your good people. You have rules for that five or six percent of your combat unit that are going to be weird. You need those people, because sometimes they're your best killers. But you need the rules. And when you make any kind of changes in them, any relaxation or even a hint of it, you're opening Pandora's box. And I fault Gonzalez, the president, the vice-president, the secretary of defense, the chain of command, Myers, Abizaid, Sanchez, the whole bunch of the them."

An administration official who had served in Vietnam explaining Abu Ghraib. Quoted by George Packer in The Assassin's Gate.

Hiatus

Well, after a substantial hiatus caused by the addition of major new responsibilities at work, it’s time to get back in the saddle, to use a Bushism. I have been reading as much as possible regarding the debacle in Iraq, and there are several really interesting and enlightening books that have been published in the last few months. I’m well into several.

The best from the perspective of what went wrong in Baghdad as far as the civil authorities is George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate. Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker — along with the Atlantic must reading, writes well. Clearly the Bush administration was less interested in making sure things went well than in regarding loyalists. Bush et al just assumed everything would turn out well and if left alone, much like the Katrina disaster, would sort of fix itself. I mean, how hard can government be? There are numerous examples of bureaucrats with expert knowledge in civil affairs being replaced by someone with no experience, but who thought “right” on abortion or stem cell research, or who was a contributor. Even the Iraqis placed in power, were those who had been in exile for many years and had little first-hand knowledge of conditions in the country. They also lacked the respect of their compatriots. In the meantime they hunkered down in the Green Zone, slurping down martinis, eating pork (the Americans at least) and isolating themselves from the horror just outside the concrete barriers. It’s not a pretty picture.

Cobra II:The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor tells the story from the military perspective. Again, a case of wishful thinking from the Bush Cabinet. [ Speaking of his Cabinet, I happened to hear Elaine Chao, current Secretary of Labor, speak at a recent EEO conference, and she is living on another planet — something probably true of all of them. ]

I must say that while reading Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, I continue to be struck by the terminology and similarities in the way our government massages the language. In 1967 and 1968 Johson and McNamara (he even looks like Rumsfeld) were discussing the problems caused by the “insurgency” and the “political instability” of the country. Not to mention that we now measure success by the number of bodies we count.

The Blog | Marty Kaplan: How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine | The Huffington Post

The Blog | Marty Kaplan: How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine | The Huffington Post

Everyone should watch this. Frightening. Must be how the Republicans won in Ohio where Diebold owner promised a Republican victory.

George Lakoff on Democratic Party Renewal

Tobin Harshaw reviewed two books (New York Times Book Review, July 23, 2006) that prescribe remedies for the Democratic party, which seems to be floundering and unable to decide just what to do. One of the books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea by George Lakoff seemed the most interesting. He proposes that right-wing conservatives have a very different definition of freedom than progressives and liberals and that makes dialog difficult. He uses a metaphor to describe the difference: progressive thought "stems from the 'nurturant parent family' model (based on 'empathy and responsibility), while the conservative outlook is shaped by the 'strict father family' model (in which the 'moral authority. . . of the father must not be seriously challenged')."

Interesting metaphor.