James Wagner

Maureen Dowd’s just about had it with affirmative action!

Justice Thomas’s dissent in the 5-4 decision preserving affirmative action in university admissions has persuaded me that affirmative action is not the way to go.
The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received.
It’s poignant, really. It makes him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race.

She reminds herself that

. . . he got into Yale Law School and got picked for the Supreme Court thanks to his race.
. . . .
He is at the pinnacle, an African-American who succeeded in getting past the Anita Hill sexual harassment scandal by playing the race card, calling the hearing “a high-tech lynching,” and who got a $1.5 million advance to write his African-American Horatio Alger story, “From Pin Point to Points After.”

Dowd is further disgusted by the affirmative action program which brought us George Bush,

the Yale legacy who also disdains affirmative action, is playing affirmative action politics in the preliminary vetting of a prospective Supreme Court nominee, Alberto Gonzales. No doubt Bush 43 will call Mr. Gonzales the best qualified man for the job, rather than the one best qualified to help harvest the 2004 Hispanic vote. [Bush 41 nominated Thomas with the preposterous claim that he was “the best qualified” man for the job.]
President Bush and Justice Thomas have brought me around. I don’t want affirmative action. I want whatever they got.

Something’s fucked-up about the way we depend upon the narrowly-argued politically-subjective legal-precedent search exercises of nine lifetime appointees (arbitrary lifespans, arbitrary appointments) in order to advance (or, in recent years much more likely, retreat) on social issues.
Other nations normally use a legislative reponse to meet changes in the demands and needs of an enlightened, maturing (maybe that’s the problem) population, but our own legislators have nullified themselves through corporate subsidies and their fear of being identified with actual issues.
Examples? Just three for now: Abortion rights, queer rights, information rights.
Today information rights are in the news. Yesterday the Supreme Court not-so-narrowly (6-3) ruled that the nation’s libraries must use Internet “pornography filters” if they accept federal financial support. In 2001 Congress had passed the statute upheld yesterday, titled “The Children’s Internet Protection Act.” The actual employment of the act had been blocked until now by a lower court ruling.
What this means is that the American Radical Right, which has dominated public policy for years, has scored another victory. A majority of Justices is now on record in believing that porn is only for the decadent rich (much in the way safe abortion and easy homosex has always been available for those same fortunates – and will continue to be, even if the Court moves to restrict these rights further).
Often overlooked in the discussion of Internet censorship is the fact that these “filters” do not tell us anything about what is being filtered out (what is it that is being kept from us?) and the fact that these systems simply don’t work.

Both sides in the debate did appear to agree on one thing: the software that the government is requiring is far from perfect.
“Filters don’t work,” said Maurice J. Freedman, director of the Westchester Library System in the suburbs of New York City and president of the American Library Association. “And they’re not going to work any better because the Supreme Court says libraries have to install them.”
He cited a number of cases in which filters have blocked inoffensive information because search terms set off the protective software, including references to the poet Anne Sexton, Super Bowl XXX and Dick Armey, the former House majority leader.

My partner Barry, using an analogy, asked how anyone would accept a filter which might eliminate your email spam but also destroy a good percentage of your legitimate incoming messages at the same time. You wouldn’t, you don’t, and libraries shouldn’t either.
Early reaction from librarians and others is pretty revealing.
On the one side there are the courageous custodians of all of human experience, like Emily Sheketoff, who will maintain their integrity even in an era of severe budget cuts.

Some libraries may decide to forgo federal financing if the alternative is filtering, said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association. “Some library boards have already decided that they are not going to offer their library patrons second-rate information,” she said. `They are going to make sure that their library patrons get access to the same quality of information that rich people get at home.”

On the other side, there are those who wish to keep the world in the dark. Representative Ernest J. Istook, a Republican of Oklahoma who was an author of the bill, enthused,

“The Supreme Court upheld the thrust of the law.” Because of the decision, Mr. Istook said, “libraries can still be safe places for parents to drop off their kids.”

In the middle, but because of its source, perhaps even more digusting than Istook’s statement, is the quote from Ginnie Cooper, the executive director of the Brooklyn Public Library:

“The real goal is for the people who use the library to get what they want and need, and not be getting what they don’t need [my italics],” Ms. Cooper said. “We’ll do our best to find, within this new rule, how it is that we can do that.”

Who is it who tells people who don’t have their own computers “what they don’t need”?
Finally, but something more that a postscript, this note: While under the federal act an adult can ask the librarian to turn off the “filtering” software, as at least some supporters, and even some opponents, of the law point out, that means that library patron Doe must explicitly ask to see the “Adult” version of the Internet – not an easy step for many people around the country.

Yesterday was the 19th of June – “Juneteenth,” but this is not yesterday’s story.
The social and political geography may sound strange, but I first heard about this holiday while working in Boston 25 years ago. Barbara was a very strong and very generous white woman from El Paso, and she made the story very real for all of her office mates. I seriously envied her for experiences which seemed awfully exotic to a painfully-white midwestern male.
Only with the understanding gained from my own experiences since then have I been able to begin to understand that the announcement of June 19, 1865, was premature, and that it remains so today.
This Common Dreams/San Francisco Chronicle article by Joseph “Jazz” Hayden describes only one obstacle to liberation, but it’s one which is just plain wrong, and it could be completely eliminated easily and quickly.

Today, many African Americans celebrate Juneteenth, the bittersweet anniversary of June 19, 1865, when the last remaining slaves were freed.
Some people assume that slavery in America died with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. But Lincoln lacked the power to enforce his edict in the Confederate-controlled South, and slaveholders in remote states such as Texas continued to exploit their human chattel. For two and a half years, no one told the slaves that they were no longer a white man’s property. Only when a regiment of Union soldiers arrived in Texas with news of slavery’s demise — and the power to back it up — did Lincoln’s promise to African Americans come true.
While this 138-year-old tale might at first seem like ancient history, echoes of Juneteenth resonate in the struggles people of color face today. Getting rights on paper, Juneteenth reminds us, is a far cry from getting them in practice.
That’s what makes Juneteenth such a bittersweet holiday. On the one hand, it honors a great advance for African Americans — gaining the rights of citizenship, especially the right to vote. But it also marks the beginning of an era in which whites imposed countless discriminatory laws, such as poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses, meant to keep blacks powerless.
Many of these overtly discriminatory state laws have been called out as racist and unconstitutional, and have been wiped from the books. But there is at least one notable exception: felony disenfranchisement laws.

The remainder of the piece describes the history and the narrow, racist application of these laws, which deprive 4.65 millions Americans of the right to vote.

Today, our “tough on crime” policies — especially our draconian drug laws — disproportionately target people of color. Only 14 percent of illegal drug users are black, but blacks make up 74 percent of those sentenced for drug possession. One in three black men will be jailed at some point.
This translates directly into loss of political power. Blacks are denied the vote because of criminal records five times more often than whites. Thirteen percent of African American men are permanently disenfranchised, and many more have temporarily lost their voting rights. Latinos are also disproportionately affected, given that 16 percent of Latino men will enter prison in their lifetime. This leaves communities of color vastly underrepresented in the political process.

Note that while in this article Hayden regularly refers to southern racism, the note at the bottom of the Common Dreams page shows that he is currently the chief plaintiff in a New York State civil lawsuit challenging felon disenfranchisement in my own, very northern jurisdiction.

Half a century ago today, and only 8 years after the end of the Nazi regime, long-suffering workers in east Berlin decided they had had enough. Because of Russian tanks however, it would be almost another 4 decades before the revolt against dictatorship begun that day would succeed.
Some of the earliest activists are still around to talk about it today.

The longtime main goal for Paul Werner Wagner, who was 5 years old in 1953 when he marched beside his father in the first workers’ uprising in Soviet-controlled Central Europe, has been to make sure that the men and women who suffered and went to prison at that time not be forgotten.
“At 17,” he recalled today, “I founded a party. It was the Progressive German Freedom Party. We published a 14-point program that was inspired by the 10-point program of June 17, 1953. For that, I spent a year and a half in the Red Ox Prison in Halle.
“So for me, June 17 is a symbol of hope, and the people who undertook the events of June 17 must not be forgotten.”
Mr. Wagner was talking, though, about an event that has been largely forgotten outside of Germany. It has been obscured by subsequent heroic actions, like the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland of the 1980’s, which led, ultimately, to the fall of Communism all over Eastern Europe.
But 50 years ago this Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets in 272 cities and towns across what was then the German Democratic Republic, the eastern half of divided Germany.
Within the space of that single day, they raided jails to release political prisoners, made and listened to speeches outlining a possible better future, issued manifestos calling for both democracy and better conditions for themselves and threw a scare into the East German leadership from which it never completely recovered.
At the end of the day, Soviet troops and the East German police, backed by tanks, put down demonstrations and arrested many of the movement’s leaders. A number of people were killed in the process, estimated at between 25 and 300. Brief as it was, the June 17 uprising remained a treasured and inspiring memory for thousands, for whom, when East Germany finally did die in 1989, it seemed a precursor, a herald of what was to come.

Sadly, and for less than honorable reasons, at least until very recently the events of that June have been largely ignored in the West. Apparently I haven’t been the only one who has been bothered by the strange silence which began decades ago. In commemorations today the politicians tried to make amends for past neglect.

“There are so many days in our history associated with defeats or mistakes,” President Johannes Rau told a special session of parliament in Berlin. “June 17 is one of the proud days in German history.”

In the socialist East, there were certainly many idealists who had not supported the 1953 uprising, but in the West the lack of support, even shortly after the events, was and remains so much less understandable.*

Germany lost interest in the uprising during more than 40 years of Cold War separation that led to a gradual accommodation with the communist German state.
“Let’s be honest: For one reason or another, June 17 had become a nuisance to many of us,” Rau said.
The uprising began with a protest by East Berlin construction laborers over higher work quotas as Germany rebuilt after World War II. It evolved into broad unrest with calls for free elections and German unity.
Protesters stormed public buildings and, in some cities outside Berlin, set up strike committees with the aim of wresting power from the communists.
East German propaganda and schoolbooks portrayed the protesters as fascist Western agents until the country collapsed in the wake of huge peaceful pro-democracy protests in 1989.
West Germany had a June 17 annual memorial day. But after reunification, it was replaced by Oct. 3, the date on which the east rejoined the larger west in 1990.

Well, they seem to be working out a lot of stuff right now; maybe the holiday thing can get resolved too. Happy anniversary to a free people who understand what it takes.
For more, from witnesses and from today’s youth, “And now they can be proud of it,” see the BBC story and the video linked there.
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* The CIA site admits the U.S. was both surprised and disinterested.

The Berlin uprising was a spontaneous action that took American intelligence officers by surprise. Although the United States had waged an active propaganda campaign that encouraged dissatisfaction with the Communist regime, it had not worked directly to foster open rebellion and had no mechanism in place to exploit the situation when it arose. US authorities in Berlin thus had no alternative but to adopt an attitude of strict neutrality.1 Many East Germans nonetheless expected the United States to intervene. These expectations persisted, unintentionally fueled by a US-sponsored food-distribution program that began on 1 July and lasted until the East Berlin government put an end to it in August.2