Johnny Cash: Would you sing a song with me?
June Carter: I would be very pleased to sing a song with you.
Johnny Cash: You sure do look nice.
— Dialogue from Johnny Cash, At San Quentin/At Folsom Prison.
Angela Davis speaking at the Peace Ball, Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2013
Let me say that this time around we cannot subordinate our aspirations and our hopes to presidential agendas. Our passionate support for President Barack Obama… should also be expressed in our determination to raise issues that have been largely ignored or not appropriately addressed by the administration.
And let me say that we are aware that we should be celebrating, critically celebrating, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. There should be massive celebrations this year. What has happened other than the film Lincoln? And, of course, with two-and-a-half million people behind bars today, the prison system, the immigrant detention system are terrible remainders and reminders of slavery. Mass incarceration has devastated our communities. It is a false solution to problems that have persisted since the era of slavery.
We should be addressing the state of our schools, the continuing crisis of overincarceration, over-punishment. We should be addressing the part played by private prison corporations in pushing for repressive legislation designed to incarcerate ever-increasing numbers of immigrants. Last year, some 500,000, a half a million, immigrants were detained. And that, of course, is the largest number ever.
The past still haunts us. Its ghosts ride the echoes of our lives. To overcome poverty, to overcome racism, we must also overcome xenophobia, homophobia. Justice for African Americans is organically linked to justice for Palestinians. The struggle goes on. A luta continua. And as June Jordan said, we are the ones we have been waiting for. Thank you.
Source: DemocracyNow.org
Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment;
All things are unreal,
Unreal or disappointing,
The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat,
The prizes given at at the children’s party,
The prize awarded for the English Essay,
The scholar’s degree, the statesman’s decoration.
All things become less real, man passes
From unreality to unreality.
This man is obstinate, blind, intent
On self-destruction,
Passing from deception to deception,
From grandeur to grandeur to final illusion,
Lost in the wonder of his own greatness,
The enemy of society, enemy of himself.
— T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (via bonjour-tristesse)
We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.
— Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
A number of students have expressed distress that there is no “happy ending.” The course emphasizes problems and criticisms of previous work without providing a constructive alternative. A number of colleagues at the regional meetings expressed similar reservations. I can only say that if the course has this effect, it has been successful. I conceive of the role of the college teacher to be precisely that of insuring that his students have “wrinkles on their brows,” that they become adept in the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” I believe for those students that take no further courses in religious studies, they have learned how to be cold-blooded about humanistic materials; for those students who continue to take other courses in religious studies, the effect of this course will be relativized by other offerings.
— J.Z. Smith, “Basic Problems in the Study of Religion,” pp. 20-27 in On Teaching Religion, ed. by Christopher I. Lehrich (NY: Oxford UP, 2013), p. 27.
With all the carnage from gun violence in our country, it’s still almost impossible to believe that a mass shooting in a kindergarten class could happen. It has come to that. Not even kindergarteners learning their ABCs are safe. We heard after Columbine that it was too soon to talk about gun laws. We heard it after Virginia Tech. After Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek. And now we are hearing it again. For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds. President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown. But the country needs him to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem. Calling for “meaningful action” is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership – not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever.
— New York mayor Mike R. Bloomberg, Dec. 14, 2012. Source: “Statements of Mayors Against Illegal Guns Co-Chairs on Newtown, Connecticut Shooting” (MikeBloomberg.com).
The sight that greeted me on walking into my office this morning. You don’t say.
During the age of slavery, then the era of Jim Crow segregation, when whites separated themselves from blacks, they needed a black individual to tell them what black people thought, desired, needed, etc. (How else were they going to find out?) Often that person was the black community’s minister; later writers served that purpose, from Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin. I personally think in the post-Civil Rights period a black person is wasting his (or her) time, the preciously few years of their lives, by devoting their energy—-as a “spokesman”—- to explaining so-called “black” things to white people. Whites can—-and should—-do their own homework. Read from the vast library of books on black American history and culture. Take a course, for God’s sake, on some aspect of black history. Then black individuals can be free to pursue the whole, vast universe that awaits their discovery (as it does for any white person), leaving behind emotionally draining racial discussions to investigate astrophysics, DNA sequencing, cosmology, Sanskrit, the Buddhadharma, mathematics, nano-technology, everything in this universe that remains such a mystery to us.
— Charles R. Johnson, in an interview with Monsters & Critics. “The M&C Interview 1: Charles Johnson” (May 28, 2007, 10:00 GMT), Monsters & Critics.
“What you fear most has already happened.” Annie G. Rogers, A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy (NY: Viking, 1995), p. 55.
I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation… There is only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words.. Listen to me, If you don’t love America, If you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say — get out. We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.
— Dennis Terry, pastor of Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, introducing Rick Santorum in Baton Rouge on Sunday, March 18, 2012. Source: “Pastor Dennis Terry Introduces Rick Santorum, Tells Non-Christians And Liberals To Get Out,” The Huffington Post (March 19, 2012).
The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is.
— Rick Santorum speaking to the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Mississippi, on Monday, March 12. Source: Dylan Stableford, “‘The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant’,” The Ticket, Yahoo! News (March 13, 2012).
From a series of photographs of the surface of the river Thames by the American photographer Roni Horn (via MoMA | The Collection | Roni Horn. Still Water (The River Thames, for Example). 1999)
