Baltimore Loses 30-3 - In BASEBALL Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I cannot bear to produce an excerpt of the Post's coverage. Go read it, if you must. Vomit-worthy.

This should take the taste of vomit out of your mouth. If you are my age, you remember happier days like these. (WARNING: Contains SEVERE unbleeped baseball managerial terminology regarding what the 'ump' was trying to do to the home team.)

Keith Ellison (D-MN) Compares 9/11 to the Reichstag Fire Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Keith Ellison sees the Third Reich today; do you?

HAT TIP to Maryland Conservatarian (who blogged about it) and Greg Kline at the Conservative Refuge podcast (who commented about it late in his podcast on July 17th.) I am mildly surprised that both men held back as much as they did.

Keith Ellison speaking to an organization called "Atheists for Human Rights" a couple weeks ago, per the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 8, 2007:

On comparing Sept. 11 to the burning of the Reichstag building in Nazi Germany: "It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I'm not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box -- dismiss you."

It's pretty miserable when a group of atheists - presumably people with habits of skepticism and possessed of the pedantic but valuable habit of demanding strong evidence for strong propositions - applauds this foolishness.

For those who do not fully know the history of the Reichstag fire, it's pretty simple: a Dutch communist burned the German parliament building. The Nazi blamed the Weimar-era Communist movement for burning it and used the burning as a pretext for seizing broad emergency powers in Germany, banning the Communist Party (which held 17% of the seats in the Reichstag), and arresting and executing major Comintern leaders.

The Democratic Party was not only not banned but is thriving, holding both houses of Congress (the Senate by the hair of Joe Lieberman's chinny-chin-chin) and standing poised to win the Presidency in 16 months. Keith Ellison was elected in that take-over effort; maybe he forgot that he won and how he won. George Bush stands a small chance of getting impeached as do a few of his senior advisers, and Bush's popularity is somewhere between Nixon's low-water mark and gonorrhea's high-water mark. The Supreme Court is marginally more conservative than it was 6 years ago but any comparison between the Supreme Court and German "courts" under the Third Reich is offensive in the extreme. There are a large number of troubling civil liberties and corruption issues surrounding the President but we read and blog about them all the time. The PATRIOT ACT subpoenas are very offensive to me, particularly when issues against institutions like public libraries, but no comparison exists.

The Reichstag Fire was not part of a broad Communist plot, according to the evidence. It was one crank's act, not an act of the Comintern or German KPD or similar organizations. The best analogy would be if Timothy McVeigh had registered to vote as a Democrat or Republican and the sitting President assassinated, executed, jailed or placed into concentration camps every Democratic or Republican political operative in the country. The fact that you are reading this blog testifies to the difference; a post-Reichstag Fire chief executive would do to bloggers today what Hitler did to the "loud, obnoxious bloggers" of his day.

9/11 was the plot not of theocratic Baptists or Methodists but theocratic Muslims. Ellison's silence on this point is deafening. It's great that Ellison is willing to step for the civil rights of atheists - about time in the U.S. Congress - but not at the expense of entertaining this sort of historical malpractice.

I like the design of Atheists for Human Rights' website - soft green, light blue. There's a lot on the site that I like in terms of content, including some well-developed video presentations. But I would take a Goldwater-esque conservative skeptic of theocracy over any organization that entertains this sort of foolishness.

The worst part about what Ellison said? He actually took the matter beyond the Reichstag Fire analogy to accuse, then coyly deny accusing, the Bush Administration of executing the 9/11 attacks itself. Ellison's warning about being placed in the "nut-ball box" is too cute by half, and insulting to our intelligence. Deliver your evidence, Ellison, or go home to your nut-ball box unless you can show that Bush operatives, not Muslims from Saudi Arabia, hijacked four planes.

I stepped up hard for Keith Ellison when Dennis Prager lost his mind six months ago over Ellison taking a symbolic, non-functional photo-op oath in his own office on the central Islamic holy text, the Qu'r'an - not from a fear of theocracy creep, mind you. Rather, Prager (who is Jewish) wanted Ellison (who is Muslim) to take an oath on a Christian Bible, and feared for the integrity of the republic were Ellison to hold his own holy book during that photo op pose. I don't know that I called Prager's rants "sacroturf" by proxy; I would today. But I wish I had exerted less effort defending Ellison, now that I know he is both at peace with CAIR's theocrats and, perversely, beloved of some fact-free atheists.

Letter to the Sun Editor re: Flamingo and Jim Crow Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, June 28, 2007:

Segregation is also Ocean City's legacy

The Sun's article on the heyday of Ocean City's Flamingo Hotel in the 1950s and 1960s failed to note that the families who lodged there during Ocean City's Jim Crow decades were all white ("Families flock to Flamingo," June 24).

Ocean City's "Motel Row" and the boardwalk itself enforced strict policies against the presence of black Americans.

For many years - until Congress passed and enforced anti-discrimination laws - only one hotel in Ocean City, "Henry's Colored Hotel," served black visitors.

Many Sun readers would want to know that black residents of Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia and the Lower Eastern Shore were unable to lodge at the Flamingo or enjoy the boardwalk for many decades.

That fact is part of the "family atmosphere" of Ocean City, to some extent, even to this day - among Maryland black families who have not forgotten this history.

Bruce Godfrey
Reisterstown

Kevin Dayhoff: National Bohemian Commercial Classics Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Many thanks to Kevin Dayhoff for his recent link to Crablaw and a MAJOR HAT TIP for an awesome piece of Maryland history and culture: National Bohemian movie trailer ads consolidated by Atomic Books ("literary finds for mutilated minds") onto YouTube. Kevin also provides a history of the administrative and judicial proceedings involving Maryland's Board of Censors, which once had prior restraint power over all films shown in Maryland, even during my early lifetime.

National Bohemian is strongly associated with old Baltimore, hairspray Baltimore, the one back when the Orioles and Colts played at 33rd Street in old beat-up Memorial Stadium, when Chuck Thompson would exclaim "Ain't the Beer Cold!" (and you KNEW what beer he meant) and Brooks and Frank Robinson played, when the Orioles finished above .500 regularly and usually had the best 20-30 year record in baseball, better even than the infamous, disgusting Yankees.

I did not grow up in the City, but the whole area lit up in 1979 when the Orioles played the Pirates in the World Series, then won it in 1983 against the Phillies. Now the Orioles are in an 11 year drought from winning, and they don't even make Natty Boh here any more. Maybe that's the problem.

Well done, Kevin - a classic.

The History of "White Trash" Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

American Sexuality Magazine, May 9, 2007:

The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks—both free and enslaved—to disparage local poor whites. Some of these poor whites would have been newly arrived Irish immigrants, others semiskilled workers drawn to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in the postrevolutionary building boom, and others still may have been white servants, waged or indentured, working in the homes and estates of area elites. The term registered contempt and disgust, as it does today, and suggests sharp hostilities between social groups who were essentially competing for the same resources—the same jobs, the same opportunities, and even the same marriage partners.

While white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech.

Over the next forty years, the term began to appear more and more frequently in print. In 1854 white trash appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin—her defense of the abolitionist play that had garnered her international fame. Stowe devoted an entire chapter to "Poor White Trash," explaining that the slave system produced "not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable." The degradation was due, Stowe argued, in part because plantation slavery locked up productive soil in the hands of a few large planters, leaving ordinary whites to struggle for subsistence. But there were other factors as well: "Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of 'poor white trash,' says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said."

I was surprised, but not completely shocked, to learn that the term originated in this region.

I recommend as decidedly non-scholarly source of rants and essays dealing with similar topics The Redneck Manifesto from self-described "rural Yankee scum" Jim Goad.

HAT TIP to 3 Quarks Daily.

William Grim of FrontPage: Modern German Antisemitism Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

William Grim, a free-lance writer based in Germany, wrote an essay six months ago about modern antisemitism in Germany. I am not an avid reader of FrontPage but anything involving either antisemitism or Germany, let alone both, is likely to catch my attention. Soccer Dad included a link to fellow Baltimore blogger Laz-a-fare's discussion of this article on SD's latest "If you haven't ... you must" list.

Grim starts off with two brief anecdotes about his experiences in Germany. The first is seeing kids on a bus ooh-ing over granddad's copy of Mein Kampf and a VCR tape of Goebbels' speeches, and the second is a businessman who repeats antisemitic canards about Jews and money at a table during a discussion of an apparently tense business negotiation with a Jewish American. From these two examples, and apparently other examples that Mr. Grim did not identify in detail, Mr. Grim has concluded that German antisemitism is extremely alive and well.

These examples do not give me much confidence in his thesis. Mr. Grim's bio is not available at WND, but I will assume that he is moderately fluent in German. Holding a job in Germany does not necessarily require full fluency in German; so many Germans speak English fluently, often without much of a noticeable accent, that survival in the medium term on assignment is entirely possible without fluency. But if one assumes that Mr. Grim knows a substantial amount of spoken German beyond the two German words that appear in his essay, including the Bavarian dialect which would likely permeate much of his environment in suburban Munich, then one should examine the thesis on its merits.

School kids looking at something forbidden with morbid fascination is nothing new. When I stayed in Germany as an exchange student 22 years ago, I had the occasion to visit a German swimming pool. Those who are familiar with German sunbathing habits will recall that nude and especially semi-nude sunbathing by German women is extremely common and is regarded generally with a colossal "yawn" by German teenage males. Why? It is not forbidden, so it is uninteresting or at least not interesting in any unusual way. I was not exactly stopped cold by the sight of 75-100 half-naked or naked young German women swimming in the local swimming pool, sunbathing, reading novels, arguing with their boyfriends, but it surprised the heck out of me at age 16; here in the States that is almost unheard of and certainly was in 1985. But Nazi propaganda is not only taboo in Germany but, with exceptions for a few things like postage stamps, strictly contraband and illegal to possess privately. Mein Kampf, on the other hand, is required reading in some high school history classes here (was in mine; my copy of Mein Kampf from 10th grade European history class probably could not have accompanied me to Germany.)

I have personally heard fellow attorneys, including colleagues in firms where I have worked with both Jewish and non-Jewish attorneys in Pikesville, repeat the same antisemitic canards about Jews and money. (How businessmen in any field ever came to regard a focus on money as somehow derogatory is beyond me - what, should businessmen focus instead on the secretary's figure or the weather? - but I digress.) Antisemitism is alive and well in Pikesville. And Parkville. And Reisterstown. Apparently also in at least one suburb of Munich.

What Mr. Grim fails to mention (leading me to suspect linguistic deficiency) is any mention of the reunification of Germany: the biggest event to occur in Germany in 40 years. The absence of any mention of this fact, any mention of the 40 years of Soviet domination of East German and the Berlin Wall, any mention of the failure of Communist Germany to come to any meaningful terms whatsoever with its own Nazi past in the same manner as did West Germany - these are glaring omissions. Much of the antisemitic violence, neo-Nazi marches, etc. has been in the economically devastated post-Communist and non-deNazified East. This fact weakens (although does not destroy) Mr. Grim's arguments about Germany as a whole; the part that exhibits the worst antisemitism is the part that has been least bathed in Western liberal values.

Where I think Mr. Grim is strongest is in his discussion of the centrality of antisemitism to German culture. To coin a phrase, if you have not read On the Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther (full-text or relevant excerpts), you must. Among the lesser offenses that Hitler committed was plagiarism of Luther's advice to seize Jewish-owned assets, burn synagogues, silence rabbis and bar Jews from travel. The Nazi Party really did the memory of Luther a disservice by failing to name Kristallnacht after Luther, though they did have the gratitude to execute Kristallnacht on his 455th birthday. The language that this former friar used to describe Jews in Germany and elsewhere was horrific; he remains in his horror a core figure, perhaps the core figure, of classical German culture, the equivalent of George Washington, King James and William Shakespeare combined for anglophone U.S. citizens. His German translation of the Bible remains standard for Protestant Germans and for some German Catholics.

I do not know that Grim's argument about the Free Democratic Party (small "kingmaker" liberal/libertarian party) using antisemitism as a campaign tool was accurate. For one thing, not many Muslims in Germany are actually voting citizens under Germany's blood-not-soil citizenship laws, though that is beginning to change. For another, I don't know from the reports I read that the FDP was actually engaged institutionally in the antisemitism attributed to one of its disgraced officials. Sort of like the Republican Party not being categorically racist everywhere because Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond's segregationist past once. On the other hand, neo-Nazi parties with varying-sized fig leaves are a real issue in Germany and would have been a good topic for Grim to cover.

It should be noted that while antisemitism is a core element of Germany's cultural development, the same can be said for most of Germany's neighbors. The rabid glee with which the many of the non-German conquered peoples of Eastern Europe frequently participated in the Final Solution - in Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia and elsewhere - should lead one to recognize European antisemitism as a European and Christian (Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox) problem which history's ultimate antisemitic state exploited across Europe to unspeakable murderous effect. Luther was not the only antisemitic Christian figure; the early Church figure St. John Chrysostom was murderously foul in his language against the Jewish communities of his day.

The arguments about Mr. Grim's colloquies re: historical revisionism with German acquaintances should be viewed as part of a general propensity for Germans to argue. Being blunt is considered a German virtue, as is stubbornness or steadfastness (the former when someone you don't like is doing it, the latter when you do it.) Germans, like their French neighbors, love a good argument and are not pushovers. They will try out arguments to gauge a person, to test his intelligence, to figure out what his true beliefs are. This business of never discussion sex, politics or religion doesn't hold over their for politics or sex (for religion, it definitely does.) It is possible that some of Mr. Grim's interlocutors were baiting him rather than spreading the Fourth Reich. On the other hand, claiming that "the Jews" [sic] were responsible for the Holocaust is simply beyond belief.

As for German knowledge of the Final Solution at the time, both the New York Times and the martyred anti-Nazi bloggers of their day, the Scholl siblings - mere broke students at the University of Munich down the street from Mr. Grim's current home - knew of the Final Solution. So yes, the claims that most Germans did not support Hitler or that the Final Solution was not known are lies. If you see the tapes of Germans interviewed post-war about what they knew and when they knew it, the face of deception is remarkably easy to see, even for someone not particularly gifted at reading people. The Scholl siblings in their leaflets regarding the concentration and death camps exclaimed "We are the White Rose - We are your guilty conscience!!!", but the guilty conscience is plainly visible in the old tapes I have seen of the late forties and early fifties.

As for today, Mr. Grim may be correct in his conclusion but I don't know that he has made his case. Munich is the most conservative big city in Germany by most measures; Bavaria has its own special conservative party because the regular conservative party for the rest of Germany is not conservative enough. Sort of like Texas, in a way, but I digress. Mr. Grim did not mention whether his definition of German extends beyond the infamously conservative suburbs of Munich, whether he has spent time in Berlin, in the left-leaning Ruhr-Gebiet reminiscent of industrial New Jersey, in liberal Hamburg. I don't know whether he has met the liberal and radical youth who make Cindy Sheehan look like a Chamber of Commerce parliamentarian, who cite Sophie Scholl as the most important woman of the entire 20th century in poll after poll, the Love Parade that outdoes San Francisco and Greenwich Village combined. Hitler got started in Munich and Grim lives there, but there's another 90 million people in the country to get to know. My verdict: fairly well-presented but not proven.

Thank you both to Soccer Dad (especially for an embarrassing error in my citing the wrong publication initially on the first draft) and to Laz-a-fare. I had cited initially to WorldNetDaily instead of FrontPageMag; somehow I got that signal crossed late in the evening.

Washington Post: A Review of Buried in the Bitter Waters Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Washington Post, April 8, 2007 (HAT TIP 3 Quarks Daily):

People knew about the terror, of course. The stories came to them in whispers, passed on in warning or in shame or perhaps in pride. There was a day 80 or 90 years ago, they were told, when the rumor of a crime -- a rape, most likely -- had so enraged the whites in town that they lynched the black man they thought responsible. Then something else had happened, something every bit as sinister. In the fever of the moment, the whites had turned on their black neighbors, ordering entire communities of African Americans to gather what they could carry and get out of town, appropriating the property the victims were forced to abandon, destroying the homes they left behind. Years later, people still knew. But these weren't the sort of stories that you told in public.

In the last decade or so, the silence has started to lift. Oklahoma established a public commission to investigate the destruction of Tulsa's African American neighborhood in a horrific 1921 pogrom. Hollywood made a movie dramatizing whites' assault on the black town of Rosewood, Fla., in 1923. And two years ago, the sociologist James W. Loewen published an award-winning book, Sundown Towns, that systematically documented America's wave of racial purges, which he rightly called "ethnic cleansing." Now Elliot Jaspin's vivid Buried in the Bitter Waters digs deeply into 12 of the purges -- those he judged "the worst of the worst."

...

As chilling as each incident is, though, the cumulative effect of stringing together 12 stories is problematic. Part of the difficulty is that Jaspin's choice of case studies leaves the wrong impression of American ethnic cleansing. All 12 incidents he describes took place in small towns, 10 of them in the South, with African Americans always the victims. In fact, the majority of purges occurred in the North and West, including almost two dozen in Illinois alone, according to Loewen. Urban neighborhoods were particularly prone to racial expulsions since racism and the real estate market made for a ferociously toxic mix. And mobs in Western states were more likely to target Chinese immigrants than blacks.

Baltimore Sun: 1968 Baltimore Riots, Through the Eyes of the University of Baltimore Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, April 4, 2007:

An African-American mother remembers a ransacked West Baltimore neighborhood occupied by white National Guardsmen who demanded proof of employment before letting her go to her job in Timonium.

"That was really humiliating," said Rosalind Terrell. "It reminded me of slavery. A pass for slavery."

These recollections of April 1968 are from an ambitious University of Baltimore effort to comprehensively document, for the first time, the four-day convulsion of grief and revenge that swept the city's poor, black neighborhoods after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn., on this day 39 years ago.

...

Ida Pats, 82, doesn't talk about the destruction of her North Avenue pharmacy and upstairs home. She says she's wiped out all memory of seeing the building where she lived for 18 years and raised a family be looted, then burned.

"I don't want to remember," she said. "It's old history, and I don't want to know about it. It's like it never happened."

...

Dr. Louis L. Randall, 75, who is black, lived in West Baltimore in 1968. He believes an epidemic of drug addiction has dampened the political spirit of impoverished Baltimoreans today.

"If you had a riot now, with all of the meth and heroin addicts who live mostly in those riot areas, I don't think they would have the strength to run up and down the streets for 10 minutes," the obstetrician said. "What would their goals be to riot? More drugs?"

Natalie Merchant: Which Side Are You On? Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Natalie Merchant did not grow up in coal country, but in a relatively impoverished area of upstate New York. The song derives from the Harlan County, WV United Mine Workers strike in the 1920s which ended violently.

Baltimore Sun: Tridentine Mass Draws Faithful to St. Alphonsus Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, February 25, 2007:

Dozens of people gather every Sunday morning in the Gothic sanctuary of St. Alphonsus Roman Catholic Church to pray for the future of a tradition that's deeply rooted in the past.

Before the Latin prayers begin, they seek God's intercession for the future of the Tridentine Mass - a form of liturgy established in the 16th century but now celebrated only in churches with special permission.

...


Aesthetic differences between the two services are obvious. The Tridentine Mass, which uses a 1962 missal, is mostly spoken in Latin, with some Greek. The priest faces the tabernacle housing the Eucharist, with his back to the congregation. Much of the Mass is silent, even the High Masses every other Sunday, which feature choirs.

To be sure, the nearby Basilica of the Assumption does offer a Sunday Mass in Latin - but it's merely a translation of the novus ordo, not the full Tridentine Mass.

...

[Msgr.] Bastress says [that St. Alphonsus] almost operates like three separate parishes: the English-speaking community, those who come to Lithuanian services at 8:30 a.m., and the Tridentine followers at 11:30 a.m. The latter is the largest service with up to 175 attendees each Sunday, many of whom travel from as far away as Virginia or Pennsylvania to attend.

A couple of points.

St. Alphonsus, located at 114 W. Saratoga Street, is probably the most convenient church for downtown Roman Catholics other than the Basilica itself two blocks away. Its interior is conservative and most ideally suited for a reverent spirit; it is on the opposite end from using the gymnasium as a makeshift "church" for mass.

St. Alphonsus was established and staffed by German Redemptorists until a later merger with a largely Lithuanian parish. Baltimore's Lithuanian community is not very large (truth be told, Vilnius' Lithuanian community is not enormous) and so it is perhaps ideally suited to have become a parish with three "styles" of downtown English-Mass Catholics, immigrant Lithuanian-Americans and perhaps their children and Tridentine Mass enthusiast in the surrounding 75-mile radius.

The reporter's claim that the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin celebrated at the Basilica is a translation is, I believe, incorrect. It is the version only Novus Ordo Mass which is in the original language of its authorship and therefore not a translation, the name "Novus Ordo" being the clue to the original. The English and Lithuanian Novus Ordo Masses are translations, just as French, Spanish and Klingon versions of Romeo and Juliet are translations while the original English is not a "translation."

A happy fact about the Tridentine Mass is that it uses not only Latin but some Greek. The investiture of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI made use of Greek liturgical language as well. This is appropriate because while in the U.S. Latin Rite Catholics far outnumber Eastern Rite Catholics, this is not the case in some majority Catholic countries (e.g. Slovakia) and many Catholic communities world-wide. Greek, Slavonic, Aramaic and Arabic are among the liturgical languages of many churches and rites within the Catholic Church. From a standpoint of preserving culture and civilization, it is perhaps unfortunate that U.S. Roman Catholics are not more familiar with the liturgical and cultural heritages of Eastern Rite and Eastern Church Catholics. (The technical difference between an Eastern "Rite" and an Eastern "Church" within the Catholic Church is a matter I will leave to those better grounded in the finer points of these issues.) Many Latin Rite Catholics are unaware, for example, that attendance at the Sunday Divine Liturgy of an Eastern Rite Church does, in fact, satisfy the Sunday Obligation of Mass attendance.

What I think about how the Catholic Church conducts its liturgy is something like what a vegetarian thinks about how Ruth's Chris cooks their steaks - no "skin in the game." But I am glad generally when history and heritage are at least remembered and studied if not revered, amidst the flotsam of cultural idiocy (and not the smart kind of "idiot", either.)

Chicago Sun-Times: African-American Family Genealogist Tells of His Research Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Chicago Sun-Times, February 26, 2007 (HAT TIP to Soccer Dad):

Last summer, as a fleet of tall ships weighed anchor in Chicago, genealogist Tony Burroughs, his sister Mary Stallworth and her sons Dean and Julius had a behind-the-scenes tour of the U.S. Brig Niagara, a reproduction of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's relief flagship used in a major battle of the War of 1812.

Burroughs and his family had a special claim on the ship. Generations ago, their ancestor Charles Smothers, an African-American soldier, was among the U.S. troops recruited by the undermanned Navy to fight the British at sea.

...

The 59-year-old Chicagoan, author of Black Roots: A Beginner's Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree, had the papers to prove it: Smothers' discharge letter.

...

He then set out to interview every relative he could find, and dug through records in trunks and boxes at home as well as at the National Archives and the Library of Congress. In addition to his ancestor who fought in the War of 1812, he found out about a great-grandfather, Preston Brooks, a Buffalo Soldier who served in the U.S. Army after the Civil War (Burroughs even bought a cavalry uniform); grandfather Asa Burroughs, who served as president of the Cook County Bar Association, and a great-uncle, Robert Burroughs, who was a payroll-robber.

The article goes on to discuss genealogical resources including the rolls of former slaves of the Reconstruction-era Freedmen's Bureaus, United States Army records of "Colored Troops" in the U.S. Civil War and other resources.

Washington Post: Ancestry.com Reveals Al Sharpton's Ancestor Was Slave of Strom Thurmond Ancestor Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Washington Post, February 26, 2007:

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the prominent civil rights activist, is descended from a slave owned by relatives of the late senator and one-time segregationist Strom Thurmond, a genealogical study released Sunday reported.

"It was probably the most shocking thing of my life," Sharpton said of learning the findings, which were requested and published Sunday by the New York Daily News. He called a news conference to respond publicly to the report. "I couldn't describe to you the emotions I have had . . . everything from anger to outrage to reflection to some pride and glory."

...

Coleman Sharpton was given as a gift to Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was the late senator's great-great-grandfather, said Mike Ward, a spokesman for Ancestry.com. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

The concept that one's ancestors were legally owned by the ancestors of one's neighbors is a difficult for a lot of white people to process experientially. While it may be true that educated white people know the basic history of slavery in this country, whites tend to learn it either from a fairly academic standpoint in many cases, comparable to the way that people study quarks or integral calculus [UPDATE: or from the standpoint of the slaveowner or his revanchist latter-day apologists.]

Early colonial history involved indentured servitude for a period of years; such indentured servants were identified as "slaves" in some Colonial legal codes including that of Virginia. But this servitude did not break down by "race" or ancestry, but by social class in the British Isles. It was not chattel slavery; the "owner" did not own the servant but only a right to his labor for a period (that labor right could be sold.) Children of indentured servants did not become servants themselves, but walked free with their parents when their parents did. No "badges or incidents of slavery" followed indentured servants. The servant was considered to have received consideration for his servitude: transatlantic transport by choice, food and shelter. The ancestors of many of these indentures servants became the hardscrabble lower social class of Southern society, the class most likely to resent black freemen both before and after Emancipation, the class that supplied to the Ku Klux Klan many of its members and to segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond and segregationist religious ministers like Jerry Falwell their fiercest support.

35 years ago, Jerry Falwell preached to some of the descendants of indentured servitude that racial segregation was God's explicit will. Today, Jerry Falwell is claiming that Satan is behind Al Gore's efforts to slow down global warming. And combative civil rights activist Al Sharpton's ancestors were owned and sold by a ancestors of a notorious segregationist (who, ironically, engaged in the very illegal "race-mixing" [sic] in his own personal life that he himself labored to prohibit at all costs.)

There's more than one inconvenient truth.

Historic and Scientific Revisionism Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Tonight, An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar for Best Documentary. Despite rumors that a few million conservatives would blow a major artery in at least one vital organ upon hearing such news, that probably did not happen (or if it did happen, it would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof.)

The movie and the general topic of climate change are specific examples of a general phenomenon: how does one distinguish agenda-driven propaganda from science? More specifically, how does a lay person - one not formally trained in climatology or even in any scientific discipline or field - evaluate scientific claims? By analogy, how does a non-historian smoke out agenda-driven revisionist pseudo-history from new historical perspectives? And to what extent, in science or history, does the boundary between agenda-driven models and objective research truly exist?

Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense has a provocative post on the broader topic of scientific knowledge. I won't cut and paste from his piece (because he has wisely elected to prevent by technical means random-ripoffs of his content, which seems wise) but one of his core theses is that in 2007, a non-scientist is most reasonable in accepting the dominant view of scientific community in most fields such as evolutionary biology, chemistry, physics and climatology.

Two professional colleagues of mine have each advised me that they each believe that HIV does not cause AIDS, and cite minority scientific views in reference to that belief. My profession is attorney, not microbiologist, public health official or physician, and the two attorneys in question are both criminal defense attorneys, not attorneys for public health agencies or hospitals. At what point is it reasonable for me to accept this apparently extant but severely minority view, especially when my background is East Asian Studies?

For a number of years, I was active in the Libertarian Party, and in that experience met libertarians of a broad spectrum of views and emphasis. I met a few liberal-leaning ones like myself, who were primarily interested in issues such as strict separation of church and state, drug legalization and government non-interference in sexual matters. I was more or less "in for the program" on other issues but the issues that motivated me were the "lefty" issues, which is probably why I have adapted so comfortably to the liberal blogosphere, often to its sharpest left edge, since the Democratic Party is not very distinguishable on most such matters from the centrist GOP positions.

But in the LP, I got to meet people with some very unusual views about taxes, i.e. that I did not have to pay income tax on my U.S. wages. I won't go into their shtick here, but I considered their members fools and their leaders criminals. General rule: if you are a U.S. citizen OR make money in the United States from any source, do not believe anyone who tells you that you don't have to pay U.S. income taxes, unless that person has legal malpractice insurance and shows you his or her policy number, binder number and maximum amount of coverage per claim. Since I knew something about the U.S. income tax code from law school and the (then) 80 years of jurisprudence that had occurred since the passage of the 16th Amendment, I was able to debunk their garbage. For the record, the LP itself seeks to abolish U.S. individual taxes, rather than to deny their unpleasant current existence and applicability.

The jurisprudential theory that U.S. income taxes do not apply to U.S. citizen wage earners earning wages here has met with no precedent support in the last 90 years. No law review articles in any law review at any accredited law school have ever entertained the theory. No precedent on point exists. What does exist are jail cells for those who refuse to file and report all income. If your jurisprudential theory belongs to you and your pals alone, and no two members of Congress thinks it's true, and no Supreme Court Justice (all of whom get assigned many tax cases annually) thinks it's true, and no tax law firm thinks it's true, and no Presidential candidate of any party with more than 1% of the electorate behind it thinks it's true, your theory is false. Even if you swear it has to be true, it's false. You do not have a colorable claim to the truth.

But I don't know as a non-scientist where to draw the line. Science and law are different. If the entire legal community thinks "no establishment of religion" means separation of church and state, or even if only a large percentage does, that's what it means in both theory and practice. In science, microbiology and climate change and chemistry and evolutionary biology do not give a damn what you think; if you don't like it, go pouns sand. In history, it's a little grayer. History involves interpretation but certain core facts remain. You can claim that President Lincoln died of a crack overdose, but you have the problems of (a) all the witnesses at Ford's Theatre and in the room next door to the gunshot wound and (b) the reliably reported non-existence of the crack form of cocaine until the 1980s, and the attendant lack of an obvious dealer, crack pipe, etc. At the macro level, it becomes easier to play propaganda games. Did the Nazis use gas chambers at Auschwitz? While Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Hoess boasted that they did upon his arrest and interrogation shortly after the liberation of Auschwitz, and the physical and documentary evidence on site were incredibly massive and damning and the eyewitnesses legion, some revisionist historians will claim otherwise.

What tool does the amateur, the layman, use to separate cranks from valid provocative alternative theories? Particularly in an age of information overload? What are the hallmarks of crankitude or worse, versus provocative but legitimate alternative theories? Is their a grand theory of crankitude which allows for grand vaccine or treatment, or is it all purely a fact- and detail-driven and labor-intensive effort to country crank with fact?

UPDATE: there is another form of historical revisionism: moron revisionism, the kind that says that Hitler defeated Stalin in World War II.

"Tom and Jerry" and Antisemitic Conspiracies Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Facts.

1. "Tom and Jerry" was and is the property of MGM and Hanna-Barbera, which were intense rivals for awards and money with the Walt Disney Company.

2. Walt Disney was not, in fact, Jewish. His ancestors came from County Kilkenny in Ireland, and he was named after his family's midwestern Congregational pastor Walt Parr. Walt Disney on Walt Disney's religion:

Thus, whatever success I have had in bringing clean, informative entertainment to people of all ages, I attribute in great part to my Congregational upbringing and my lifelong habit of prayer...

3. While European antisemitism was replete of slurs for Jews in multiple language families, "dirty mice" or "dirty mouse" were not among such routine slurs.

4. The creation of "Tom and Jerry" in late 1939 and first screenings in 1940 predated most American and European knowledge of the Nazi atrocities, in part because some of those atrocities had not yet occurred (but were being planned and implemented.) Kristallnacht was barely a year before the creation of this cartoon. WWII had just begun in Europe but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (and the U.S. entry into the War on the European and Pacific fronts) was not to occur at least a year.

5. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a Russian Czarist, not Nazi, forgery (though certainly approved by the Nazis decades later.) The Protocols were generally considered to have been forged in the late 1800s or early 1900s. In 1910, Hitler was homeless in Vienna after dropping out of high school and working as a semi-employed painter. Hitler did not forge the Protocols or cooperate with their forgers; he was perhaps idling his time in the 7th grade when they were forged and promulgated.

6. "Tom and Jerry" is well-known in Iran and in many other countries of the world, with occasional censorings and country-specific voiceovers reflecting local cultural and political realities.

62 Years Ago Today Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun: Walter Sondheim, 1908-2007 Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, February 15, 2007:

Walter Sondheim Jr., who led Baltimore's schools through desegregation and championed the redevelopment of downtown Baltimore for more than a half-century, died of pneumonia this morning at Mercy Medical Center. He was 98.

A counselor to generations of state and city leaders, Mr. Sondheim continued to work up to last week as a senior adviser to the Greater Baltimore Committee.

Over the decades, he served in many roles of civic leadership, including the presidency of both the state and city school boards.

As president of the Baltimore school board in 1954, he insisted -- though other cities stalled -- on the speedy desegregation of Baltimore schools after the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

R.I.P.

Gregory Kane on "Joey the Lip" Biden Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Gregory Kane in the Baltimore Sun, February 10, 2007:

"Joey the Lip" has an official, albeit unwritten, invitation to attend two exhibits that focus on racial stereotyping and slavery now at two Baltimore museums.

You might know Joey the Lip by his more familiar title: Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the recently declared presidential candidate who has spent the last week surgically removing his foot from his mouth.

...

So on Monday, Anne Garside, the director of communications for the Maryland Historical Society, and Arvie Smith, an artist-in-residence at the society, extended an invitation to Joey the Lip to visit the exhibits At Freedom's Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland. Part of the exhibit is at the society; the other is at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture.

The Maryland Institute College of Art is also a partner to this exhibition.

Letter from a British soldier, Christmas 1914 Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

From an unidentified British soldier on the Western Front, Christmas 1914:

This will be the most memorable Christmas I've ever spent or likely to spend: since about tea time yesterday I don't think theres been a shot fired on either side up to now. Last night turned a very clear frost moonlight night, so soon after dusk we had some decent fires going and had a few carols and songs. The Germans commenced by placing lights all along the edge of their trenches and coming over to us - wishing us a Happy Christmas etc. They also gave us a few songs etc. so we had quite a social party. Several of them can speak English very well so we had a few conversations. Some of our chaps went to over to their lines. I think theyve all come back bar one from 'E' Co. They no doubt kept him as a souvenir. In spite of our fires etc. it was terribly cold and a job to sleep between look out duties, which are two hours in every six.

First thing this morning it was very foggy. So we stood to arms a little longer than usual. A few of us that were lucky could go to Holy Communion early this morning. It was celebrated in a ruined farm about 500 yds behind us. I unfortunately couldnt go. There must be something in the spirit of Christmas as to day we are all on top of our trenches running about. Whereas other days we have to keep our heads well down. We had breakfast about 8.0 which went down alright especially some cocoa we made. We also had some of the post this morning. I had a parcel from B. G's Lace Dept containing a sweater, smokes, under clothes etc. We also had a card from the Queen, which I am sending back to you to look after please. After breakfast we had a game of football at the back of our trenches! We've had a few Germans over to see us this morning. They also sent a party over to bury a sniper we shot in the week. He was about a 100 yds from our trench. A few of our fellows went out and helped to bury him.

About 10.30 we had a short church parade the morning service etc. held in the trench. How we did sing. 'O come all ye faithful. And While shepherds watched their flocks by night' were the hymns we had. At present we are cooking our Christmas Dinner! so will finish this letter later.

Dinner is over! and well we enjoyed it. Our dinner party started off with fried bacon and dip-bread: followed by hot Xmas Pudding. I had a mascot in my piece. Next item on the menu was muscatels and almonds, oranges, bananas, chocolate etc followed by cocoa and smokes. You can guess we thought of the dinners at home. Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans: a party of them came 1/2way over to us so several of us went out to them. I exchanged one of my balaclavas for a hat. I've also got a button off one of their tunics. We also exchanged smokes etc. and had a decent chat. They say they won't fire tomorrow if we don't so I suppose we shall get a bit of a holiday - perhaps. After exchanging autographs and them wishing us a Happy New Year we departed and came back and had our dinner.

We can hardly believe that we've been firing at them for the last week or two - it all seems so strange. At present its freezing hard and everything is covered with ice...

...

There are plenty of huge shell holes in front of our trenches, also pieces of shrapnel to be found. I never expected to shake hands with Germans between the firing lines on Christmas Day and I don't suppose you thought of us doing so. So after a fashion we've enjoyed? our Christmas. Hoping you spend a happy time also George Boy as well. How we thought of England during the day. Kind regards to all the neighbours. With much love from Boy.

There is no Christmas truce in Iraq.

BBC Online: Christmas Cards and Politics Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

A brief article about the history and politics of Christmas cards in the USA and in Britain.

Baltimore Sun: Orioles' Sammy Stewart Descent from Pitcher to Recidivist Cocaine Addict Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

From the Baltimore Sun, December 17, 2006:

Sammy Stewart used to have it all. A hulking, fun-loving pitcher from the Blue Ridge Mountains, he played on pennant-winning teams, set major league records and signed six-figure contracts. Married to his high school sweetheart, he had a large house, two young children and 4,000 albums in his collection.

...

The man who once had everything was sentenced recently on charges stemming from his addiction. He shares a dorm with 34 inmates and is reduced to what he called "a cot and three hots" -- his version of room and board.

...

Pitching mostly out of the bullpen, he was a dependable, charismatic Oriole for most of his playing career. But since 1988, he has been charged 46 times with more than 60 drug offenses, according to local police records.

...

Stewart said he has spent all of the $3 million he earned in baseball on drugs, and also unloaded his 1983 Orioles World Series ring. He estimated he has smoked crack "tens of thousands of times."

...

Stewart's daughter, Alicia, suggested another low point: "He used my illness to bum things off people," she said. "He would tell them he needed help because of me and use the money for drugs. He even told someone I was dead."

...

Alicia said: "I don't know if it is going to help him, I hope it does. I'm worried it might make him more bitter. But it's all up to him. People have this image of him being a great guy who just happened to go down the wrong path.

"Well, he is a great guy, but he has been in this [drug] life a long time. He wants this life. It disgusts me. He'll never understand what I went through. He'll never understand a lot of things. I mean, when I came home from my lung transplant and he saw me, you know what he did? He offered me a cigarette. He said, 'Here, you can smoke now.' Can you believe that?"

As a kid growing up near Baltimore, I enjoyed the Orioles but never idolized them. I enjoyed the 1979 season when they faced the Pirates in the World Series, losing in game 7. I did follow the Orioles thereafter but increasingly less. "Ripken" for me meant the third base coach, not his Iron Man son who would play later.

In 1979 we had 4 strong starters if I remember correctly: Flanagan, McGregor, Palmer and Stone. All were giants - no doubt, backed up by solid hitting and fielding, but 4 man rotations were more common then and all were mighty. Part of what made them so strong, though, was solid long relief, which Sammy Stewart generally provided. Other pitchers come to mind, like Don Stanhouse.

This descent of a well-like ball-player into complete ruin and jail over cocaine is the saddest story I have read in a while. Literally millions, up his nose. His World Series ring (from 1983, I think) - gone. His father's collection of firearms - gone.

Damn.

Baltimore Sun: Mondawmin Mall to Get Target, Marshalls Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

From the Baltimore Sun, December 15, 2006:

After years of building in the suburbs with open land and large numbers of shoppers, big-box retailers and others are seeking new business in shopping-deprived cities such as Baltimore by pumping new life into urban neighborhoods and rethinking their cookie-cutter image.

Mondawmin Mall in West Baltimore stands to be the latest to benefit from the retail renaissance in cities across the country. General Growth Properties, which owns Mondawmin, said this week that it is in negotiations to bring Target, Marshalls and Shoppers Food Warehouse to the shopping center, which now houses mostly sneaker and urban apparel stores.

...

The $70 million Mondawmin Mall renovation is the latest example of the renewed interest for retail in Baltimore. Mondawmin is attractive to retailers because it's one of the few areas with a parking lot and easy access to many parts of the city, retail consultants say.

Mondawmin Mall - one of the very first shopping malls built in the United States - is very strongly identified in the minds of many as a "scary place." Part of the cause of this is white suburban Negrophobia, which defines anything that is or might be majority black as ipso facto "bad" and "scary". Part of it is the rational fear of anyone from the area of being part of the body count from the murders and robberies that have happened in or near the mall. Part of it is the discomfort of white suburbanites in standing out as the "odd man out"; black people undergo a similar experience routinely in predominantly white malls. The website for Mondawmin Mall shows a youngish, casually dressed white couple presumably visiting the mall; this is, to be polite, "ahistorical."

What's ironic is that some of the most stable and even wealthiest majority black neighborhoods in Baltimore are within 1-2 miles of Mondawmin: Forest Park, Walbrook, Ashburton, Liberty Heights. Reservoir Hill to the immediate SE of the mall is majority black but has a significant number of urban homesteaders of diverse backgrounds. One of the most beautiful sights in Baltimore is watching the sun rise over Ashburton Park in the morning, casting an amazing light over the downtown skyline. Much of Baltimore's black political elite is said to live nearby. To white suburbanites, this is unknown. There are scarier neighborhoods in Baltimore than Mondawmin, most of them black, a few majority white (e.g. Curtis Bay/Brooklyn, arguably non-gentrified Highlandtown, etc.)

The location is in some ways a pretty good one; it is a tolerable bus or Metro ride for many West Baltimore residents, near Baltimore City Community College Liberty Campus and not far from Coppin State. No major highway serves it directly; I-83 is not too far away but that mall is less attractive logistically for an resident of downtown or the East Side anyway (or traveling by Metro is better.) Transportation in West Baltimore is often a pain, with poorly-designed or poorly-upgraded thoroughfares, but Mondawmin is at or near the crossroads of the best of the road network, such as it is.

I have been to Mondawmin a number of times, sometimes to shop, a few times to take care of MVA business at their Mondawmin location. When I go there, I am most obviously the only white/European on the premises. Funniest story I ever heard was from an acquaintance, white guy who went to Mondawmin to buy, I swear, cowboy boots. (There is a less well-known history of black cowboys in Texas, but it was apparently unknown that day at Mondawmin Mall.)

I wish the Mall and the surrounding community the best; the return of major discount department stores is a very good thing and will tend to stabilize and strengthen the neighborhood further.