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Today's Stories November 2, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Holy Alito!: Not as Crazy as Scalia, But Just as Bad November 1, 2005 Ron Jacobs An Interview with Kent State's Dave Airhart Gary Leupp The Plame Affair Leads to Rome John Ross Days of the Dead on the Border Bill Quigley Why Are They Making New Orleans a Ghost Town? Joseph Nevins From a Boundary of Death to One of Life Dave Lindorff Thinking About Impeachment Linda S. Heard Bashing Syria: Another Trojan Horse from the UN? Heather Gray Thank You, Mrs. Parks Michael Dickinson To Di For: Charlie and Camilla Cross the Pond Jeffrey St. Clair Kent State: Wise Up and Back Off   October 31, 2005 Elaine Cassel Libby's Lies Mark Weisbrot Pop Goes the Bubble: Bernancke and the Fed Mike Whitney Carry On, Patrick Fitzgerald Norman Solomon After the Libby Indictment, the Press Acquits Itself Farooq Sulehria Trading Weapons While Kashmir Burns Nicole Colson Scapegoating Immigrants Madis Senner Dhafir Sentenced to 22 Years: Another Erosion of Civil Rights Paul Craig Roberts Scooter and the Neocons October 29 / 30, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair The Libby Indictment: Gotterdammerung for the Bushies? Peter Linebaugh The Wedges of Hephaestus Tim Wise Framing the Poor: Katrina, Conservative Myth-Making and the Media John Chuckman Bushspeak: Dark and Garbled Words Steven Higgs Green Hoosiers: Forging a New Democracy in the Heartland Brian Cloughley The Fifth Afghan War M. Shahid Alam Israel and the Consequences of Uniqueness Nikki Robinson Crack Down at Kent State Ralph Nader Let the PIRGs Begin!: Student Activism Thrives Joe DeRaymond Requiem for Bethlehem Steel? Joshua Frank Karl's Great Escape: Did Rove Rat on Scooter? Laura Santina Tongue-Tied on Iraq: Why Aren't the Dems Screaming Bloody Murder? Fred Gardner Death of an Organizer Michael Dickinson Insult Your Country Ron Jacobs Autumn in America Dr. Susan Block Fear and Sex: a Halloween Greeting Vanessa S. Jones Self-Portrait, 1994. Bronte Beach Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Marbet, Gardner, Ford, Albert, Engel, Krieger & St. Clair Website of the Weekend Red State Update   October 28, 2005 Jared Bernstein Inflation Up; Wages Down: Fastest Decline in Wages on Record Virginia Tilley Embracing the Anti-Aparthied Movement in Israel/Palestine Phil Gasper The Race to Execute Tookie Williams Jennifer Matsui It's Mardi Graft Time! Manual Garcia, Jr. Is the US Really Against Torture? Monica Benderman In the Name of Justice Jason Leopold Fitzgerald Focuses on the Forgeries Dave Lindorff Suddenly, Bush Endorses Right of Fair Trials Otober 27, 2005 Saul Landau The Scandal Isn't the Leak, But the Illegal War Stuart Hodkinson Bono and Geldoff: "We Saved Africa" Oh No, They Didn't! Ingmar Lee Stop the Troops!: No Glory or Honor in Iraq Lila Rajiva License to Bill: Gates Does India Ilan Pappe The Last Moment of Hope Niranjan Ramakrishnan Waiting for Fitzgerald Michael Donnelly Look Who's Talking Now: the GOP on Perjury Ron Jacobs Escape the Weight of Your Corporate Logo Cockburn / St. Clair White House in Meltdown   October 26, 2005 Kathy Kelly For Whom They Toll Gary Leupp Dialectics of the Plame Affair Mike Marqusee Empire of Denial Eric Ruder War Crimes in Afghanistan Patrick Cockburn Iraq: a Constitutionally Divided Nation Joshua Frank Fitzgerald v. the Bushies: Hold Your Elation in Check J.L. Chestnut, Jr. The Legacy of Rosa Parks Website of the Day Decent Work in America: the 2005 Work Environment Index     October 25, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Condi and Syrian Regime Change: Could Somebody Recommend a President? Ken Sengupta / Patrick Cockburn Attack on the Palestine Hotel Conn Hallinan Sleight of Hand: Iran, India and the US Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Pulling the Court Strings Jackie Corr Barbara Bush: Poster Gorgon of the Houston Astros Robert Day Talk to Strangers John Sugg Judith Miller and Me   October 24, 2005 Dave Lindorff Revoke Judy Miller's Pulitzer Michael Donnelly Shades of Iran/contra Patrick Cockburn A Nation Stands on Trial Mike Whitney Apres Rove Norman Solomon Iraq is Not Vietnam, But... Bill and Kathleen Christison US Foreign Policy and Palestine   October 22 / 23, 2005 Alexander Cockburn When Divas Collide: Maureen Dowd v. Judy Miller Billy Sothern Letter from the Circle Bar, New Orleans Saul Landau Bush, an Assessment Ralph Nader An Open Letter to Bush on Harriet Miers Behrooz Ghamari Whose Justice Does Saddam's Trial Serve? Brian Cloughley Bush the Strategist: Pyrrhus Without a Victory? Diana Barahona Venezuela's National Workers' Union Fred Gardner Dershowitzed! Lee Sustar What the War on Terror is Really About Patrick Cockburn Murder of Saddam Trial Defense Lawyer Laura Carlsen Mexico City Seamstresses Recall 1985 Quake James Petras China Bashing and the Loss of US Competitiveness Joshua Frank Invading Iran: Who is to Stop Them? Manuel Garcia, Jr. Disasters are Us Michelle Bollinger When Abortion Was Illegal Missy Comley Beattie CSI: Iraq Kona Lowell Intelligent Design: Making High School Fun Ben Tripp Tanks for the Memories Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening To This Week Poets' Basement Albert and Engel Website of the Day Indictment Watch   October 21, 2005 Dave Lindorff The Democrats' Abortion Hypocrisy Winslow T. Wheeler Paying for Their Mistakes: Incompetence, Deception and the Defense Budget Col. Dan Smith The Destruction of the National Guard Norman Solomon Media at Crossroads: 25 Years After Reagan's Triumph Madis Senner Abusing Katrina Michael Donnelly Richard Pombo: DeLay in Cowboy Boots October 20, 2005 Dave Lindorff Impeachment Comes to NYC Ray McGovern 16 Fatal Words: Cheney's Chickens Come Home to Roost Jeremy Brecher / Brendan Smith Attack Syria? Invade Iran?: By What Constitutional Right? Patrick Cockburn Saddam Refuses to Recognize Court Kevin Zeese Was the Iraqi Constitution Vote Fixed? Ross Eisenbrey Millions Would Lose Pay and Protections Under Enzi Amendment Randy Shields James McMurtry Makes It in Dayton Justine Davidson Prosecuting Bush in Canada for Torture: a Small Victory After Lucas Cranach Judy and Holofernes Joe Allen The Scandalous History of the Red Cross   October 19, 2005 Christopher Reed Koizumi and the Rape of Nanking Stephen Soldz Bush and Avian Flu: the Excuses Begin to Fly Chet Richards War and Intelligence Patrick Cockburn Saddam on Trial Scott Richard Lyons Multicultural Columbus? Ralph Nader An Interview with Rev. William Sloane Coffin Website of the Day Shocking Video: Why Birds May Be Taking Viral Vengeance on Humans   October 18, 2005 Chet Flippo Merle Haggard: "Let's Get Out of Iraq" Ron Jacobs Dual Devotions: the Catholic Church and the US Flag Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A Tale of Two Cities: From DC to Toledo Dave Lindorff Judy Miller: Little Miss Run Amok Virginia Rodino A Winter Patriot: Reflections on the Antiwar Movement Thomas Healy The Weather in Goshen: Still Radical After All These Years Ralph Nader A New New Orleans Stephen Lendman The Sorrows of Haiti Patrick Cockburn On the Eve of Saddam's Trial: a Divided Iraq   October 17, 2005 Peter Linebaugh Spinoza and the Black Limos Norman Solomon Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State Cockburn / Sengupta "If the Sunnis Don't Like It, That's Their Problem" Mike Whitney Miller's Confession: Last Gasp Before Indictments? Uri Avnery Iraq Now: What Awaits Samira? Harold Pinter Torture & Misery in the Name of Freedom Website of the Day Al Joudi v. Bush   October 15 / 16, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Ayatollahs of the Apocalypse Patrick Cockburn "This Constitution Won't Get Me a Job" Saul Landau Two Terrorists and a Lush: Osama, Posada and Bush's Drinking Neve Gordon "Beyond Chutzpah": Exposing Grave Moral Distortions Moshe Adler Poverty in New York City Christopher Brauchli Lynndie England's Burden Diane Farsetta The Emperor Doesn't Disclose: the Fight Against Fake News Sam Husseini Notes on Current Reporting About Judith Miller Monica Benderman From Chaos to Conscience to Peace Mickey Z. POW Abuse by US: Nothing New Going On Here Douglas C. Smyth George W. Bush, the Honorius of Our Time Lee Sustar Will Delphi Bust the UAW? Fred Gardner Cannabinoids Arrive in Realm of Established Fact Elizabeth Schulte A Former Panther's Georgia Campaign: an Interview with Elaine Brown Joshua Frank Will the Democrats Save Harriet Miers? David Vest Down with Formalism! Up with Values! Ben Tripp Epistle II: the Reawakenign Poets Basement Engel, Albert, Ford and Louise Website of the Weekend The Hidden Canyon   October 14, 2005 Farrah Hassen A Somber Ramadan in Syria Ron Jacobs The Black Panthers: They Haven't Forgotten; Neither Should We Sasha Kramer USAID and Haiti: the Friendly Face of Imperialism? Katrina Yeaw The Student Struggle in Italy Nicole Colson Bird Flu: Militarizing Health Care Raúl Zibechi Survival and Existence in El Alto Nikolas Kozloff Hugo Chávez and the Politics of Race Website of the Day LA Filmmakers Cooperative October 13, 2005 Jeremy Scahill Mr. Bush Goes to Tikrit (Sort Of) Jeff Birkenstein A Thoreau for Our Time: Why Cindy Sheehan Matters Brendan Smith / Jeremy Brecher Harriet Miers: Bush or the Constitution? Stan Cox Did You Know This About Iraq? Anis Memon The Curious Case of Russ Feingold Gary Leupp Miller, Libby and the June Notes Dave Zirin A Tribute to August Wilson Matthew Koehler America's Endangered Forests Werther The Two-Headed Monster Website of the Day Hurricane Song October 12, 2005 Omar Waraich Britain and the Quake: Mean and Stingy William Cook Voices Behind the Entombment Wall Phil Gasper Countdown to a Legal Lynching Dave Lindorff Impeachment Now and Then: Clinton, Bush and the Polls Matt Vidal Capital, Power and Class John Gautreaux New Orleans will Never be the Same Diana Johnstone Srebrenica Revisited: Using War as an Excuse for War Mark Weisbrot The IMF Has Lost Its Influence Brian J. Foley Gitmo Tribunals Endanger Public Safety Website of the Day Columbus Day Lies   October 11, 2005 Roger Morris / Steve Schmidt Strategic Demands of the 21st Century Lila Rajiva Live from New Orleans: Abu Ghraib Bill Quigley New Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again Paul Craig Roberts Natural Born Liars Dave Lindorff Recruiters in Schools: No Lie Left Untried Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Suspect Thy Neighbor Mitchel Cohen Showdown at Chuck E. Cheese Tariq Ali Pakistan will Never Forget This Horror Website of the Day L'Heure Americaine   October 10, 2005 Cindy and Craig Corrie Rachel's Words Live Joshua Frank Washington's War Dems Gideon Levy The Beautiful Life Without Arafat Alan Wallis The Fight for Free Speech at Union Square Mickey Z. In Defense of Liars CounterPunch News Service Vermont Independence Convention Paul Craig Roberts The Police State is Closer Than You Think Website of the Day Dylan's Chronicles   October 8 / 9, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Rhetoric and Reality in the Business of Getting Rid of Black People Ralph Nader Katrina and the Growls of Greed Jennifer Van Bergen New American Law: Legal Strategies in the Dharfir Case Saul Landau An Oily Religious Dream Jeff Halper Setting Up Abbas Lenni Brenner The Millions More Movement and Zionism Nikolas Kozloff Bird Flu and Bush Brian Cloughley Training Soldiers in Iraq Alice Slater A Nobel Prize for Chernobyl? John Gautreaux A View from Cajun Country Fred Gardner Does the Controlled Substances Act Mean What It Says? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Leveethan Approach M.G. Piety Rot in the Ivory Tower: Collusion, Cover-Up and Kierkegaard Tom Gorman The Hitchens Doctrine Mike Whitney Bunker Days with George Aseem Shrivastava Beyond the Wasteland: Lessons from Afghanistan Ben Tripp Religion, an Epistle Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Ford   October 7, 2005 Larry Johnson The Plame Case: the Real Issues Will Youmans Why Do We Hate Our Freedom? Recruiters and Thugs on Campus Dave Lindorff Bird Flu: Evolution or Intelligent Design? Judith Scherr Haiti's Children's Prison Russell D. Hoffman Nukes for Peace, Revisited?: Nobel Prize Debacle Jared Bernstein Katrina and Jobs Jennifer Van Bergen New American Law: the Case of Dr. Dhafir Website of the Day FBI Witchhunt October 6, 2005 P. Sainath "Take That, Tom Friedman": Indian Masses Reject NYT's Neoliberal Idol Again Scott Parkin When Antiwar Activists Get Mugged Paul Craig Roberts Blundering into Syria Andréa Schmidt Haiti's Biometric Elections: a High-Tech Experiment in Exclusion Dave Lindorff Easy Money in the Big Easy Joshua Frank In Defense of Lew Rockwell M. Junaid Alam Jackboots at George Mason Matthew Koehler Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot Robert Pollin Is the Dollar Still Falling?   October 5, 2005 Heather Gray Militarization is Not an Answer for Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines Robert Jensen Is Bush a Racist? Ramzy Baroud Bush's Final Choice: America or the Empire Col. Dan Smith Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything is Bad" Dave Zirin Barry Bonds Laughs Last Paul Craig Roberts Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons Took Over Alan Maass Doing the Right Wing's Dirty Work   October 4, 2005 Nikolas Kozloff Shocking the Two Party System: a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt. Mike Roselle Houston, You've Got a Problem Joshua Frank The Scoop on Harriet Miers John Chuckman War Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say Alan Farago Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers, Hurricanes and the Keys Mickey Z. An Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski Christine & Ethan Rose Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims Gary Leupp An Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History Website of the Day Rodney Crowell on Bob Dylan   October 3, 2005 Vijay Prashad Desperation at Holyoke Paul Craig Roberts Condi Rice: Gunslinger Joshua Frank An Interview with Cindy Sheehan Seth Sandronsky The Hiring Crisis for Black Teens Jeffrey St. Clair The Great Green Scare             Subscribe Online

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To contribute by phone you can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683 Onward, Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva November 2, 2005 Watching CNN Redefine a Heroine of the Resistance Saving Rosa Parks from American Hypocrisy By ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ Who can argue with the honors paid to Rosa Parks, the woman described repeatedly as "the mother of the Civil Rights movement"? As the first woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda where, not too long ago, Ronald Reagan's corpse lay, she is the heroine nobody can find fault with. Fifty years ago, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. In this simple act, the story goes, the American civil rights movement was born. I wish the story could end on that high note. Instead, a hagiography filled with hypocrisy is slowly turning Rosa Parks into a conservative weapon against the present generation of antiracist activists, who are already being contrasted against Park's "unassuming" and "modest" way of changing things, to quote Kyra Phillips on CNN. After celebrating Parks' diminutive size and "quiet" courage, Phillips asked Reverend Joseph Lowery, an African American civil rights advocate, how Parks' memory made him feel about all the current-day commentators who are "always on the TV set complaining and shouting." Phillips was convinced that Parks was "very different;" in fact, a few minutes earlier both Phillips and Lowery had agreed that Parks was an angel chosen by God. [1] Even Parks' defiance was assumed only by divine right, a right not likely to be conferred on any people of color who wish to continue fighting for equality today. Skepticism at times like this borders on bad taste, but a small dose of skepticism is necessary to save Rosa Parks from some bad-faith hero worship poised to handicap the very struggle she contributed to. As Rev. Lowery retorted to Phillips, now is not the time to let people "praise Rosa Parks through one side of their mouths" and then from the other side, back Bush's reactionary pick for the Supreme Court. [2] A realigned Court could easily roll back affirmative action, and Alito's draconian record on prison rights would hurt the African American inmate population (which, among males at least, is still larger than the number of blacks in college). The same trend occurred last year, upon the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. On one rhetorical level, spokespeople from all sides of the political spectrum sang odes to the progress made since the 1950s. Heartfelt recollections surfaced from countless famous black people, including both superstars and scholars, who spent their childhoods in the segregated South. On a hidden level, however, the discussion made it harder for younger minorities, who have no authenticating memories of pre-1960s segregation, to speak frankly about racial inequality today. And on the lowest level of the rhetoric, the vulgar discussion on talk shows and call-in programs stated what the saccharine speeches on the top level were implying but not saying directly: The struggle was over, because racism was a thing of the past. Unhappiness in the 21st century is a function of ingratitude and the cultural flaws of people of color themselves, over which white people have no power. Between the Brown anniversary and Parks' death, Hurricane Katrina intervened, changing things. American racial tensions became as globally evident as they were in the Rodney King riots thirteen years earlier. I was hoping for a frank discussion of America's present racial problems; if any good could come out of the disastrous death toll in the Gulf states, at least we could take the opportunity to update our consciousness and abandon the trite clichés about racism existing fifty years ago "but not today." To our country's credit, some discussion did surface in the media. Prominent scholars were invited onto CNN, MSNBC, and others, to discuss the racial implications of Katrina. But we can always count on the smug white sanctimony of men like Lou Dobbs of CNN, who quickly poked at race scholars to ask, "haven't these black spokespeople had anything to say about the fact that New Orleans' mayor was black?" Race sputtered as a topic for a little while and seemed, somehow, to be forgotten. And maybe people of color needed to forget it for a while, because the press was sending mixed messages and the discussion seemed to expose all of us to too much risk. At one moment, the viewer was asked to sympathize with black mothers whose infants were dehydrated at the Superdome; at the next moment, reporters shared the lurid stories about rape and people firing at the rescue workers who were trying to save them (there was no need to tag these monsters as black, since the streaming images created a bizarre epistemology that assured us that they were black before anyone needed to ask.) Rape and irrational violence are not exactly new stereotypes to affix to men of color, and the underlying threat in the press was simple: talk too much about racial inequality and we will Willie Hortonize the whole damn city. "Le Rage des Oubliés," ran the headline of France's Liberation in the shameful days after Katrina struck. "The Rage of the Forgotten." The picture below the headline featured a lone black woman in tattered clothes, screaming at the top of her lungs on one of the battered streets of New Orleans, presumably one of the many African Americans left stranded without food or water. [3] The tragic truth in the French critique of American racism was its prophetic rather than descriptive quality: the angry ones were going to be forgotten, because they were angry. The American press knows two courses of action when dealing with angry minorities: crush them or erase them. With extreme sadness, I see Rosa Parks slowly being marshaled in the latter course. "Unassuming," "humble," this "small-framed" "seamstress" "chosen by God" is the perfect antidote to the "Rage des Oubliés." Instead of discussing Rosa Parks' readiness for confrontation or how enraged she must have felt about the Montgomery law, the adjectives emphasize her sacrificial meekness. Kyra Phillips may have simply blurted the question that much of white America is thinking but refuses to ask: "now what do you think of all those commentators who keep complaining all the time on the television, when Rosa Parks' approach was so different?" In death, she is brought into the Capitol Rotunda. The honor is not hers, I would argue, but the Rotunda's. In a sickening irony, she lies in the same spot that served to honor J. Edgar Hoover's corpse shortly after his death on May 4, 1972. [4] Hoover, the longest-lasting head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, worked indefatigably to destroy everything that Rosa Parks stood for. To place her coffin inside the Rotunda is a not-too-subtle act of ownership by the conservative Washington camp that follows in Hoover's footsteps, not Rosa Parks'. Her story will now belong to someone else, and this time, she cannot refuse to be placed where they want to place her. The story will now go something like this: racism once existed, but it does not anymore. It ended because God chose one small seamstress, and she defied the law, but she defied it meekly, quietly, unassumingly, without pride or aggression. If you are patient and quiet, you will be remembered. If you are angry or militant, you will be forgotten, just as the French headline says. To his great credit, Reverend Joseph Lowery politely resisted Kyra Phillips' innuendoes on CNN. "It takes all approaches," Lowery said. "I do not condone violence, but I do condone militancy." Phillips, blonde and smiling, may or may not have understood that Lowery was telling her she was wrong. She did not say anything in response. But the endless photographs of Rosa Parks to follow simply reinforced everything Phillips had said: black-and-white pictures of a bygone era, the small "quiet angel" as Lowery called her, serenely defying her oppressors in a feminine, almost Christ-like sacrifice consciously differentiated from the black woman screaming at the top of her lungs in the wreckage of New Orleans. Turning heroes against their causes is a very old routine in American racial history. When I teach African American literature to college students, I always observe how well students have learned the "I love Martin Luther King but I hate Malcolm X" game. They vaunt Frederick Douglass' method of opposing slavery through self-education and they condemn Nat Turner's violence (in a mock trial I held in Camden, New Jersey, for instance, the students called Douglass' ghost to the stand and used his testimony to convict Turner.) Someone somewhere usually manages to rewrite racial history in the United States to instill: (1) indifference to the racial problems of the present, (2) a false remembrance of past heroism in the face of an injustice that is supposedly gone, and (3) an even falser nostalgia for the classier, more polite, more Christian, nicer, and more acceptable forms of antiracist resistance that used to exist. All this rewriting can be translated to the crass thought, "they don't make colored people the way they used to." African Americans are not immune to this willful amnesia. Footage of Condoleezza Rice waving to the crowds at an event to honor Rosa Parks' memory should remind us of that. When he died in 1895, fifty years after his heroic act of publishing a famous slave narrative, Frederick Douglass' memory was manipulated in a similar way. Pundits used some of the same contortions to distance early twentieth-century America from racial problems. Many apologists hoped to construe race oppression as something that died with the defunct practice of slavery. Some favorably contrasted Douglass' Christian patience against the more explicit demands of an educated black elite led by W.E.B. DuBois. The stakes in race were high and the strategies a little desperate: the beginning of the twentieth century found the United States uncomfortably tied up in a quagmire not unlike the occupation of Iraq. President McKinley had led the United States to war against Spain in 1898 and found himself saddled with former Spanish territories, especially Puerto Rico and the Philippines, laden with social problems and insurgencies. In his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington praises McKinley as "the best example" of "those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient and polite." [5] Washington's disturbing lack of criticism may be explained by the apparent agenda revealed by his article, "Signs of Progress Among the Negroes" in a 1900 edition of Century. Washington wanted to export his Tuskegee model for black education to the newly acquired Caribbean territories full of Spanish-speaking Negroes who, as he says in Century, "are largely an agricultural people, and for this reason, in addition to a higher degree of mental and religious training, they need the same agricultural, mechanical, and domestic training that is fast helping the negroes in our Southern States." Washington continues: "Industrial training will not only help them to the ownership of property, habits of thrift and economy, but the acquiring of these elements of strength will go further than anything else in improving the moral and religious condition of the masses, just as has been and is true of my people in the Southern States." [6] Washington's idealistic vision of Americans uplifting "liberated" blacks from the former Spanish colonies came at a time when countless American intellectuals were decrying the effects of the Spanish-American War. To counteract war guilt and charges of racism toward "little brown brothers" in the Philippines and the Caribbean, Washington employed his own race's history as a way of enforcing paternalism onto other races. And to do so, Washington used the sanctified memory of Douglass, who had only recently died. In his 1901 autobiography, Washington describes what happened years earlier, when Douglass was told to move from the whites-only car of a train, to the section reserved for Negroes: This reminds me of a conversation which I once had with the Hon. Frederick Douglass. At one time Mr. Douglass was travelling in the state of Pennsylvania, and was forced, on account of his colour, to ride in the baggage-car, in spite of the fact that he had paid the same price for his passage that the other passengers had paid. When some of the white passengers went into the baggage-car to console Mr. Douglass, and one of them said to him: "I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner," Mr. Douglass straightened himself up on the box upon which he was sitting, and replied: "They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me." [7] A troubling nuance hides beneath the surface praise of Douglass: Heroism is not resisting. Heroism is not making a scene. Instead, heroism means accepting with grace the restrictions unfairly imposed, only with an internal sense of dignity. Booker T. Washington is a hero in his own right for advancing industrial education; nonetheless he made several unsavory claims in Up from Slavery, including the falsehood that the Klu Klux Klan did not exist [8] and specious generalizations about black people's profligacy based on what he observed as a guest in a few families' homes. [9] His main detractor, DuBois, criticized Washington for using his autobiography to silence the protests of educated black men, many of whom did not want to accept Jim Crow laws with the patient dignity Washington attributed to Douglass. (Since it is Washington telling the story and not Douglass, it would be unfair to assume that the description of Douglass' reaction to post-bellum segregation in Up from Slavery accurately reflected Douglass' philosophy.) DuBois attacks Washington for encouraging silence: "the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners." [10] The early twentieth century and early twenty-first century share a tormented racial landscape. In both settings, it is easy for the shameful crime of racism to seem like a thing of the past. The Civil War ended in 1865 and The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965: forty years later, in both cases, America was/is a little tired of race and anxious to stop thinking about it. Nonetheless, in both cases, African Americans still confront(ed) the persistent racism that never went away, and new races keep/kept complicating the equation because of imperialism, global migration, and war. Booker T. Washington used African American experience to abet the exploitation of Asians and Latinos in 1901. In October 2005, Lou Dobbs interviewed Jesse Jackson and prodded him to admit that illegal immigrants from Mexico were stealing jobs from unemployed black people in New Orleans. Dobbs' program on CNN has become an endless crusade against immigrants (especially Latinos, Asians, and Muslims), whom Dobbs has blamed for terrorism, taxes, real estate scams, crime, and the bus that blew up during the evacuation of Houston before Hurricane Rita--as a final coup de grace, Dobbs finally finds a way to blame people of color for the sufferings of people of color. Rosa Parks will soon be used in the same way. The tactics are remarkably similar and should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention to race (unfortunately, few people are.) Where there are signs of persistent racial problems, such as Jim Crow back then, and Hurricane Katrina now, one camp usually advises people of color not to complain too much, to be "quiet" and "unassuming" and to "go slowly." Supposedly, we hear, this means being like the dead black heroes of a romanticized past--Frederick Douglass with his inner dignity in a segregated train car, Rosa Parks with her small seamstress body and unassuming angelic nonviolence. One of the most astute people to deconstruct racial hypocrisy was James Baldwin, when he quoted Thurgood Marshall as saying, "They don't mean go slow." [11] Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass were not patient, unassuming, meek, or angelic; and only the most perverted logic of historical denial could ever lead us to characterize them as such. They were heroes because they fought, they complained, and they stood strong in the face of entire societies wanting them to shut up or die. Nor, I would contend, were they entirely nonviolent. It is an aggressive act to initiate a boycott and one that knowingly provokes a violent backlash. Douglass' famous chiasmus that "you have seen how a man became a slave, now you will see how a slave became a man," occurs, after all, after he physically strikes the white man determined to beat him into submission. Nothing will make me happier than seeing Rosa Parks brought back out of the Capitol Rotunda, where our memories of her can breath again--that is, as long as we can still remember who she really was. Robert O. Lopez is a frequent contributor to Buffalo Report. He can be reached at: bobby.o.lopez@lycos.com [1] Live From. Narr. Kyra Phillips. CNN. 31 Oct 2005. [2] Ibid. [3] Liberation. 5 Sept 2005. [4] Powers, Richard Gid. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press, 1987. 482. [5] Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery (1901). New York: Dover, 1995. 88. [6] Washington, Booker T. "Signs of Progress Among the Negroes." Century Magazine 1900. American Studies at the University of Virginia. 31 Oct 2005 . [7] Washington, Up from Slavery, 47-48. [8] Ibid., 38. [9] Ibid., 51-56. Washington notes with indignation, for example, that he visited a home that had "One fork, and a sixty-dollar organ!" (54). [10] DuBois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folks (1903). New York: Penguin, 1989. 39-40. [11] Baldwin, James. "Faulkner and Desegregation." Collected Essays. Ed. Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998. 209.   What You're Missing in the Special Expanded Print Edition The War So Far: a Failure Worse Than Vietnam by Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad "The need for the White House to produce a fantasy picture of Iraq is because it dare not admit that it has engineered one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worse than Vietnam because the enemy is punier and the original ambitions greater." Get the answers you're looking for in the subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! 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