"Never"

Jim Clark, the thug who oversaw the racist gulag of Selma for more than a decade, went toe-up yesterday in an Alabama nursing home. Clark was best remembered for the nationally-televised police riot that took place in early March 1965, when civil rights activists attempted to march from Selma to the capital in Montgomery in support of federal voting rights legislation. As the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge on their way out of town, Clark's Dallas County sheriffs joined a phalanx of state troopers who clubbed and gassed everyone who wasn't wearing a badge. Clark would later insist that no one had actually beaten the activists; instead, he claimed, they had all fallen down simultaneously.

Though Clark could often be seen wearing a button that boasted "Never" -- a word that neatly summarized his views on black voting rights -- he was thrown from office the following year, when newly-registered black voters bade him farewell from public life.

A man who represented a less evolved era of white supremacy, Jim Clark's spirit endures nevertheless.

. . . in comments, nolo reminds us that Clark later served time for scheming to import and sell dope from his mobile home . . .

Decision Rules

Although it's unfortunate for the Democrats, I have to say that Wyoming's rules for replacement of Senator Thomas make sense, or at least more sense than a system under which the governor gets to choose whomever he likes. The random death of a legislator shouldn't be allowed to shake up the political balance in Washington.

"That's called a Fire and Brimstone"

A toast of Campari, ginger ale and soda to Jerry.

He told Christine Amanpour on CNN last week that he'd been praying to God for 20 more years of life so he could complete his work. He seemed pretty optimistic that his prayers would be answered, because it apparently happened just like that to someone in the Bible.

Humble to the end.

Ouch

When asked, I've always said that if I didn't pass quietly in my sleep at the age of 85, I would want to die -- heroically defending my reputation for dexterity and rhythm -- in a dance contest.

Looks like I need a new Plan B.

Bertha Wilson (1923-2007)

The feminist Canadian jurist Bertha Wilson passed away last week. Wilson was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada (by Pierre Trudeau in 1982, the same year the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was ratified.) See also Pithlord and zuzu. I discussed her concurrence in the 1988 case R. v. Morgentaler, which struck down Canada's federal statute criminalizing abortion here. A quote from the case would seem a fitting epitaph:

Given then that the right to liberty guaranteed by s. 7 of the Charter gives a woman the right to decide for herself whether or not to terminate her pregnancy, does s. 251 of the Criminal Code violate this right? Clearly it does. The purpose of the section is to take the decision away from the woman and give it to a committee. Furthermore, as the Chief Justice correctly points out, at p. 56, the committee bases its decision on "criteria entirely unrelated to [the pregnant woman's] own priorities and aspirations". The fact that the decision whether a woman will be allowed to terminate her pregnancy is in the hands of a committee is just as great a violation of the woman's right to personal autonomy in decisions of an intimate and private nature as it would be if a committee were established to decide whether a woman should be allowed to continue her pregnancy. Both these arrangements violate the woman's right to liberty by deciding for her something that she has the right to decide for herself.

[...]

I agree with my colleague and I think that his comments are very germane to the instant case because, as the Chief Justice and Beetz J. point out, the present legislative scheme for the obtaining of an abortion clearly subjects pregnant women to considerable emotional stress as well as to unnecessary physical risk. I believe, however, that the flaw in the present legislative scheme goes much deeper than that. In essence, what it does is assert that the woman's capacity to reproduce is not to be subject to her own control. It is to be subject to the control of the state. She may not choose whether to exercise her existing capacity or not to exercise it. This is not, in my view, just a matter of interfering with her right to liberty in the sense (already discussed) of her right to personal autonomy in decision-making, it is a direct interference with her physical "person" as well. She is truly being treated as a means -- a means to an end which she does not desire but over which she has no control. She is the passive recipient of a decision made by others as to whether her body is to be used to nurture a new life. Can there be anything that comports less with human dignity and self-respect? How can a woman in this position have any sense of security with respect to her person? I believe that s. 251 of the Criminal Code deprives the pregnant woman of her right to security of the person as well as her right to liberty.

R.I.P.

Halberstam

Just my imagination, or are there a lot of people dying lately?

The Best and the Brightest is an outstanding book; I haven't yet read War in a Time of Peace, but I have it and I'll probably dig in eventually. His baseball work was full of factual errors, but always included a powerful, well related narrative. Halberstam spoke at the University of Kentucky in the autumn of last year. It wasn't the best performance, either substantively or in delivery, and it seemed as if he was ailing, although that hardly has any relevance for how he died. Nevertheless, he was one of the most important journalists of the last forty years, and his Vietnam work continues to hold up well.

RIP.

Boris

1931-2007. He got drunk and fell off a bridge once. Then he presided over the final wreckage of his country. If anyone ever wants evidence of what the two worst economic models of the 20th century -- Soviet communism and Washington neoliberalism -- can do for a nation, go ask a Russian.

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions was the first Vonnegut book I ever read, and I have to say it really messed me up for quite some time when I was 13 years old. For some reason I really identified with the character of Dwayne Hoover, who winds up going mad and beating the shit out of a load of people in a bar. (Trust me: it's funnier than it sounds, even though in Palm Sunday he only gave the book a grade of "C.")

In 1971, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a brief essay for the New York Times that I've thought about quite a bit over the past five years but haven't read again until tonight. Titled "Torture and Blubber," Vonnegut's essay wondered

where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of torture.

Children talk about tortures a lot. They often make up what they hope are new ones. I can remember a friend's saying to me when I was a child: "You want to hear a really neat torture?" The other day I heard a child say to another: "You want to hear a really cool torture?" And then an impossibly complicated engine of pain was described. A cross would be cheaper, and work better, too . . .

I am sorry we tried torture. I am sorry we tried anything. I hope we never try torture again . . . .

. . . And this, from The Rotarian magazine (1972):

When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment lasts forever.

And So it Goes...

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007. Rest in peace. You will be missed.

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

People did not like it here.

Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007

Jean Baudrillard did not happen.

Eagleton

Thomas Eagleton, 1929-2007.

He would have made rather a better vice-president than Spiro Agnew, but that's damning with faint praise. Without doubt a fine legislator, he played no small part in the effort to restrain executive power after the Vietnam War.

As I'm just back from Chicago (ISA) there'll be no Deposed Monarch Blogging this week.

Age of Schlesinger

Arthur Schlesinger has moved on. Apart from a couple of minor cites from A Thousand Days for a paper I wrote a long time ago, the only Schlesinger I've read is Age of Jackson. That would have been autumn quarter 1993 at the University of Oregon, in a History of Jacksonian America class taught by "Mad" Jack Maddux. If I recall correctly, Erik Loomis was also in that class. Schlesinger spun an entertaining yarn in Age of Jackson, but it would have been nice if, at some point, he'd noticed that Andrew Jackson wasn't actually Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Not missed

Another nonagenarian bastard is dead. As head of the French police, Maurice Papon was a Nazi collaborator under the Vichy regime, overseeing the transfer of at least 1500 French Jews to the camps in Eastern Europe. After the war, Papon furthered the cause of law and order by heading up the Parisian police -- a position he acquired in March 1958 after several thousand police officers demonstrated on his behalf, led by the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. During the rally that immediately preceded Papon's nomination as chief, his fellows -- many of whom had also served the Vichy government -- were heard chanting such inspiring slogans as "Sales Juifs! A la Seine! Mort aux fellaghas!" ("Filthy Jews! Into the Seine! Death to the rebels!")

The "rebels" to which the policemen referred were of course the Algerians, who had the temerity to beg release from the abusive colonial situation they'd endured for more than a century. Papon, conveniently, had spent the previous two years supervising the detention and torture of those associated with the Algerian resistance. Less than six months after being named prefect of police, Papon oversaw the creation of an urban concentration camp in Paris, where 5000 Algerians were detained; two of the facilities used for the detentions had been similarly employed by the Petain government during World War II. When the FLN intensified its Parisian bombing campaign in August 1961, Papon instituted a racist curfew that confined French Algerians to their homes after 5:30 p.m. During a peaceful October demonstration that brought 30,000 people into the streets, Papon's men opened fire without provocation and killed scores of protestors.

True to their March 1958 promises, some of Papon's men tossed Algerian victims into the Seine.

A Tribute to the Man who Changed My Life

Robert Adler, inventor of the modern remote control, has died.

Had he not invented it, I would be less fat and better read.

Soccer for the Disabled

Alejandro Finisterre, leftist opponent of Franco, inventor of foosball, and a pioneer of airplane hijacking, died last week. Via Randy and Trend.

Why Can't She be Both, Like the Late Earl Warren?

I wonder if this sentence could have been better constructed...

A ninth-grade dropout, she rose quickly from life as a small-town wife and mother to a highly visible, and sparsely clad, career as a topless dancer, pinup, model, film actress, reality-show star, clothing “designer,” product endorser, and, briefly but most notably, wife of a tycoon nearly four times her age, a marriage that would eventually propel her to the United States Supreme Court.

RIP Anna Nicole Smith.

Buck McCoy

Looks like four. I didn't really think very much about Dennis Weaver before I saw Duel last year, my main knowledge of him coming from his role as Sam McCloud. In Duel he played a middle class salesman taken out of his depth by a confrontation with a psychotic trucker. He begins to self-destruct as he realizes that the implicit social contract that has governed his life and, really, priviliged him within his universe has started to collapse. Weaver was perfect for the role because he exuded a kind of semi-toughness, an earthiness that makes the disintegration of his carefully managed existence deliciously uncomfortable to watch.

It's a pity that he got stuck in a particular kind of role for the last half of his career. Nevertheless, he did good work.