mealypotatoes

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

William Lloyd Garrison, introductory column for The Liberator

# history language

But it was one thing to threaten force against the South, long regarded as the country’s most benighted region, and quite another to marshal it against the North, home of the nation’s leading banks and corporations, its most powerful media, and the very liberals who most passionately supported the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, the federal government’s legal guns were locked into place, facing south. Only in the late sixties and early seventies did they begin to swivel and train their barrels on the hitherto exempt cities of the North.

J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground

(And apparently it is yet another thing to incorporate the problems of civil rights in the North into its history education. This whole book is news to me.)

Did you know Ted Kennedy was once chased (~2:00) in Government Center by protestors, throwing tomatoes and breaking windows, for supporting forced busing? The announcer reports with wonderful accent: “The crowd surged toward this once-favored son. It was a strange crowd to surround a Kennedy.” This was one of the moments that inspired Lukas to write his book. He says in an interview:

I remember asking myself, “What in the world is going on when Ted Kennedy is driven to shelter by his ‘own people,’ Boston’s Irish Catholics?” When a reporter asks himself, “What in the world is going on?” that’s generally a pretty good starting place for a story — or a book. In fact, absent that kind of obsessive curiosity, I can’t produce a successful book.

N.B., in the video, tea-bagger at 1:00.

# boston history

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Boston Pops performing somewhere nearby

One thing I have never appreciated about Boston is its zeal for order in the form of multitudes of police; which manifested itself strangely at a totally innocent Boston Pops performance (technically a rehearsal) on the 3rd of July; my friend and I, trying to catch a glimpse from outside the fences, were again and again pushed along, despite once managing to find ourselves a good vantage point behind a Tilla Cordata (and how the small space in which one wedges oneself between a tree and a fence is part of an “emergency exit” is a mystery to me).

Perhaps there is still fear of a Green Day riot of 1994 repeat, when elated Hatch shell concert-goers began tearing up flowerbeds, followed by singer Billy Armstrong, who “jumped off the stage and tore up flowers himself, and the band was cut-off mid-song and the concert canceled.”

Is there a more cowardly, shameful act, than the ripping up of flowerbeds!? I don’t know.

There is at least one case of Boston using a concert to prevent disorder. This is a funny and revealing anecdote from J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: the mayor of Boston in 1968, Kevin White, at the insistence of advisers, reverses the cancellation of a James Brown concert the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. (Although the mayor apparently had no idea who James Brown was, and “kept referring to him as ‘James Washington.’”) White and his council were justly afraid of more rioting in the city, and correctly thought the concert would help.

Brown demanded the city guarantee the concert — which was poorly attended — for $60,000. White agreed.

(That is — the mayor of Boston agreed to pay James Brown $60,000.)

The night of, White appeared with Brown on stage:

Dapper in a dark blue suit, button-down shirt, and rep tie, Kevin White ducked into the spotlight. The crowd’s response was—at best—subdued. It was the first time since King’s assassination that the Mayor had confronted a large group of blacks. […]

Sensing the Mayor’s anxiety and the crowd’s hostility, Brown took the microphone. “Just let me say,” he assured his constituency, “I had the pleasure of meetin’ him and I said, ‘Honorable Mayor,’ and he said, ‘Look man, just call me Kevin.’ And look, this is a swingin’ cat. Okay, yeh, give him a big round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. He’s a swingin’ cat.”

A definitive mayoral testimonial if ever there were one.

# boston history

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85817 days ago, at Boston’s old State House, “fellow patriot Sheriff William Greenleaf attempted to read [the Declaration of Independence] from the balcony, but he could only muster a whisper. Col. Crafts then stood next to the sheriff and read it from the balcony in a stentorian tone.”

Boston today continues the tradition of mumbling the Declaration (following closer in spirit the whispering Sheriff than the stentor) — though on the wrong date, and there is a disturbing absence of burning lions and unicorns.

# boston history

The aim of the Arab nationalist movement is to unite the Arabs eventually into one nation. We believe that our ideal of Arab unity in Asia is justified beyond the need of argument. If argument is required, we would point to the general principles accepted by the Allies when the U.S. joined them, to our splendid past, to the tenacity with which our race has for 600 years resisted Turkish attempts to absorb us and in a lesser degree to what we tried our best to do in this war as one of the Allies. My father has a privileged place among Arabs as the head of their greatest family and as the Sherif of Mecca. He is convinced of the ultimate triumph of the ideal of unity, if no attempt is made now to thwart it or hinder it by dividing the area as spoils of war among the Great Powers. I came to Europe on behalf of my father and the Arabs of Asia to say that they are expecting the powers at the Conference not to attach undue importance to superficial differences of condition among us and not to consider them only from the low ground of existing European material interests and supposed spheres of influence. They expect the Powers to think of them as one potential people, jealous of their language and liberty, and they ask that no step be taken inconsistent with the prospect of an eventual union of these areas under one sovereign government.

Emir Feisal, speaking before the Supreme Council of the Entente Powers, Paris, France, 1919. The quote is pulled from A Shattered Peace by David A. Andelman.

Feisal’s words were to be lost amid frantic land grabs by the Western powers throughout the Middle East. The Ottoman empire was destroyed and the victors were looking for spoils: think blood in shark-infested waters. Wilson’s call for self-determination apparently did not apply to Arabs.

Feisal was not exactly the anointed leader of all the Arab peoples, but one wonders what would have been had the major parties actually considered his call for nationhood. Andelman excels in uncomfortably hanging the question before us throughout his story: what might have been? — during what he apparently considers to be the most important moment of the century to come, the Treaty of Versailles.

# Middle East politics history