"Donald W. Duncan, a Green Beret master sergeant who came home from Vietnam a disillusioned hero in 1965 and became a leading early opponent of the war, died in the obscurity of a small Midwestern town seven years ago, an all-but-forgotten soldier. He was 79.
In an age of seeming information ubiquity, the news media will generally recall the lives of noteworthy people when they die. But Mr. Duncan’s death went largely unnoticed outside of Madison, Ind., the Ohio River town where he lived.
His obituary in The Madison Courier said only that Mr. Duncan had once worked for a local nonprofit that helped poor people find jobs. The crucial events of his life — the killings and brutalities of 18 months in Vietnam, the agony of conscience and conversion, and the years of antiwar struggle — had happened long ago and were not mentioned.
Mr. Duncan’s daughters Valerie Casey and Luise Wilson confirmed this week that he died on March 25, 2009, at a Madison nursing home.
In an America torn by protests against the war in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Duncan was often in the news, although not as prominently as the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Roman Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan or the actress Jane Fonda, who was photographed laughing and applauding on an antiaircraft gun in Hanoi. (Daniel Berrigan died on April 30.)"
Donald W. Duncan, 79, Ex-Green Beret and Early Critic of Vietnam War, Is Dead - The New York Times
Saturday, May 07, 2016
Friday, May 06, 2016
The Media Keeps Letting Trump Get Away With His Iraq Lie - BuzzFeed News
Here is a simpler one: Could reporters stop letting him lie to their faces about the most important policy call of the last 20 years?
Donald Trump did not oppose the invasion of Iraq. Further, there’s no evidence that he’s ever been a “dove” — and a great deal that he’s been an impulsive supporter of military intervention around the world.
We know this because BuzzFeed News’ intrepid Andrew Kaczynski unearthed an audio recording of him saying he supported it. You can listen to it above. The audio quality is clear.
In the recording, made on Sept. 11, 2002, when it mattered, Howard Stern asked Trump whether he supported the invasion. His answer: “Yeah, I guess so.” On the war’s first day, he called it a “tremendous success from a military standpoint.”
It was the most recent in a series of belligerent statements about Iraq. In 2000, he opined at length in his book how U.S. airstrikes did nothing to stop Iraq’s WMD programs and said it “is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion” in the context of a new war. He said many times in the late 1990s and early 2000s that George H.W. Bush should have toppled Saddam during the Gulf War.
The Media Keeps Letting Trump Get Away With His Iraq Lie - BuzzFeed News
Thursday, May 05, 2016
The Perils of Being a Black Philosopher - The New York Times
"Your point about discursive violence is an important one. Immediately after the publication of “Dear White America,” I began to receive vile and vitriolic white racist comments sent to my university email address, and verbal messages sent to my answering machine. I even received snail mail that was filled with hatred. Imagine the time put into actually sitting down and writing a letter filled with so much hate and then sending it snail mail, especially in our world of the Internet.
The alarming reality is that the response to “Dear White America” revealed just how much racism continues to exist in our so-called post-racial America. The comments were not about pointing out fallacies in my position, but were designed to violate, to leave me psychologically broken and physically distraught.
Words do things, especially words like “nigger,” or being called an animal that should go back to Africa or being told that I should be “beheaded ISIS style.” One white supremacist message sent to me ended with “Be Prepared.” Another began with “Dear Nigger Professor.”
The brutality and repetitiveness of this discursive violence has a way of inflicting injury. Given the history of the term “nigger,” it strikes with the long, hate-filled context of violence out of which that term grew. This points to the non-spectacular expression of violence. The lynching of black people was designed to be a spectacle, to draw white mobs. In this case, the black body was publicly violated. It was a public and communal form of bloodlust. There are many other forms of violence that are far more subtle, non-spectacular, but yet painful and dehumanizing. So, when I was called a “nigger,” I was subject to that. I felt violated, injured; a part of me felt broken.
Only now have I really begun to recognize how discourse designed to hurt can actually leave its mark. I recall after reading so many of these messages I began to feel sick, literally. So, words can debilitate, violate, injure; they can hit with the force of a stick or a stone and leave marks on the body. In this case, I began to feel the posture of my body folding inward, as it were, under the attacks. Franz Fanon talks about this as not being able to move lithely in the world.
The Perils of Being a Black Philosopher - The New York Times
The alarming reality is that the response to “Dear White America” revealed just how much racism continues to exist in our so-called post-racial America. The comments were not about pointing out fallacies in my position, but were designed to violate, to leave me psychologically broken and physically distraught.
Words do things, especially words like “nigger,” or being called an animal that should go back to Africa or being told that I should be “beheaded ISIS style.” One white supremacist message sent to me ended with “Be Prepared.” Another began with “Dear Nigger Professor.”
The brutality and repetitiveness of this discursive violence has a way of inflicting injury. Given the history of the term “nigger,” it strikes with the long, hate-filled context of violence out of which that term grew. This points to the non-spectacular expression of violence. The lynching of black people was designed to be a spectacle, to draw white mobs. In this case, the black body was publicly violated. It was a public and communal form of bloodlust. There are many other forms of violence that are far more subtle, non-spectacular, but yet painful and dehumanizing. So, when I was called a “nigger,” I was subject to that. I felt violated, injured; a part of me felt broken.
Only now have I really begun to recognize how discourse designed to hurt can actually leave its mark. I recall after reading so many of these messages I began to feel sick, literally. So, words can debilitate, violate, injure; they can hit with the force of a stick or a stone and leave marks on the body. In this case, I began to feel the posture of my body folding inward, as it were, under the attacks. Franz Fanon talks about this as not being able to move lithely in the world.
The Perils of Being a Black Philosopher - The New York Times
Black Men, Violence and ‘Fierce Urgency’ - The New York Times
In the wake of the incredible level of attention garnered last year by citizens who were rightly outraged by state violence — often at the hands of law enforcement, directed disproportionately at black citizens — the issue of community violence receded.
When it did surface, it was often used as a cudgel against activists like those supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
The message was invariably some version of: If black lives really mattered, activists would focus on black-on-black violence instead.
The implication being that there is something pathologically broken about blackness that makes black people prone to self-destruction, and that attention to anything else is a minor diversion from a larger truth.
But in fact, this argument is the diversion.
Both state violence and community violence are problems, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. One exacerbating factor of community violence is the present and historical factors that helped form the communities and created the conditions for violence.
It is not hard to explain, as many have, how every level of government, and by extension society itself, used every possible lever of power for centuries to create the conditions in black communities that now make fertile ground for violence.
This is not to say that personal choice plays no role, but rather that human beings make choices within an environmental context, which at its base level is affected by state and federal policy.
Black Men, Violence and ‘Fierce Urgency’ - The New York Times
When it did surface, it was often used as a cudgel against activists like those supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
The message was invariably some version of: If black lives really mattered, activists would focus on black-on-black violence instead.
The implication being that there is something pathologically broken about blackness that makes black people prone to self-destruction, and that attention to anything else is a minor diversion from a larger truth.
But in fact, this argument is the diversion.
Both state violence and community violence are problems, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. One exacerbating factor of community violence is the present and historical factors that helped form the communities and created the conditions for violence.
It is not hard to explain, as many have, how every level of government, and by extension society itself, used every possible lever of power for centuries to create the conditions in black communities that now make fertile ground for violence.
This is not to say that personal choice plays no role, but rather that human beings make choices within an environmental context, which at its base level is affected by state and federal policy.
Black Men, Violence and ‘Fierce Urgency’ - The New York Times
Wednesday, May 04, 2016
Obama in Flint: water crisis is a 'tragedy that never should have happened'
"The Flint water crisis was a “tragedy that never should have happened” in the US, Barack Obama said Wednesday during his first visit to the city since evidence of lead contamination emerged last fall, while residents jeered Michigan’s governor in his first public remarks before the community.
“Flint’s recovery is everybody’s responsibility,” the president told a crowd of 1,000 gathered inside a high school gymnasium. “And I will make sure that responsibility is met.”
The president focused his remarks on what he called a “corrosive” mentality in politics that “contributed to this crisis”.
“Now, I do not believe that anybody consciously wanted to hurt the people,” he said. “And this is not the place to sort out every screwup … but I do think there’s a larger issue.
“It’s a mindset that believes the less government is the highest good no matter what,” he continued. “It’s an … ideology that undervalues the common good, says we’re all on our own.”
The president’s trip included a discussion with nine residents and a local pediatrician, Dr Mona Hanna-Attisha, who last fall uncovered elevated blood-lead levels in Flint children."
Obama in Flint: water crisis is a 'tragedy that never should have happened'
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