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August 26, 2001
This weekend, I read Toni
This weekend, I read Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, the novel that, more than any other, is credited with winning her the Nobel Prize for Literature.
*** Spoilers follow *** Do not read if you intend to read the novel and haven't yet ***
Beloved, singularly, is a book about a young woman who flees from slavery in Kentucky in the late 1850s and, when threatened with recapture, kills one of her own children rather than let her be returned to slave life. It is a difficult novel, but a magical, enchanting, and deeply moving one. It does not have much of a plot; this is a novel about people, about life, about suffering, about courage, about tragedy.
It is hard to really describe what this novel is about without reading it. One is confronted with a jumble of emotions....curiosity, horror, admiration, sadness, longing, all the myriad aspects of the human condition. Dreams, thoughts, wishes, memories, roll together into a seamless whole, uniting the conscious and the subconscious. Memory is personified, and guilt is made real.
I have read many accounts of slavery and oppression, and none have moved me the way Beloved did.
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Posted by Tyrone at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2001
Good news came in today.
Good news came in today. Senator Jesse Helms announced his retirement at the end of next year. At long last, one of the most philistine figures in American politics is exiting the scene. I can only hope that his successor is an improvement. Elizabeth Dole (who next to Helms is almost liberal) is said to be a Republican candidate. The others are various state officials no one outside the state has heard of.
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Posted by Tyrone at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2001
Warning: Readers of the Jewish
Warning: Readers of the Jewish faith may find this entry offensive.
I ought not to have to put that disclaimer. The fact that I do indicates the state of discourse in this country about the terrible tragedy that is Palestine. Four million refugees are trapped for generations in squalid refugee camps. Jewish settlements and their connecting roads, on which Arabs are not permitted to set foot, carve it up like a chessboard. Schools are closed, harsh curfews are imposed, political liberties are restricted, water supplies are sharply limited. Torture, beatings, and ill-treatment of prisoners are standard. Stone-throwing at soldiers is answered with automatic weapons fire; attacks on shopping malls are answered by a cavalcade of F-16 fighter attacks on defenseless towns. This is what is happening, what the state of Israel claims it has the right to do in "self-defense".
Israel has never trusted Palestinian Arabs. It refuses to let them return to their homes seized in the 1948 war because it regards them as a terrorist fifth column. It pockmarks their territory with military lines, rendering it defenseless and carved up piecemeal, because it wants to be able to crush them with an iron hand at the slightest sign of trouble. Every day Israeli bulldozers demolish homes, sweep farmlands, and destroy buildings and wells. Such is the Israeli fear of terrorism that even greenhouses and orchards are razed, under the pretext that they may conceal weapons caches. Civilians who try to fight back against the invaders are denounced as "terrorists" and shelled and bombed anew.
The Palestinian "terrorist threat" is a canard. There certainly is terrorism, but it is hard to think of a greater incentive to engage in terrorist activity than the savage Israeli assaults, usually way out of proportion to any provocation. Since September 2000, there have been six Palestinians killed in the fighting for every Israeli dead. Tanks, fighter jets, and automatic weapons are fired against lightly armed, or unarmed, Palestinian policemen and civilians, many of them teenagers. The brutality is almost beyond believe. Political leaders are targeted for assassination; prisoners are beaten and tortured; thousands of arrests are made without charge or trial.
The Israelis are engaging in deliberate war with the Palestinian people, a barefaced use of raw, naked power to force them into submission. Their goal is to bully the Palestinians into a state of such fear and terror that they will meekly roll over, allow their territory to be carved up, and settle forever for a token measure of autonomy, limited access to their holy sites, and permanent status as second-class citizens, stateless and rejected.
Will they succeed? Politically, they cannot; one of the cardinal principles of human nature is that the more you oppress people, the stronger their desire to strike back becomes. Fighting only begets more fighting; provocation leads to more provocation; obstinacy leads to more violence. Israel's tanks, jets, and guns will earn it no peace, no security, nothing but eternal hatred and enmity.
It is time the rest of the world put aside their sympathy for this rogue state and recognized it for the bloodthirsty, fanatical killer that it is rapidly becoming.
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Posted by Tyrone at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)