Not playing possum: the real thing

Maybe you're within striking distance to make it up to Cherokee County by 10 p.m. tonight--in time for the 11th annual possum drop. It's a real possum this time, but don't worry, "The opossum is not actually 'dropped,' it is lowered with great care. We treat our little friend with respect, hold him in awe, and do not inflict any injury or traumatize God's creature of the night."

Here's what I had to say about it last year. No, I haven't been. Maybe next year.

Slow reentry (production v. consumption)

We were in Texas for Christmas. Paul flew back on Tuesday; Tucker and I drove back yesterday and today, stopping over in Birmingham, which is halfway. The weather was lovely--wished we'd had our sandals--and thanks to the interstate, there's really nothing to the drive. Especially with 11 hours of Ender's Game on CD.

Santa brought me something I didn't think to ask for: The complete New Yorker DVD. Yes it's a pain not to be able to download the discs to your own hard drive. Yes it's a challenge to navigate. Nevertheless.

I'm reminded of something Bob Bain used to say to his freshman composition students. Dr. Robert Bain was a wonderful UNC English professor. He would say to his students, You are about to go from being consumers (of writing) to producers. But enough already. Being a consumer is enough. More than 4,000 issues, half a million pages of The New Yorker! What more is there to say, and not lamely?

Merry Christmas

"Santa Claus giving gifts to soldiers in camp," 1863.

Jesus in the schools: Texas showdown

Unfazed by the Dover decision, the school board in Odessa, Texas has followed through on plans to adopt the curriculum of the Greensboro-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. Among other advantages, this curriculum uses the Saint King James version.

Santa tracking

NORAD does it again.

Fifty years of this remarkable service began with a wrong number.

Away from home for the holidays

We're traveling south; little or no blogging till new year's. In addition to the great locations on my blogroll (Balkinization is essential reading on the NSA scandal), I recommend that you check out the guest-bloggers at IsThatLegal? --especially the locally famous blogger and talented law student Lance McCord.

Speaking of NSA, the GWU National Security Archive is full of informing information. I expect it's been all over the blogosphere by now, but it's worth noting that the NSA actually warned the Bush II administration that advances in technology were making it harder to ensure 4th Amendment protections. Looks like that bit of well-intentioned advice just gave them ideas.

Well, whoever said it, it fits.

A friend told me about a trip to the mall today--said he went mainly for the spectacle, to experience the vast disconnect between the news about our government and the behavior of the governed. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men go shopping," was the thought that occurred to him. Or something like that.

Who said that? Burke, wasn't it? Probably not, according to one Martin Porter, who in 2002 made an extensive web-based study. He could find no source for this quotation in any of its variants.

A wild college town

I've heard there are foxes right in my back yard here on Morgan Creek, but I'd never seen one in the wild till last night: in Durham, on Campus Drive, somewhere near the Nasher Museum. We were on our way to the boys choir concert. We saw it cross the road, then we slowed down to watch it on the grassy bank. The car at the T intersection was probably waiting for me to go forward, more so than watching the animal--at least, that's how I took the honk of its horn--but the effect was that this car's headlights put the fox in a freeze, and so we all got to admire each other for a little while.

I'm all for animal-friendly roads, by the way.

Boys Choir at Duke Chapel tonight

This is Tucker's fourth year in the North Carolina Boys Choir. The choir is always wonderful, but never so wonderful as at the annual Christmas concert. For a small-town mom it's purely amazing to have a child that has the gift of being able to perform such beautiful music in such a space as Duke Chapel. If you're in the area and need a boost to your Christmas Holiday spirits, treat yourself to this terrific performance.

Wilmington revisited

The Wilmington report gets a nice write-up in today's Times. And the News and Observer expresses remorse for founder Josephus Daniels' role in it. What's striking, but not surprising, is how such a horrendous event was almost wiped from memory. One member of the commission that produced the report, a 68-year-old black native, said to the Times, "I didn't even know it happened until I was a grandmother."

Also striking, but not surprising, is the difference between the way the story of the "Wilmington Race Riot" had been told--"oft-repeated local claims that the insurrection was a frantic response to a corrupt and ineffective post-Reconstruction government"--and the stubborn facts that the record reveals. Not content to have won the election of 1898 by stuffing the ballot boxes, a white mob demanded an immediate turnover of power. That's when "Hell jolted loose." Further from the Times:

"The ultimate goal was the resurgence of white rule of the city and state for a handful of men through whatever means necessary," the historian LeRae Umfleet wrote in the report's introduction.

The report concludes that the rioting and coup fully ended black participation in local government until the civil rights era, and was a catalyst for the development of Jim Crow laws in North Carolina.

"Because Wilmington rioters were able to murder blacks in daylight and overthrow Republican government without penalty or federal intervention, everyone in the state, regardless of race, knew that the white supremacy campaign was victorious on all fronts," the report said.

The Wilmington report contributes significantly to a larger effort by historians to come to a more honest reckoning with Reconstruction and its aftermath. It joins recent reappraisals of racial violence in Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it adds interesting overtones to my own work on a brutal event in Carrollton, Mississippi.

Eric Foner has been at the forefront of this movement. You can get a taste of his work in this neat digital exhibit/essay.

Foner's new book, which includes illustrated essays by Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, stresses that the failure of Reconstruction was not because it was misguided and corrupt (though corruption did happen), but because white southerners could not tolerate the thought of blacks in the voting booth. The "what ifs" continue to haunt:

What if the brief flowering of equality in the war's immediate aftermath had been allowed to flourish rather than being brutally suppressed? What if the federal government had upheld the Constitution and upheld the rights of all its citizens? The story is at once poignant and urgent. The complex legacy of Reconstruction is lived every day in America. Until Americans understand that history, we are, as the saying goes, condemned to repeat it.

The North Carolina legislature did a brave and wise thing in setting up the Wilmington commission. Back to the Times: a white member "said he had questions initially about whether the report should have been done at all." Why go there? And yet, he said, "'My opinion changed, and I was surprised to learn the depth of feeling that existed and that it was not that long ago."

The colorful Depression

Via Jeff Pomerantz, a fascinating Library of Congress exhibition of color photographs taken by photographers for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.

Seeking the long view

President Bush said on TV yesterday that the national security bombshell--the NSA wiretappings, a headline of national and international import--was "not the main story of the day." Only in his dreams.

So this is the way to win the war on terror. The terrorists hate us because of our freedoms. Get rid of our freedoms. Then they won't hate us any more.

It's a sad and scary time to be an American. It would be nice to find solace in our own history and literature, to predict happier times. Harold Bloom tries it, clinging to Whitman in an effort to understand "what seems our national self-destructiveness." His little essay that might have moved toward a misty hope for the United States as "the greatest of poems" rises, in the end, no higher than the grim realities of the present moment.

Uncle Tom uncabined

The real "Uncle Tom" was not the Uncle Tom you might have thought he was.

Gift ideas

Hot chocolate:

Vosges Oaxaca Bar, dark chocolate with guajillo and pasilla chiles

Dolfin chocolat, milk chocolate with hot masala

Indescribably good.

Going up

Annie Leibovitz documents the construction of Renzo Piano's New York Times office building.

(Via kottke, not boing boing.)

Wilmington report published today

The hundredth anniversary of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riots sparked an interest in coming to terms with what really happened. In 2000, the legislature appointed a commission "to develop a historical record" through detailed examination of source materials as well as interviews of descendants of people involved.

Sometime about now (11 a.m. today), the draft report is being issued. It's online too, which is wonderful. From the news release (.pdf),

The riot took place in an era when similar violent attacks on black communities by white mobs occurred in Atlanta, Tulsa and Rosewood, Fla. In Wilmington, in a move unparalleled in U.S. history, a coup d'etat replaced the city's duly elected officeholders with white supremacists. . . .

"This research demonstrates unequivocally that the Wilmington Race Riot was not a spontaneous event, but was directed by white businessmen and Democratic leaders to regain control of Wilmington," says Dr. Jeffrey Crow, deputy secretary of the N.C. Office of Archives and History.

Surely this study will confirm that to call it a "riot" was, itself, a rhetorical attempt to deny reality. A "riot" suggests an emotional outburst: what happened in Wilmington was coldly calculated.

UPDATE: NYT report.

Another city tries "housing first"

Santa Monica, California, is embarking on a housing first program to deal with its homelessness problem. That's one more example I hope we in Orange County can learn from.

Goodbye . . . and good luck.

To the person who found my blog by googling "civil rights term papers," you might try another kind of strategy. It may not be too late to do your own work. It's probably cheaper, too.

Land of the dreamy scenes

I'm worried about New Orleans. Despite what the experts say about modern cities returning from disaster, this one seems unprecedented. For one thing, the barrier islands are gone. For another, yesterday's NYT editorial says "the reconstruction is a rudderless ship."

A few weeks ago, Nick Spitzer, host of the "American Routes" radio show out of New Orleans, gave a talk here at UNC. "Many things are intact visually, but we are decentered in many ways," he said. From the time the storm hit, his show became a site of remembrance and community, a place where those exiled from the city could go to hear the music they needed to hear. And those songs included songs already about floods and disaster--like Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927." Disaster has always been just around the corner in New Orleans, so when it really happened, there was an oddly comforting body of music to be found.

It struck me that Spitzer, who seemed so insistent that the cultural recovery of New Orleans had to come first, almost before red beans, rice, or housing, was just the right person to be there on the scene making it happen. But what I heard on the way out of the talk was that he was being wooed to relocate at UNC.

Editorials, ink

Romenesko reports that today is "Black Ink Monday," a day of expressive protest by editorial cartoonists upset about the way so many of them are losing their jobs. The News & Observer's own Ted Vaden is linked for his column praising the N&O for keeping its cartoonist on: "the next time [Dwayne] Powell makes you mad, be glad. Love him or hate him, there are not enough of his breed around."

Meanwhile Ed Cone get a nod from Romenesko for speculating on the future of newspapers.