The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The signers of the Declaration represented the new states as follows:

Read more »

Ladies and Gentlemen, Happy 4th of July!

I personally (and fairly literally) couldn't be happier about the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is (I just pinched myself again, it's not a dream) our president. Let the American experiment continue!

(Pepito, sometimes I feel like I occasionally do this just to egg you on to new heights of righteous outrage… 🙂

Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

During the final two days of his international lecture tour, in Germany and France, policy again vanished behind Obama's philosophical nonnegotiables, boldly submitted as starting points for negotiation. At Buchenwald, addressing Holocaust denial, Obama denounced “a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful.” At Omaha Beach, the president followed stories of heroic soldiers with a hybrid principle of existential pragmatism, pitch perfect for the occasion and redolent of Camus, whom Elie Wiesel had quoted the day before.

“Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman,” said Albert Obama. “It has always been up to us.” Schama himself, reviewing the oratory, dubbed Obama “our new American Pericles.”

Over all, though, Obama's most singular philosophical breakthrough was to artfully project the cosmopolitan idea that the U.S. president must care about non-Americans. True, Obama observed months ago that he's the president of the United States, not the president of China, and understandably must put the needs and safety of Americans first. But to an extraordinary extent, Obama effectively announced that the U.S. president, because of the United States' effect on and involvement with the rest of the world, must think of other global citizens as constituents.

A truly cosmopolitan culture permits its members to choose different styles of life and thought, including antiquated ones, as long as they don't harm the neighbors. Obama, like no president before him, has notified the rest of the world that the United States will continue to export its philosophy, ethos, and political theory — but through conversation, not declamation, seeking free adoption, not grudging acquiescence.

Philosopher prez and cosmopolitan in chief. After all this time, you figure, we were entitled to one. It looks as if we've got him.

More here. [Thanks to Ahmad Saidullah.]

The canon of literary obsession includes such odd classics as Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, in which the author fails to write the D. H. Lawrence biography he’s been planning all his life, producing instead a memoir about his failure to write that biography; and U and I, Nicholson Baker’s little comic masterpiece about his reverence for a still-living John Updike. Obsession adds a radioactive element to potentially boring genres: They become gloriously subjective, unstable, irresponsible, and creative. It’s exponential literature: textuality multiplied by itself. It was with great pleasure, thttp://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00d8341c562c53ef00d83451b72569e2/page/composehen, that I read Elizabeth Hawes’s brand-new entry in the genre, Camus, a Romance. I have never personally been obsessed with Albert Camus—I always leaned toward Dostoyevsky—but I can see the attraction. In many ways he’s the perfect literary crush. He was the most glamorous exponent of the twentieth century’s most glamorously nebulous intellectual movement, existentialism. He looked like Humphrey Bogart, suffered nobly all his life from TB, and died young in a car accident shortly after winning the Nobel Prize. He was a batch of contradictions: an artistic philosopher, a private political figure, a celebrity recluse, and a moralistic philanderer. He was doubly exotic—not only French but Algerian. And he’s still many Americans’ gateway to serious European literature—everyone has their mind at least a little bit blown, in high school, by The Stranger.

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

Hard on the heels of Christopher Buckley’s recent memoir of the deaths of his parents (“Losing Mum and Pup”), Richard Brookhiser has published his own account of life with William F. Buckley Jr., the founder and longtime editor of National Review, who died in February 2008. Brookhiser is a talented and prolific writer, best known in recent years for a series of books on the founding fathers. But through much of his adult life, the center of his world was National Review. This slight but engaging memoir is the story of a young man drawn early into Buckley’s orbit who struggled over many years to bask in, and at times to escape, the aura of his famous mentor. Brookhiser grew up in a conservative but not particularly political middle-class family in a suburb of Rochester, N.Y. When nationwide protests against the Vietnam War broke out in 1969, extending into his own small community, Brook­hiser was a high school freshman. He was contemptuous of his fellow students who joined the protests. “I thought they were wrong,” he recalls. “I also thought there was something phony about the exercise, simultaneously preening and copycat.” He wrote a long letter to his brother (a student at Yale) describing his reactions, and at his father’s suggestion, he sent a copy to National Review — a magazine his family knew largely because they sometimes watched Buckley’s television program, “Firing Line.” A few months later, his precocious article appeared as the magazine’s cover story — the day after his 15th birthday.

more from Alan Brinkley at the NYT here.

Michael Spence in Project Syndicate:

What can we expect as the world’s economy emerges from its most serious downturn in almost a century? The short answer is a “new normal,” with slower growth, a de-risked and more stable core financial system, and a set of additional challenges (energy, climate, and demographic imbalances, to name a few) with varying time horizons that will test our collective capacity to improve management and oversight of the global economy.

Lower growth is the best guess for the medium term. It seems most likely, but no one really knows. The financial crisis, morphing quickly into a global economic downturn, resulted not just from a failure to react to growing instability, risk, and imbalance, but also from a widespread pre-crisis inability to ”see” the rising systemic risk.

These defining characteristics will condition the responses and the results in coming years. There are countervailing forces. The high-growth countries (China and India) are large and getting larger relative to the rest. That alone will tend to elevate global growth compared to the world where industrial countries, and the US in particular, were in the growth driving seat.

The current crisis has come to be called a “balance-sheet recession” of global scope and tremendous depth and destructive power because of its origins in the balance sheets of the financial and household sectors. Extreme balance-sheet destruction is what made it distinctive. In the future, central banks and regulators will not be able to afford a narrow focus on (goods and services) inflation, growth, and employment (the real economy) while letting the balance-sheet side fend for itself.

Over at e! Science News:

Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors? Social scientists don’t know for sure. They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.

But the virtual world Second Life does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have taken advantage of this unique information to study how “gestures” make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

Roughly half of the gestures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.

“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets,” said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Daniel Gross in The New York Times:

The financial meltdown has sent the literary-minded scurrying back to the classics for insight and succor. The dastardly exploits of the Ponzi artist Bernie Madoff call to mind “The Great Gatsby” or “The Way We Live Now.” At a time when hard-core free-marketeers like Richard Posner are questioning the efficacy of capitalism, the works of Karl Marx are being fished out of the dustbin of history. Most classic critiques of capitalism are much-mentioned but little-read, the sort of books people routinely cite without really knowing what’s in them. In the interest of understanding our suddenly imperiled passion for private jets and $5,000 handbags, I recently dusted off — literally — one of those classics, Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class,” published in 1899.

In the book, Veblen — whom C. Wright Mills called “the best critic of America that America has ever produced” — dissected the habits and mores of a privileged group that was exempt from industrial toil and distinguished by lavish expenditures. His famous phrase “conspicuous consumption” referred to spending that satisfies no need other than to build prestige, a cultural signifier intended to intimidate and impress. In this age of repossessed yachts, half-finished McMansions and broken-down leveraged buyouts, Veblen proves that a 110-year-old sociological vivisection of the financial overclass can still be au courant. Yet while Veblen frequently reads as still 100 percent right on the foibles of the rich, when it comes to an actual theory of the contemporary leisure class, he now comes off as about 90 percent wrong.

More here.

From The Guardian:

This is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.

This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world's best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail. This is Armstrong's principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory – in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern “militant” atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.

More here.

From The City Journal:

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

More here.

Roger Burback in CounterPunch:

The coup against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras represents a last ditch effort by Honduras’ entrenched economic and political interests to stave off the advance of the new left governments that have taken hold in Latin America over the past decade. As Zelaya proclaimed after being forcibly dumped in Costa Rica: “This is a vicious plot planned by elites. The elites only want to keep the country isolated and in extreme poverty.”

Zelaya should know, since his roots are in the country’s large, land-owning class, having devoted most of his life to agriculture and forestry enterprises that he inherited. He ran for president as the head of the center-right Liberal Party on a fairly conservative platform, promising to be tough on crime and to cut the budget. Inaugurated in January, 2006, he supported the US-backed Central American Free Trade Agreement, which been signed two years earlier, and continued the economic policies of neo-liberalism, privatizing state held enterprises.

But about half way into his four year term, the winds of change blowing from the south caught his imagination, particularly those coming from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the largest regional power fronting on the Caribbean. With no petroleum resources, Honduras signed a generous oil subsidy deal with Venezuela, and then last year joined the emergent regional trade bloc, ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Inspired by Venezuela it now has Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica and Ecuador as members. Simultaneously, Zelaya implemented domestic reform policies, significantly increasing the minimum wage of workers and teachers’ salaries, while stepping up spending in health care and education.

More here. [Thanks to Isabel Toledo.]

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Shootings and killings in deprived areas of Chicago and Baltimore have plummeted by between 41 and 73 per cent thanks to a programme that treats violence as if it is an infectious disease.

Pioneers of the programme, called CeaseFire, say it relies on simultaneously changing attitudes and behaviour and will work anywhere.

The key is to change social norms so that violence is seen as “uncool” both by potential perpetrators and their communities, instead of being the automatic way to settle a dispute.

On 30 June, pioneers of the programme publicised their high success rate so far to attract interest at a time in the year when violence peaks, triggered by the heat.

“Violence gets transmitted the same way as other communicable diseases, so we train 'violence interruptors' to prevent escalation,” says Gary Slutkin, founder and executive director of CeaseFire.

“They change the norm from 'violence is what's expected of me' to 'violence will make me look stupid',” says Slutkin.

More here.

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic:

The past three generations of historians have agreed that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president in American history and that Franklin Pierce was one of the worst. Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat, gave political cover to fractious slaveholders and their violent supporters in the 1850s. His softness on the slavery issue encouraged the southern truculence that later led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. Apart from their closeness in age–the bicentennial of Pierce's birth passed virtually unnoticed four and a half years ago–about the only things that he and Lincoln had in common were their preoccupation with politics and their success in reaching the White House.

When Pierce ran for president in 1852, Lincoln, naturally, campaigned against him. But the cause of the Whig party was extremely feeble in Illinois that year. (The Whigs, originally formed in opposition to Andrew Jackson, were a national coalition of pro-business conservatives, reformers who supported economic development, and moderate southern planters. Lincoln remained a staunch Whig loyalist until the party crumbled in 1854.) And so Lincoln limited himself to a long speech in Springfield–it took him two days to deliver it!–which he abridged and repeated in Peoria. The speech did nothing to affect the outcome of the election, in Illinois or in the country at large. But it deserves to be remembered in these days of Lincoln idolatry, because it can be disturbing reading to anyone inclined to worship Father Abraham.

More here.

The early part of the century saw an explosion of literature with the hotel at its heart, reflecting a period of enormous social change on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time that the work that Matthias explores was being written—Kafka, Stefan Zweig Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann—American writers such as Edith Wharton, Henry James and Sinclair Lewis too wrote about hotels. And British writers like Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen all made use of the literary hotel in their fiction, at a time when travelogues (JB Priestly, George Orwell) also abounded. The hotel as an institution is a product of the transnational industrialisation and development that took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and thus an important vantage point from which to observe that change. The emergence of a bourgeois leisure class and the shift from a sedentary to a travelling society was reflected in literature with a focus on newly created modern spaces. These began to prise apart the strict boundaries between public and private that had hitherto been so important in the consolidation of a bourgeois identity. Ironically, one of the novels that best captures this moment was published in 1997. Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer prize-winning Martin Dressler is a fairytale-like invocation of fin-de-siècle New York. Dressler, a flâneur who spends his life in semi-public spaces, watching and speculating, neither at home nor dislocated from home, neither alone nor part of a group, rises from humble beginnings to own a chain of hotels.

more from Monica Ali at Prospect here.

Some time after James Baldwin arrived in Istanbul he settled in Gumussuyu, a neighbourhood that hangs on the side of one of the city’s many hills, above the Golden Horn, the shores of Asia, and even the Sea of Marmara. Baldwin was a drinker, and one of his favourite neighbourhood spots was the Park Hotel. These days that glamorous meeting place is a terrible hulking carcass of a stunted building project, all grey, barren floors and trash heaps, stray dogs barking at nothing all hours of the day. Both vistas – the fabled view, the hovering skeleton – loom outside the living room windows of the great Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who was largely responsible for Baldwin’s little-known sojourn in Turkey, where he lived on and off throughout the 1960s. When I went to visit Cezzar last winter, a collection of letters between Baldwin and Cezzar had just been showcased in an Istanbul bookstore along with Baldwin’s translated works, and I told Cezzar I’d bought them. He scowled: “Don’t read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ’s sake.” Cezzar seemed proud of his book, and his special friendship with “Jimmy,” but he had priorities. He prized Baldwin as one thing above all else: a writer.

more from Suzy Hansen at The National here.

In 1945, Pablo Picasso was invited to illustrate the elegiac Le Chant des morts, a book of poems by Pierre Reverdy that contemplates mortality after World War I. Yet when the publisher sent him a sample written in the poet’s handwriting, Picasso thought it “almost a drawing in itself.” Inspired by the shape of Reverdy’s script, Picasso crafted bright red, fanciful calligraphic images for the book, offsetting the poems’ melancholy and calling attention to the material presence of the page itself—what art historian Irene Small refers to as “a registration of painting pulled into the physical space of writing.” Picasso had long been fascinated with the correspondence between image and text; in his “papiers collés,” 1912–14, he famously collaged fragments of newspaper, inviting the viewer to read into the surface of the canvas; later, he treated newspaper pages as grids on which he composed figural drawings and paintings. Picasso also tried his hand at writing. In 1935, suffering from a bout of artist’s block, he stopped painting and, for one year, zealously wrote poems instead. (His friend and patron Gertrude Stein was not a fan.) In reconciling his personal obstacles as an artist, Picasso declared, “i will no longer paint the arrow / we see in the drop of water / trembling in the morning.” Here, he rejects not only representation (pointing where to look and how) but also signification (painting as a visual trick that portends something it is not). But without these foundations, how would he paint?

more from Stefanie Sobelle at Bookforum here.

From History Today:

It is 40 years since Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant leap for mankind’ on the early summer morning of July 20th, 1969. It was the high point of a vast and expensive space programme initiated by President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s which ended when Apollo 17’s lunar module lifted off from the Moon on December 14th, 1972. In just under three and a half years, 12 US astronauts walked on the Moon, drove around in their Moon buggy and thrilled television viewers around the world with their barely believable pantomime on a celestial body 236,000 miles from Earth.

The end came suddenly and space has not captured the public’s attention in the same way since, except, in a very different way, in response to the tragedies of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The Apollo programme had to compete for attention with other major events: the large-scale unrest in the US over civil rights and against the Vietnam war; then, less than a year after the last Apollo mission, the Watergate scandal which brought down President Nixon. Throughout these upheavals, astronauts walked on the Moon, flew the American flag and displayed the might of US technology and resources to massive global audiences in what remains, arguably, the greatest technical achievement of mankind.

More here.

Driving Lesson
Renay

I learned to drive on this road flattened between
cornfield and pasture. my stick legs folded onto daddy's lap
the sun white off the Plymouth hood, ribboned
down a windshield crack. careful. so careful, I
curved the wheel between a shallow grade to the corn
and a runoff ditch where tadpoles swam together
like bee swarms then exploded apart, comma bodies
shooting from the huddle at a stone drop in the water

daddy whistled The Year that Clayton Delaney Died
to the back of my neck while I crisscrossed the car over dust ruts.
sixteen blocks in the city. out here it was
twenty rows of irrigation pipe, two mailboxes, Fred's pig shed.
I never saw Fred's pigs but my cousin Janell did.

I swayed through every slouch in the road, passed the truck cab
splotched rust and green hunkering in a blackberry tangle.
every year those berries plumped out fat and sweet,
then wrinkled to dry nubs while we watched from the fence line
where a bull waited to stick little girls on his yellow horns.

we snuck a bath towel out once, Clorox white with fat red roses
spilled across it. we shook it at him but he stood bull still
watching us run to the fence, shake the towel, then scramble away.
he stood bull still while those red red bullfighter roses flashed at him
so we proclaimed him colorblind.

I watched from the toolshed while he stood still again when they
shot him then rolled his stomach, red and white like the towel,
onto the pasture. I wasn't afraid of him humped over on the grass.
that sticky mat of blood made me want to charge at them, gore them
through the fence with my imaginary horns

on the day they butchered, I touched him for the first time. his
horns as thick as my forearm, round on the end
not ice pick sharp. all summer we ate beef for supper. beef
and unguarded blackberries that stained our faces purple.

I learned to steer on this road.

from: Agnieszka’s Dowry

My old friend Jyri, who, along with Marko Ahtisaari, got me started blogging:

India moves closer to civil rights for all its citizens, in the Hindustan Times:

It observed that the inclusiveness that the Indian society traditionally displayed in every aspect of life manifested in recognising a role in society for everyone.

“Those perceived by the majority as ‘deviants’ or ‘different’ are not on that score excluded or ostracised,” the Chief Justice writing the judgement for the Bench, said.

Where society can display inclusiveness and understanding, such persons can be assured of a life of dignity and non-discrimination, it said.

“This was the spirit behind the resolution of which Jawaharlal Nehru spoke so passionately,” the Bench said referring to the Objective Resolution moved by him on December 13, 1946 at the Constituent Assembly debate.

Quoting Nehru, Justice Shah said “words are magic things often enough, even the magic of words sometimes cannot convey magic of human spirit and of a nation’s passion …(this resolution seeks very feebly to tell the world of what we have thought or dreamt of so long, and what we now hope to achieve in near future)”.

He said Nehru was of the view that the House should consider the resolution not in a spirit of narrow legal wording, but rather look at the spirit behind that resolution.

The Bench was critical of the provision of section 377 of IPC holding that “a provision of law branding one section of people as criminal based wholly on states’ moral disapproval of that class goes counter to equality guaranteed in the Constitution.”

“The provision of section 377 runs counter to the Constitutional values and the notion of human dignity which is considered to be cornerstone of our constitution.