Bono In New York TImes Magazine

Good article. Too long but I read whole thing.

Everything that is beautiful and terrible about limo lobbying. The preaching is dead on, and the story about Jesse Helms which I read before, amazing. Jesse Jackson does it too, quite well, but Americans discount him because of familiarity. Maybe Bono is partly the white Malcolm X I dream about, though not the ass-kicking voice reaching the poor and lower midle class that I think is needed. Now you should have seen Zbiggy Brezhinski on one of the first CNN town meeting type shows about 1992 nakedly insulting the Atlanta audience and, subsequently, the audience's wild cheers for him. Like excitable children who badly needed a firm parent. The audience had been applauding questions from the crowd, and he said, " I can understand you applauding a particularly good answer, but when you applaud each and every question you look like a bunch of trained seals!" He was not smiling. He was absolutely sincere and annoyed. The audience was stunned and sat in total silence after the reprimand. But as the show continued they listened raptly to Brezhinski's insights and gave him thunderous applause and cheers at the end. Too bad his main idea to save the world, to empower Islamic Mujhadeen to humiliate the Soviets, a brilliant tactical move, was not part of a broader strategy which took into account the devastating impact on the Islamic countries of vast influxes of resources to their most extreme religious fanatics, while secular mostly leftist elements were still being subverted, persecuted or killed by friendly regimes like Mubarak, Musharaf and King Hussein and the Israelis. Oh hindsight. Too bad for average working families in the middle who now had to demonstrate allegiance to the fanatics n varying degrees.

One thought - Bono needs to get at Cheney - maybe that is why Cheney is so elusive. Does he remain untouched, a virgin to feelings of humanity, by design, and yanks everybody back to the dark side if they get swayed by the likes of Bono. Does he say to the others, "remember our deal! Your soul in exchange for unlimited power. No backsliding into having a conscience or soul."?

The most interesting story is Paul O'Neill who opened up to Bono and the African reality and ended up frozen out of the Bush administration and wrote a very important, perhaps pivotal book that pulled the curtain aside on the administration, still influencing how irreverent many even mainstream journalists are getting.

Eery echo: Fatal Flood on PBS American Experience

Many amazing, but not mysterious, parallels. I pray that PBS will show Fatal Flood (the american experience) this week. Read the timeline from the documentary by clicking the title of this post above. Photos from the documentary show 13,000 poor blacks trapped on a levee under guard by by armed whites and I immediately thought of the photo when I saw the civilians and prisoners on the expressway ramp outside the Superdome with the national guard around them.

The documentary is about a levee busting flood in 1927 with uncanny echoes today(especially the photos) that brought racial and class differences to a violent climax. Tens of thoudands of black prisoners and farm workers were forced at gunpoint to work day and night to shore up levees on the Mississippi, which may be why the song Aaron Neville sang Friday night, Louisiana 1927, refers to "They're trying to wash us away/They'retrying to wash us away.". When the levee broke many were swept away. Then 13,000 poor blacks were trapped on a levee without food or water further down the Mississippi and promised by a businessman that barges would come to take them to safety. The businessman's father colluded with local whites to block the rescue and only a handfull of white women and children were allowed on the barges. They feared their cheap labor would never return. A black leader was shot in the back for refusing to work a 24 hour shift, and whites and blacks armed themselves amid rising tensions.

Two Americas

Just saw Jesse Jackson on MSNBC, interviewed by the African American woman, with long curls who has been hosting Countdown subbing for Olbermann. Real TV, like Kanye, real things going on. First of all he rips into her for calling them refugees, these are not refugees; these are American citizens. Then she asks a good question: why is this story, like the Rodney King and OJ stories uncovering 2 Americas, black and white, who view things very differently. He answers, because we have no black newsperson who hosts a show on CNN, MSNBC, not one.She responds, I'm working on it.

Rev. Jackson's point about refugees was spot on. How easily the we slipped into the habit of calling them refugees. The only other recent poor black refugees, from Haiti, were sent to Guantanamo and then back to the violent, poverty stricken island where they now live at risk of massacre by US and UN supported death squads. I would avoid being thought of as a refugee given the treatment of the Haitian refugees.