Jeezus. The line about the kid who knew the difference between gunshots and fireworks made me sad.
This reminds me of David McKittrick et al.'s Lost Lives, a biographical dictionary of everyone who was killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Just names, dates, tags, and a couple of paragraphs. Oh, and an infinity of understated grief.
1: I was thinking last night how there were so many different types of fireworks going off at so many locations that it was in some cases impossible to tell whether they were gunshots or not.
But yeah, what a depressing read.
Terrifying is right. How many shootings does Chicago get a year? I assume this was unusually bad...
4th of July is usually about as bad as it gets. The Trib had reporters just roaming this weekend, because they expected something like this. Which can make you feel better or worse.
Annual stats: http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/shootings
Thanks. Incredible figures. Thirteen hundred so far this year!
I was thinking last night how there were so many different types of fireworks going off at so many locations that it was in some cases impossible to tell whether they were gunshots or not.
Yes, I had the same thought, in part because my house is within earshot of a gun range. It's faint, but the constant pop-pop-pop is something I've both become used to and have come to associate with gun. Fire.
Fireworks on the 4th of July are a celebration of gunfire, are they not? Celebrating the War of Independence with a display that simulates gunfire. While fireworks are pretty, I recall now that as a child I cringed at those types of works that were essentially just sonic booms. Never really got why that was supposed to be nice. Just an adrenalin-inducing thing.
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Coates on July 4th ...letter to his son
You think you are white.
I read some books, but Geoffrey de st Croix'x Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World was particularly important. It really wasn't that much about class struggle, yet it was, thing is the slaves were and remain voiceless, so the book is about one side of the struggle, the struggle to remain on the side of capital, on the side of the owners. Owners.
Sorry, wasn't about race, story was everywhere round the Mediterranean. The story they told themselves wasn't really about being Greek or Roman or citizen or such and such family. The only story that mattered was about being owner or slave, free or slave.
That is what De ste Croix taught me, and how I read Calhoun and Coates. Owner = free. Own your body, your house, your family, your citizens' part share in the community, your future, your vote. Own and be free.
Or have nothing and be nothing. Own...or be less than human, a thing.
But of course I and Ste Croix are Marxists and know it was then and is now an illusion. We are not owners. We are not free. We are not white. I am not male.
Stop being white. Stop being an owner. Stop being free.
"Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it." ...Coates
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When you put it that way it seems so much less attractive than I thought. From now on I'm going to give my pittance to the tea party groups instead of Alan Grayson, Elisabeth Warren, and the like. Thanks Bob!
12:I don't who or what the fuck you are.
Went to Wikipedia to look up "pornography" and "fanservice" but they limit both pretty much to sex.
In my definition, pron is about say, using text or images to invoke? provoke? specific bodily responses, usually but not always conventional predictable and expected. So sex pron is a mere subset of a broad class that includes scenery pron, shaggy dog stories, horror, suspense, patriotism, etc.
For contrast, Stokely Carmichael at Berkeley 1966 ...doing another kind of thing.
Coates writes a kind of anti-racist pron designed to make white people cry.