Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Dog Days True Quaker Stories: The Party That Went On Too Long

Much of my initial “information” about the Communist Party came from watching a TV show, “I Led Three Lives,” after we got a TV in mid-1952. The show started the next year and ran for more than a hundred episodes. It was inspired by the true-life career of Herbert Philbrick of Boston.

For years, Philbrick was a seemingly ordinary white collar office worker. But he was also a secret member of the Communist Party, spying and planning to overthrow the American government — and even more secretly, a double agent helping the FBI foil the Communist schemes. In 1952, he published a best-selling book about all this; and Hollywood jumped on the story line.

(In an episode I sadly missed, one such –fictional– plot was about how the party was going to turn vacuum cleaners into handheld missile launchers. Sound, um, far-fetched? But J. Edgar Hoover approved that episode, as he did all of them, so it must have been thrilling.)

Now I know much better how, in the late 1940s and into the 1960s, “the Communists” were a very big deal for Americans. Hiss’s two trials marked a major turning point in U.S. public opinion, toward a hard anti-communism, of the sort I grew up absorbing like milk on cornflakes.

Michelle & Larycia: Two Remarkable Women Speak

The uproar that led to the firing of Larycia Hawkins was what we call a total flustercluck, which surfaced so many ugly currents that swirl through the evangelical constituency that the oppression bean counters had to scramble to keep up: there was race (of course), but also gender (& single too, i.e., not under a man’s “headship”, and — dare I say it — attractive); she’s also an accomplished intellectual; staunchly Christian, yet theologically adventurous; well-spoken, vocal and assertive.
“Wheaton College cannot scare me into walking away from the truth that all humans, Muslims, the vulnerable, the oppressed … are all my sisters and brothers and I am called by Jesus to walk with them.”
Michelle Obama spoke today (10-13-2016) in New Hampshire, and her speech will, I believe, go down as a landmark of humanist political rhetoric. She was angry, she was eloquent, she was unanswerable & unstoppable, and the crowd (sounded like students) went totally bonkers.

Yes, it was a campaign speech. But I’ve left out the parts that urge her listeners to vote for a particular candidate; because that’s not what I want to highlight here.

I want to pass the heart of the speech, a woman speaking to other women, and men, about the issues that have leapt to the fore in the past few days. You know what they are. But she says it best:

Transphobia’s “scriptural” roots: The Bible Is Better Than That

Transphobia: The Bible Is Better Than That North Carolina’s odious “Bathroom Bill,” HB2 has been pushed out of the spotlight for the moment, while the crazy 2016 election plays itself out. I can understand that. But HB2 and it’s ilk will be back, and it’s still on my mind. In particular, I’ve been trying to … Continue reading Transphobia’s “scriptural” roots: The Bible Is Better Than That →

Two Election Comments — Bear With Me

Now, here in Carolina we currently have a redhot race for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Richard Burr, a faceless Republican known mostly for saying little, collecting millions from coal companies, and being the best friend & defender of torture in the U.S. Senate.

Burr’s challenger is former state Senator Deborah Ross. A year ago, when she announced, few gave the little-known Ross much of a chance against Burr.

But that was before Donald Trump turned the state into a purple battleground, and before the federal courts threw out most of the vote suppression tools the right-wing legislature had enacted to hold down Democratic voting. Now the polls are very close, and Burr’s attack ads are getting down & dirty.
This is Burr’s big attack ad. Note the three key elements: pro sex offender; ACLU Lawyer; — and in the background, where many might miss it but the base won’t, is the visage of a presumably predatory male of dark hue and evil intentions.

How down & dirty? Just a couple days ago, the senator unveiled a saturation attack ad against Ross that uses three magic, time-tested, silver bullet Democrat-destroying elements: “pro-sex offenders” and — wait for it — “ACLU.”

But there’s more: in the background, an ominous dark-skinned male visage.

For the GOP & further right base in NC, any of these is a killer; the combo adds up to a go-for-broke, four-pronged assault. And the ACLU thing, at least, is true, Ross did work there, from the mid-’90s til 2002 when she ran for the legislature.

That’s fine with me — hey, I’m a proud ACLU contributor/member. But this is still North Carolina . . . .

Who Knew? Wikipedia Can Be Funny!

It’s dispiriting to see articles about schools these days putting Huckleberry Finn in the literary dustbin, because of concerns over trigger words that were authentic to the culture Twain was portraying. But then, that’s happened a lot to other classics too.
I’m not going to get into the weeds on all that here, though I’m standing by my (Twain) man. Rather, I want to note that related controversies are nothing new for Twain’s magnum opus. Indeed, they go back to its appearance in the U.S. in 1885. (It was published in the United Kingdom a year earlier.) And here is where the tale gets interesting, and not about the word that is so radioactive now. No, it was much bigger.