Culture
As one would predict, many humor writers are taking cheap shots at the new pat-down rules at airports. But at Sojourners we're different.
Preachers in American fiction are usually not to be trusted -- Elmer Gantry might steal from you, the priest in Mystic River might kidnap you, Robert Duvall’s Sonny i
My husband, he die
without water in desert.
Walking Saudi Arabia --
no jobs in Yemen
for policemen
from Somalia.
Michelle Alexander, a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, is an associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohi
Reading Walter and June Wink's interview with Steve Holt ("Confronting the Powers," December 2010) brought back blessed memories of their warmth, humor, intelligence, and love of life while they at
1. Dive! The United States throws out 263 million pounds of food per day, much of which is perfectly good to eat.
Not to brag, but my new toilet was rated Best Flush for 2010. I don't know if this reflects its intrinsic design superiority or if the manufacturer was simply teaching to the test, but it does recall the original slogan of George W. Bush's education initiative: "No Child Left Behind; Check the Bathrooms." (It was supposed to be a reminder to school bus drivers, but Congress broadened it considerably.)
Regardless, my new toilet has three times the standard flush power, which means the user should not remain seated when the flushing process is initiated, unless that person's effects are in order and power of attorney established.
This is just one of the features of our new quarter-bath downstairs, the construction of which was my attempt to stimulate the weak economy while providing a place for me to use in the coming years when I become too frail to make it to my secret place in the back yard.
A quarter-bath, a home improvement concept of my own invention, is like a half-bath, only smaller, by half. There's space for a sink, a toilet, and a small person not wearing bulky clothing. Definitely a summer destination. There is room to sit, but not room to flail your arms emotionally after being denied use of the larger bathroom because family members, citing overcrowding, threatened to call the fire marshal.
Nonviolent Power
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC gathers powerful oral histories from 52 women, "northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina" who were on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. University of Illinois Press
Tell Me, Tell Me
In a Winnipeg, Manitoba, high school where 58 languages were spoken among the student body, a teacher started an after-school storytelling project to bridge the gaps between immigrant and Canadian students. The documentary The Storytelling Class tells of the students' experience. Bullfrog Films
It's a golden age for documentaries. Michael Moore kick-started the era with crusading films such as Bowling for Columbine and Sicko, fusing serious social commentary with a protagonist who could be identified with by a wider audience than the "God's-eye view" used in magnificent PBS films by Ken Burns, such as The Civil War and Jazz. Burns seeks a resonant "objective" perspective, relating tales of U.S. history as if our lives depended on it (which of course, if you accept that those who forget are doomed to repeat, it does). Moore wants to place us at the story’s center, revealing the insecurities at the heart of American social strife as something that we could all do something about.
Moore and Burns are only the most popular and widely seen of recent documentarians. They stand alongside Errol Morris, whose treatment of the life of Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, may be the best analysis of how political rhetoric can mask horrific action; Michael Apted, whose Up series, following the lives of several people since their seventh birthdays in 1964, constitutes a social history of the past 50 years; and most of all the Maysles Brothers, who were among those who invented the form, with films such as Salesman, an astonishing vision of the corruption of commerce and religion, and Grey Gardens, which serves as a mirror image to the myths of Camelot that surround JFK's presidency. All of these films paved the way for recent works fusing factual cinema with an ethical eye.
My strokes are halting, not like the imagined fluidity
of the monastic scribes, hunched, by candlelight,
over some ancient text, perhaps the Our Father,
being deftly rendered in the thin black liquid
of a gently dipped quill.
From their sublime to my ridiculous work
in colored calligraphy markers
purchased at the local drugstore.
But my text is the same, the Our Father;
except mine is printed on the inside jacket
of the pocket edition of a scriptural rosary book,
printed and published a mere forty years ago.
I went into a Christian bookstore the other day and was surprised to see some of the most prominent display space given over to military flags for the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. These flags, and a vast assortment of Americana merchandise, were on sale for the holidays.