Disqus - Latest Comments for countrycache

Re: Mapping Police Stops on a Global Walk

countrycache — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 21:05:22 -0000

Mapping police stops is a great way to document the reality of state control of travel and migration. Thank you for recording the variations of that enforcement reality for us armchair adventurers who gain valuable impressions and insights from your words.

After reading your post I remembered Aviva Chomsky's book 'Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal' where she wrote: "Restricting freedom of movement, as in apartheid, is a way of enforcing domination and maintaining inequality ... ... ... On a global level, patrolled borders prevent the poor of the world from escaping the poverty they were born into ... ... ... Global apartheid is enforced with walls, stadium lights, and guns."

Re: What’s Really Interesting About These Hacked Emails

countrycache — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:11:22 -0000

The Donald has a short attention-span - "I can tell you that!"

Re: Bill Cosby and Rape: Why Were We So Slow?

countrycache — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 07:24:59 -0000

Suzanne, thank you for this sensitive and insightful post. If dealing with the break-up of the Cosby icon is difficult for us, his erstwhile 'fans,' then it is immensely more problematic for the man himself. Scott Simon interviewed Cosby after the rape allegations surfaced this time with a vengeance. Scott asked him directly twice to comment. Since it was a radio show, Scott described Bill Cosby's response to the questions by saying into Cosby's silence ... 'I see you shaking your head.' as Cosby refused to say even one word on-air. Silence was Cosby's answer. Neither vengeance, nor silence can be our answer.

Re: More Americans Are Flocking To The South

countrycache — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 13:02:45 -0000

I think that Mr. Thompson made an utterly astonishing claim at the beginning of yesterday's show when he said:

"Ah, you know how water collects in bogs and sort of sits there? Demographically that’s basically what was happening in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. Families born in the South wouldn’t leave. They would just stay."

Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration documents the out-migration of six million African Americans from the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. That's hardly families "just staying" in the "bog" of the South. I think that Mr. Thompson owes his listeners an apology and a clear statement about the tidal wave of persons who left the American South during the first half of the 20th Century.

The Great Migration had a profound impact on all American geographical regions: from the South itself to northern industrial cities and westward to the Pacific Ocean. Isabel Wilkerson, on page nine of The Warmth of Other Suns, writes: [The Great Migration] grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.

We forget this epic in American history at our peril.

Re: Postscript to A Letter About Jesus

countrycache — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 06:52:35 -0000

I'm writing to say Thank You. I find the distinction you so clearly make between the historical and the risen Jesus very liberating. Knowing the historical Jesus as man and metaphor opens me to Jesus' teaching now. Freed from the prison of the past in my mind, the Risen and abiding Jesus shows up today as God's gift of forgiveness and right-order that calls me into a new 'way' for living in my present moment.

Re: The end of night

countrycache — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:31:49 -0000

We got rid of our yard light too. At first we wired it with an on/off switch; but then about twenty years ago we removed the light and the pole. I agree with your comments about eyes adjusting nicely to the darkness, and the feeling of greater rather than less security. But I'm not a farmer. If I had the large investments in agricultural equipment found on the typical Iowa farm these days, I suppose I'd feel differently.

Re: The end of night

countrycache — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 10:53:12 -0000

This was a wonderful article, very interesting and informative. Growing up in Chicago, I was quite aware of the way nighttime lighting kept the urban environment 'in your face.' Then when I moved out to the Iowa countryside, farmstead after farmstead had bright yard-lights that came on with the first hint of dusk. Farmers like these lights for convenience and security, I suppose; but for me, with each nightfall they just tear ragged holes in the horizon.

Re: Desert silence

countrycache — Sat, 31 Aug 2013 07:44:58 -0000

Daniel Barenboim gave the 2006 BBC Reith Lectures. The title of his first lecture was "In the beginning there was sound." Barenboim said that sound emerges from the surrounding silence, which is an enveloping force like gravity that pulls objects together obliterating their differences.

In our world of ever-present sound Robert Twigger's essay brought Barenboim's lecture to mind. I am but one note in the music of the universe with a beginning, and an ending. Reading Twigger's essay I was reminded that the sound of my life's one note exists in the enveloping silence of the universe where each life is contingent upon notes preceding, and yet somehow is necessary for the sound of notes to follow.

I found a BBC link to the PDF transcript of Barenboim's 2006 lecture here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/... .

I did not find a link to a soundtrack of Barenboim's actual presentation due to the 'gravity of silence,' perhaps.

Re: Cities belong to us

countrycache — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 21:27:53 -0000

This excellent article reminded me of a podcast I heard in 2012. Charles Tripp, professor of politics with reference to the Middle East at the London School of Economics (LSE), explained "... how resistance to regimes' appropriation of public space has been a central theme of the Arab uprisings." You can find the podcast here: http://bit.ly/196ipSb

Tripp's book is: Power and the People - Paths of Resistance in the Middle East. Here's a link to the book at Amazon: http://amzn.to/13D8SJP

Re: The American cloud

countrycache — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 22:10:32 -0000

Although it took some re-reading to realize the cloud metaphor referred to America's technological production infrastructure, I liked this article. This cloud is not a geographical but a liturgical, Hamiltonian-cathedral reality. Wow! I would never have thought of that. And yet, once I got the idea it sure made my nostalgic drive to Marble Rock, Iowa today, along the gravel-road route of "The Pershing Way," much more interesting. Lots of Hamiltonian-cathedrals and incense along the Pershing Way today, all of it from penned-up, seven-day, factory-farm animals.

Shannon Stoney ended her comment on this article with a reference to the Walmart Greeter. Walmart doesn't use greeters on our pigtail of the cloud. That's too bad, because those greeters were some of Walmart's most significant employees. Walmart would never have reached the stratosphere of merchandising if its greeters were dour, surly types; meaning, I guess, we'd still be heading on down to the A & P for our groceries!

Re: The death of my father

countrycache — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 09:02:41 -0000

Thank you for this article. I was struck by the underlying 'tearing of the fabric of a life' metaphor, which recognizes the shared nature of individual, but not isolated, consciousness. Anguish that gut wrenching emotion, comes unbidden to surround these tears in the fabrics of our lives. Anguish peers through the tear with us at loss. And yet anguish brings both recognition of loss and also openness for birth. Even then as we mourn the rending, life is busy weaving nascent textures and new individual patterns into its ever unrolling bolt of life-cloth fabric.

This essay calls to mind James Fenton reading "verse of his own" at Christopher Hitchens memorial gathering April 20, 2012, which I readin The New Yorker. Here’s a little of Fenton's offering, followed by a link to the article –

I think the dead would want us
To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.

And time would find them generous
As they used to be
And what else would they want from us
Than an honoured place in our memory,
favourite room, a hallowed chair,
Privilege and celebrity?

http://nyr.kr/1cYnpW5

Re: What is peace?

countrycache — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 07:38:15 -0000

This was a beautiful essay, especially as it contrasted the seemingly opposite ideas of longue duree and immediate, personal, peacemaking decisions (summarized in the last paragraph.) A movie which came to mind after reading this article was "Of Gods and Men," which is about the personal decisions of ten Trappist monks in war-torn Algeria. Each man choose to continue his ministry to the villagers rather than to accept the government's offer of evacuation. http://dvd.netflix.com/Movi...

Re: State Experts

countrycache — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 10:45:59 -0000

O. Kay Henderson in Iowa -
http://okhenderson.com/2012...

Re: Dorcas Gustine -- Spoon River Anthology

countrycache — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:52:04 -0000

It takes great courage and fortitude to "... snatch the wolf forth and fight him openly ... amid dust and howls of pain ..." yet where else are the recognition, the resolve, the repentance and the rejoicing in life to be found?