Letters to the Editor
Dirigo
Published Letters: 673 Editor's Choice: 1
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Media Madness
[Read the article: John King with Mike McConnell: Rare journalistic honesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"These are normal clothes that nomadic people wear.
The head turban is especially used by elderly people as a suggestion of respect. It is something that has no meaning whatsoever in Somali culture.
If you see someone dressed like that in Somalia, you think it is a nomadic person, that is all.
There is no religious significance to it whatsoever.
In this particular place [where the picture of Barack Obama in a turban was taken], Wajir in northeast Kenya, the community is majority ethnic Somali."
[ ... ]
"This debate [in the US over the Obama picture] reminds me of people back home in Somalia who say that women should not wear trousers, or other cultures who say men should not wears a tie. I just don't think it makes sense."
---Yusef Garaad Omar, commenting on the picture of Barack Obama in native Somali dressed, first posted in this country on the Drudge Report Website, 2/25/08
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Omar is chief of the BBC's Somali Service; his comments are posted on the BBC's Website, 2/26/08.
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Aycharaych
[Read the article: John King with Mike McConnell: Rare journalistic honesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I read some of your stuff once in a while, passing for the most part on any urge to weigh in on your pet peeve - the drug war; which is not to say I don't have an interest in its more throughly fraudulent political dimensions.
However, have you seen "American Gangster," the Ridley Scott film with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe?
If not, get the DVD with the extended cut and the supplemental documentary material.
After I watched it, I thought that if I had been killed while in Vietnam in '68, I might have become an unwitting and obviously completely unconscious mule for Frank Lucas
What a legacy that would have been.
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Aycharaych
[Read the article: John King with Mike McConnell: Rare journalistic honesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, well Lucas claims this and that, but the storyline is that he arranged to ship nearly pure heroin from Southeast Asia to the US, using some accomodating American military personnel, including a key relative who served in uniform 'in-country," for many years during the Vietnam War..
The War On Drugs.
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Gangster
[Read the article: John King with Mike McConnell: Rare journalistic honesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm tellin' ya, Aych, I just know I came home from 'Nam in one of Frank's mule coffins! And, lived to tell the tale!
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bucky 1 - re: If There Was No Drug War In '68
[Read the article: John King with Mike McConnell: Rare journalistic honesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What does it mean indeed?
What does the "war" on this and that mean?
Underlining the absurd, if I knew I was going to die in Vietnam (a premonition?), and got wind of the possibility that I might be sent home as, in effect, a mule for someone like Frank Lucas, I would have insisted on first class!
The entire rhetorical edifice about a "war" on tobacco, obesity, faulty dental dams, leaky fire plugs, drugs, burnt bras, and on and on, is a function of phony government programs, publicized by lazy commercial news outlets.
You're right, drug "lords" have always been with us. Some in history have become political leaders; some have, in their later years, "helped" the very communities they pillaged when they were young "terrorists."
But based on what we hear everyday, and have heard for years now, we're in a perpetual state of war, on all fronts, and on every level.
The big war now is a war on a tactic, apparently a never-ending war on a tactic.
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A Riff On Barack - 1
[Read the article: Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Obama's quest for the meaning of his absent father's life becomes a search for his own identity in "Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." First published in 1995, beautifully written, it is the story of his youthful disaffection and salvation through community organizing in Chicago. He describes his childhood and adolescence in Hawaii, where 'there were too many races, with power among them too diffuse, to impost the mainland's rigid caste system.' Hawaii had been interrupted by Djakarta, where Obama lived between 1967 and 1971, when his mother married again, to an Indonesian engineer who would teach him how to defend himself and how to change a tire. His stepfather's brand of Islam accomodated elements of animism and Hinduism, but Obama understood in retrospect that the overthrow of Sukarno in 1965, and the massacre of Communists and ethnic Chinese, had changed his stepfather from the idealist his mother had met at the University of Hawaii to an uncommunicative man intent on surviving in the new regime."
---"Dreams From Obama"
---By Darryl Pinckney
---The N.Y. Review of Books, 3/6/08
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Riff On Barack -2
[Read the article: Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"He learned to slip back and forth between his black and white worlds, 'understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.' Yet racial self-consciousness left him on edge. 'There was a trick there somewhere, although what that trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.' "
---"Dreams From Obama"
---Pinckney
---N.Y. Review, 3/6/08
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Riff On Barack -3
[Read the article: Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"He read DuBois, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and concluded - as only a young man can - that each had ended his life exhausted and bitter. 'Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.' But in 1979 at Occidental College in Los Angeles he 'stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren't interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time.' Yet when he remembers that a girl on campus from a multi-racial background nearly cried when she said that black people were trying to make her choose sides, that it was black people who always made everything about race, he reflects that integration was a one-way street, that the minority always assimilated into the dominant culture, as though only 'white culture' could be nonracial, neutral, and objective. 'Only white culture had individuals.' "
---"Dreams From Obama"
---Pinckney
---N.Y. Review, 3/6/08