Michael Donald
PG was looking at facebook, minding his own business. Then he saw something he could not unsee.(TRIGGER WARNING) The NSFW image showed a dead black man hanging in a tree. You can see his face. The caption: “Fox News commentator and Trump sycophant Tucker Carlson said yesterday that “white supremacy is a hoax.” I wonder if this poor man would agree? (I apologize if the image offends but sometimes right-wing idiots have to have reality stare them in the face.)”
The gut level reaction was that of being violated. What gives a facebook “friend” the right to shove a gruesome image in the viewers face? A lot more than “right-wing idiots” will see this picture. We understand that a Fox-boi said something you don’t like. That does not give you the right to disturb the community peace of mind.
There are plenty of arguments you can make. You can post your two-wrongs-make-a-right all day long. No doubt _______ did something terrible last week. That does not give you the right to post an obscene picture on facebook. UPDATE: The image has been *hidden* by facebook.
White Supremacy® is an expression that grows by leaps and bounds. It used to mean the kkk, and other hard-core racists. Now, it means whatever you want it to mean. The definition of WS has expanded to the point where the term is meaningless. It is tough to say what, if anything, Tarlson Cucker meant. We would be better off using the phrase White Supremacy® a lot less frequently.
When you are collateral damage on facebook, you have a few options. You can unfriend the perp, and say rude things about them behind their back. This has always seemed petty and childish. Another thing you can do is research the picture. PG did a google images search of the picture. It turns out to be a powerful story. Is it proper to appropriate this image to shame Tarlson Cucker? As if he would know it happened, or care.
Michael Donald is the man hanging in the tree. Here is the story of how he got there. “That week, a jury had been struggling to reach a verdict in the case of a black man accused of murdering a white policeman. The killing had occurred in Birmingham, but the trial had been moved to Mobile. To (Bennie) Hays — the second-highest Klan official in Alabama — and his fellow members of Unit 900 of the United Klans, the presence of blacks on the jury meant that a guilty man would go free. … Hays had said that Wednesday, ”If a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man.””
“On Friday night, after the jurors announced they couldn’t reach a verdict, the Klansmen got together in a house Bennie Hays owned on Herndon Avenue. According to later testimony from James (Tiger) Knowles, then 17 years old, Tiger produced a borrowed pistol. Henry Francis Hays, Bennie’s 26-year-old son, took out a rope. Then the two got in Henry’s car and went hunting for a black man.”
“Michael Donald was alone, walking home, when Knowles and Hays spotted him. They pulled over, asked him for directions to a nightclub, then pointed the gun at him and ordered him to get in. They drove to the next county. When they stopped, Michael begged them not to kill him, then tried to escape. Henry Hays and Knowles chased him, caught him, hit him with a tree limb more than a hundred times, and, when he was no longer moving, wrapped the rope around his neck. Henry Hays shoved his boot in Michael’s face and pulled on the rope. For good measure, they cut his throat. … Henry Hays and Knowles returned to the party at Bennie Hays’s house, where they showed off their handiwork, and, looping the rope over a camphor tree, raised Michael’s body just high enough so it would swing.” For a while, it looked like the case would go unsolved.
Some people kept looking. “After hearing a lot of lies and following many unproductive leads, (Thomas H.) Figures and (James) Bodman uncovered one key fact: On the night of the murder, Tiger Knowles had returned to Bennie Hays’s house with blood on his shirt. With this new evidence, the Justice Department convened an investigative grand jury in Mobile. Incredibly, the Klansmen called to testify did not bring lawyers with them. In short order, one witness told the grand jury that young Henry Hays had admitted everything to him. This got back to Tiger Knowles, who began to worry that Henry Hays would confess — and, by trading testimony against Knowles for a reduced sentence, leave him bearing the greater burden of guilt.”
“In June of 1983, Knowles confessed to F.B.I. agent Bodman. After pleading guilty to violating Michael Donald’s civil rights, he was placed in the Federal witness protection program — a fairly standard accommodation for Klan informers — and sentenced to life in prison. In December, when Henry Hays was tried for capital murder, Knowles appeared as a prosecution witness.”
Henry Hays was found guilty. “Hays was executed in Alabama electric chair Yellow Mama after Governor Fob James refused to commute his sentence. He was the first white person executed for murder of a black in Alabama since 1913.” Mr. Hays died June 6, 1997.
“Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, in assistance of SPLC, sued United Klans of America in a civil suit. An all White jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Michael Donald and ordered it to pay 7 million dollars. This resulted in the Klan having to hand over all its assets including its national headquarters in Tuscaloosa.”
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Hiroshima 74 Years Later
At 8:15 am, August 6, 1945, Hiroshima got nuked. It was the start of a new era. Since Japan is 13 hours ahead of Georgia, and standard time was used, the literal anniversary is 8:15 pm, August 5.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was working in Hiroshima when the bomb hit. He survived, and found a train to take hime to his home town, Nagasaki.
The device dropped on Hiroshima, the Little Boy, had an estimated force of 13 kilotons of Trinitrotoluene, or TNT. A kiloton of TNT is roughly a cube whose sides are ten meters. This device is fairly tiny compared to many of the warheads developed since. Many of the modern appliances are measured in megatons, or millions of tons of TNT. The Soviet Union had a bomb with a capacity of 50 megatons, or 4,000 times the size of the Little Boy.
The largest weapon tested by The United States is the Castle Bravo. This device destroyed Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The two piece swimsuit was named for this island. The Castle Bravo device had a yield of 15 megatons of TNT. This is roughly 1,000 times the power of the Little Boy.
The decision to drop the bomb has long been controversial. There are a lot of factors and gray areas, and the issue does not lend itself to sound bite solutions. The conventional wisdom is that Japan surrendered because of the nuclear attack. This meant the war was shortened by at least a year, there was no invasion of Japan, and many lives were saved. PG is scared by the moral calculus involved in a decision like this….do 100,000 civilian deaths prevent the deaths of 500,000 soldiers? PG suspects that even G-d herself would lose sleep over that one.
There is also evidence that the bomb was not needed. Japan was whipped in August 1945. The air raids were conducted in daylight with little resistance. A debate was going on in the Japanese government on whether to continue the fight.
An event happened the day between Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, which influenced the Japanese decision to surrender. The Soviet Union had agreed to help the United States with the war against Japan. On August 8, The Soviet Union invaded Japanese occupied Manchuria. There are indications that Japan knew the fight was hopeless at this point, and would rather surrender to The United States than The Soviet Union. This is one of the gray areas that never seems to be mentioned.
The United States wanted the war to end quickly for obvious reasons, and a few subtle ones. America did not want to share the spoils of Japanese war with The Soviet Union. There were already tensions between the two allies, and the cold war was not far off. Many felt The United States used the Little Boy as a warning to The Soviet Union.
When you get your moral software out, you might want to figure in the effect of opening the nuclear Pandora’s box. Would the nuclear bomb have been developed by other countries if America had not led the way? The science is not that complicated…after all, America hit paydirt with the Manhattan Project fairly quickly. Nonetheless, there is karma involved in using a terrible new device on a civilian population. The United States started the wind of the arms race, and has yet to feel the whirlwind.
This is a repost. The pictures are from The Library of Congress. Ansel Adams took pictures of Japanese Americans, in a World War Two internment camp. The ladies in the bridge game are Aiko Hamaguchi, Chiye Yamanaki, Catherine Yamaguchi, and Kazoko Nagahama.
Adolf Hitler Really Said
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The r-word is a dandy distraction. Not that I would correct Mary’s babydaddy, but I would be the words “perceived as” in front of the r-word. Not everyone considers stupid tweet to be worthy of the r-slur. ~ Writing poetry is neither a game nor a chore, it is rather the art of choosing the right words and to assemble them correctly and musically. We ought to read and write and not the contrary. ~ @jordanbpeterson One more week to get something from my Rule 7 Collection from @teespring #12rulesforlife ~ Did you ever think we would be having serious discussions about “The President’s tweets”? ~ I was mostly commenting about the word tweet. Fifteen years ago, a tweet was a useless noise from a bird. I admit, I follow @realdonaldtrump. I like getting an unfiltered view of his madness. With previous world leaders, you had to wait on the press to report on their idiocy. Now, you can see it direct from the source, in real time. ~ While we are salivating about Dayton and El Paso and @realDonaldTrump , how many one on one killings have we had in the same time period? ~ Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Mental Hospital; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years ~ The Therapeutic Benefits of Ambient Music: Science Shows How It Eases Chronic Anxiety, Physical Pain, and ICU-Related Trauma Sixty years ago, when (Dr. Oliver) Sacks was still in medical school, avant-garde jazz bandleader Sun Ra had a very Sacks-like experience when he played for an audience of patients in a mental hospital, and inspired a catatonic woman who hadn’t spoken for years to stand up and say ‘Do you call that music?’” ~ story source ~ iow, if you support a politician, you deserve to be physically assaulted. That is incredibly fucked up. ~ pictures for this psycho-killer free recollection of last week are from The Library of Congress. ~ selah
August 4
August 4 is just another day. Summer is roughly halfway over, if you talk about the time between the solstice and the equinox. Schools are starting, and football teams are tackling, so autumn is not far away. One advertising medium says August 4 is National Friendship Day, National Sisters Day, National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, National Family Day, and National Coast Guard Day.
A few interesting people were born on August 4. 1792 – Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821 – Louis Vuitton, 1901 – Louis Armstrong, 1961 – Barack Obama, 1971 – Jeff Gordon.
Important events took place on August 4. Wikipedia will be quoted, with a few tasteful edits. 1693 – “Date traditionally ascribed to Dom Perignon’s invention of champagne.” 1892 – “The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden are found murdered in their Fall River, MA, home.” 1914 – “In response to the German invasion of Belgium, the British Empire declares war on Germany.” 1944 – “A tip from a Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to an area in Amsterdam, where they arrest Anne Frank.” 1964 – “Civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney are found dead in Mississippi after disappearing on June 21.” 1964 – “U.S. destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy report coming under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.”
On August 4, 1964, I spent the day with my Grandmother. Her favorite soap opera, “As The World Turns,” was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Later that day, we walked to the clubhouse of the Piedmont Park golf course. A friend of Gran’s worked there. The golf course lady could not wait to tell me that she did not like the Beatles. “If the Beatles were playing, for free, across the street, I would not waste the energy to walk over there and see them.”
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Richards
A comment at a recent post mentioned “Jenning’s Rose Room, a classic poor white juke and dance hall … where Trader Joes now sits.” PG had been in that building when it was called Richards. Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
There is no telling what the original use of the building at 931 Monroe Drive was. It was across the street from Grady Stadium, and adjacent to Piedmont Park. The railroad tracks that became the beltline ran behind it. The parking lot was primitive, with a marquee sign built at some point. (PG drove by that sign several nights and saw that Lynyrd Skynyrd was playing.)
There was another nightclub building on the hill behind JRR. One night, PG went to see a jazz band there, accompanied by someone who lived in a nearby house. After seeing the band, PG was led to a horse stable behind the bar. The horses were not well maintained … you could see the ribs sticking out. There is a story of a goat getting loose from the stable, and being chased out of the jazz bar during happy hour.
Jennings Rose Room was before PG’s time. There is a story that some men had lunch there, and made a bet. The idea was to hit a golf ball from the JRR parking lot, and putt it into a hole at Piedmont Park. A biscuit was used as a tee. The first shot went across the street, onto the field at the stadium. Eventually, the ball was hit across Tenth Street, onto a green, and into the cup.
At some point, Jennings Rose Room closed. A gay club called Chuck’s Rathskeller was opened in that location. A rock and roll club or two did business there. Then Richards opened.
The first time PG was in the house was after a Johnny Winter concert at the Fox. There were rumors of visiting musicians dropping by Richards to play after their shows. Mr. Winter was only onstage for a couple of minutes after PG got there.
The most memorable trip to Richards was during the summer of 1973. The headliner was Rory Gallagher, who was ok but not spectacular. The opening act was Sopwith Camel, one of the forgotten bands of the seventies. They performed a novelty hit, “Hello Hello”. Someone in the audience liked it, and paid them to do it again. The band wound up doing “Hello Hello” five times, and said that was the most money they made in a long time.
Average White Band was making the rounds that fall, and had a show at Richards. A lot of the audience was black, and they hit the dance floor in unison when “Pick up the Pieces” was played. Fellow Scotsman Alex Harvey was in town, and joined AWB to sing “I heard it through the grapevine”.
Muddy Waters played at Richards one night. The band did most of the playing, with Mr. Waters tossing in a few licks on bottleneck guitar. He might have sang a couple of times.
About this time, Iggy Pop played a few shows at Richards. One night, someone snuck up on him, and gave him a hug. It was Elton John, wearing a gorilla suit.
PG saw three more shows (that he can remember) at Richards. Richie Havens was worth the two dollar admission. Soft Machine played in the winter of 1974. Larry Coryell played a show that summer, with the Mike Greene Band opening. PG got to talk to Mike Greene that night. The National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (who do the Grammy Awards) had a President named C. Michael Greene at one time. PG thinks this is the person he talked to that night.
Two friends of PG went, as their first date, to see Spirit at Richards. They were married a few years later. Towards the end of 1974, Richards was running out of steam. They advertised a New Years Eve show starring B.B. King, and sold high priced tickets. When the crowd showed up for the show, they found the doors locked. Richards had closed.
The next tenant for 931 Monroe Drive was going to be Cabaret After Dark, a gay club. There was a fire the night before the grand opening. The building was never used again. Eventually, a shopping center was built on the site.
UPDATE: Here is an article, from the Great Speckled Bird, about Richards. The 010975 edition of the Bird had an article about Richards closing. This is a repost.
Chamblee54 
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