Mark Maynard | 2005 | November

articulating why alito is bad for america

By Mark | November 8, 2005

The People for the American Way have put together a fantastic television ad on Judge Alito and why we, as a nation, should demand better for our Supreme Court. And, their framing of the issue, I think, is spot on… Essentially they suggest in the ad that, because of the criminal indictments against senior Bush officials, the quagmire in Iraq, and the mess in the wake of hurricane Katrina, Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to an unprecedented low, and, as a result, he’s been put in a position where he’s had to pander to his extreme and vocal base, going so far as to allow them to hand-pick the person to take O’Connor’s seat. (“George Bush’s presidency is in trouble and he’ll do anything to save it… even giving the radical right wing the power to choose who sits on the Supreme Court.”)

I know it’s not a lot, but I just gave $30 so that the ad could be aired more widely. Does anyone out there want to match me? If so, click here to donate.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

suspect sought in ypsilanti

By Mark | November 8, 2005

There was a brutal attack on a woman here in Ypsilanti yesterday morning. According to the report published in today’s Ann Arbor News, she entered her home on Congress Street, after raking leaves, to find a man waiting for her. (She’d seen the same man earlier, trying to get into a vacant house on her street.) The man proceeded to beat her savagely. Roberta Citino, the 49 year old victim, is presently in stable condition, and the police are looking for her assailant. Following is the police description (thanks to Brian for forwarding it):

Incident occurred in the 1100 block of Congress Street within the City of Ypsilanti, on 11/07/05, between the hours of 10:00 am and 11:00 am.

The suspect is a black male, mid 30’s to mid 40’s, 5’10” to 6’02”, slim build, black hair and brown eyes. The suspect was wearing a light brown casual coat, baggy grey sweat pants and dark blue canvas deck style shoes.

Any with information regarding the incident or the suspect in this sketch should contact the Ypsilanti Police Department at (734) 483-9510 or Detective Sgt. Walker at (734) 483-5849.

I just saw the police questioning a man in front of BW3’s a few minutes ago. I didn’t hear what the police were saying, but the man kept repeating, “I’m sorry if it’s a crime, but I was born black.” It wasn’t until I was a block or so away that I realized that they’d probably stopped him because he fit the above description… What made it doubly weird and depressing is that as I was watching this young black man surrounded by white cops, proclaiming his innocence, I was listening to Alan Lomax’s “Negro Prison Songs” on my iPod. While the police appeared to be treating the man well, standing there, listening to the voices of imprisoned black men in the deep south, I couldn’t help but think about our nation’s not so perfect record when it comes to treating men of color as though they too are presumed innocent… In the defense of the police in this case, however, now that I see the artist’s skecth, the man I saw them questioning really did look similar… At any rate, if you should see anything out of the ordinary tonight, and especially if it involves a man fitting the description above, please call the police. (And please keep a positive thought for the Citino family.)

update: Apparently this attack in Normal Park isn’t the only local home-invasion-related story in recent memory. Fellow Ypsi blogger Lynne Fremont recently had a man enter her home as well. Fortunately, she came out of it unscathed, however, and the man, who was completely nude at the time, was taken into custody.

update: And, to preemptively stop my relatives from flooding my in-box with yet another wave of “Get out of Ypsi” emails, I thought I’d share this link to the Ypsi Crime page, which shows, I think, that things aren’t as bad here as you might think after having just read this post… and the one I wrote this weekend about prostitutes and dealers on my street.

Posted in Ypsilanti | 8 Comments

frank rich revisits the pat tillman myth

By Mark | November 6, 2005

A few weeks ago, after the New York Times first started hiding it’s op-ed writers behind a paid-subscription wall, I suggested a possible way around the system that involved linking a number of blogs together – the idea being that each blog could post a few paragraphs and then link to the next blog in the chain. The idea didn’t go over so well, but I still think it’s got potential…. At any rate, the Times is running an interesting piece by Frank Rich today on the coverup surrounding The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman and I wanted to tell you about it, even though I know that most of you won’t be able to access it on the Times site. (It’s also not listed as being available anywhere else on the Never Pay Retail site.) So, here are the first few paragraphs. If you absolutely love them, order a subscription to the Times. Or, if you already have a subscription and feel like sharing, post the next few paragraphs on your site and leave a link in the comments section.

It would be a compelling story,” Patrick Fitzgerald said of the narrative Scooter Libby used to allegedly mislead investigators in the Valerie Wilson leak case, “if only it were true.”

“Compelling” is higher praise than any Mr. Libby received for his one work of published fiction, a 1996 novel of “murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow” called “The Apprentice.” If you read the indictment, you’ll see why he merits the critical upgrade. The intricate tale he told the F.B.I. and the grand jury – with its endlessly clever contradictions of his White House colleagues’ testimony – is compelling even without the sex and the snow.

The medium is the message. This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case – the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam’s mushroom clouds – was only the first of its genre. Given that potboiler’s huge success at selling the war, its authors couldn’t resist providing sequels once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day approaches, we need to remember and unmask those scenarios as well. Our troops and their families have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war.

If there’s a tragic example that can serve as representative of the rest, it is surely that of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who famously volunteered for the Army in the spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay something back to his country by pursuing the enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war in Iraq that he didn’t see coming when he enlisted because the administration was still hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he “personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun.”

It would be a compelling story, if only it were true. Five weeks after Tillman’s death, the Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing details, that he had “probably” died from friendly fire. Many months after that, investigative journalists at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times reported that the Army’s initial portrayal of his death had been not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of something darker. “The records show that Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath,” Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December 2004. “They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman’s commanders.”

And, while we’re on the subject of creating myths in order to sell the war, I wonder what Jessica Lynch is up to these days.

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

rosa, we hardly knew ya’

By Mark | November 5, 2005

By far, the best discussion that I’ve heard on the life of Rosa Parks since her death a few days ago, has been between University of Wisconsin professor of Afro-American Studies, Tim Tyson, and On The Media’s Bob Garfield. The piece, which was absolutley fantastic, concerned her treatment by the mainstream press, who, right up until the end, felt it necessary to perpetuate the myth that she was just a meek seamstress with tired feet, and not a well-seasoned political activist who would later find common cause with the likes of Malcolm X… If you get a chance, give it a listen, or check out the transcript. Here’s a clip:

BOB GARFIELD: And yet, as recently as today — I’m speaking to you on Wednesday — the Washington Post, in its appreciation of Rosa Parks, referred very much to her as a seamstress and very little to her as an activist. It did nothing to squelch the myth that she was just one woman who, on a certain day, had had enough. Why do you suppose that that myth endures?

TIM TYSON: I think for some reason we are unwilling to honor people who are politically active. We want to honor people who just have had enough and sort of spontaneously won’t take it any more. But somehow if they get categorized as active citizens, which would be a positive way of saying it, as troublemakers — which is the way we often [CHUCKLES] think about such persons — then somehow it becomes self-serving, part of a movement which we’re less comfortable with. And I think that’s just an American popular cultural narrative that we pick up very quickly. And indeed, it started very quickly after the bus boycott. And they talked about her tired feet. That gets mentioned a lot more often than it should. She may have been a little bit tired, but that had nothing to do with the decision that she made.

BOB GARFIELD: In that same Washington Post obituary I read today there was, it seemed, a palpable sense of disappointment that the myth is, in fact, a myth. Why are we so reluctant to let it go?

TIM TYSON: There’s a sense in which Mrs. Parks is very important to our post-civil rights racial narrative, because we really want a kind of sugar-coated civil rights movement that’s about purity and interracial non-violence. And so we don’t really want to meet the real Rosa Parks. We don’t, for example, want to know that in the late 1960s, Rosa Parks became a black nationalist and a great admirer of Malcolm X. I met Rosa Parks at the funeral of Robert F. Williams, who had fought the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina with a machine gun in the late 1950s and then fled to Cuba, and had been a kind of international revolutionary icon of black power. Ms. Parks delivered the eulogy at his funeral. She talks in her autobiography and says that she never believed in non-violence and that she was incapable of that herself, and that she kept guns in her home to protect her family. But we want a little old lady with tired feet. You may have noticed we don’t have a lot of pacifist white heroes. We prefer our black people meek and mild, I think.

Of course, I realize that some of it has to do with the fear that acknowledging the fact that she was an activist prior to her act of civil disobedience might play into the hands of racists who have sought to portray her has a meddlesome n-word with “an agenda,” but don’t we deserve the truth? And why is that we think one story is any more meaningful than the other? Why can’t she be just as worthy of our praise for being the well-informed, pissed-off woman tired of white oppression, instead of the mild-mannered seamstress with tired feet? I realize why, at the time, one story was chosen over the other, as it resonated better with white people and worked to the advantage of the cause, but why, almost 50 years later, do we still feel the need to perpetuate it?

Posted in Civil Liberties | 7 Comments

the joy of fall in ypsilanti

By Mark | November 5, 2005

My friend Dan sent me a photo of his daughter, Leah, a few days ago. It was cute. She was jumping around in a big pile of leaves… Of course that’s something my daughter, being an Ypsilantian will never know. No, our leaves, no matter how hard we try to screen for such things, are always full of crusty bandaids, beer cans and the twisted-up plastic wrap that drugs are sold in.

Here’s the photo I sent back to Dan. It was taken in my front yard. I find about one of these things a week. If I’d been collecting them for the past five years that I’ve lived here, I could have made a pretty cool art piece, like a giant “Welcome to Ypsi” sign.

For the most part, I’m very happy to be living where I’m living, and I love the community, but every now and then, I find myself getting pissed off. Nothing puts me in one of these moods like having a hooker walk down my street, or having to stoop and pick up evidence of a successful drug deal. I did both today, so you’ll have to excuse me…. You know, if I didn’t love Ypsi so damned much, I’d make shirts that said, “Ypsi… Come for the Hookers, Stay for the Meth,” and make a fortune selling them to the rich kids in Ann Arbor.

Posted in Rants | 13 Comments