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Don’cha Know?
A Texas Civil Rights Review
Column of Dissent

By Faddy MacMough

In your article I found at CounterPunch.org, “Beauty from the Heart of Texas: Denzel Washington’s “The Great Debators” you started out with the following paragraph:

Over at the Internet Movie Database, redneck trolls are saddling up their cyber posse to go night riding on the message boards against Denzel Washington and “The Great Debaters.” All of which is a good thing if you like to see relevance in contemporary art. Because deep down, “The Great Debaters” is a film about how to grow yourself into a real person despite the needlers, taunters, and brutes who dominate the space around you — and who dominate it, still.

By now you ought to know I’ll come back at you on any generalizations you make that excoriate Rednecks — it is my solemn duty after all as a leftie redneck. I’ll be the first to admit there are, as you suggest, trolls of a redneck variety. But there are trolls of all sorts of varieties that include folks who are not rednecks. And amongst the trolls who are busy attacking Denzel Washington and the great debaters are some who just don’t have the credentials to be good decent rednecks.

I’d suggest, based on his betrayal of his own roots, that Justice Thomas is a troll who, if his past maunderings are any indication, is perfectly capable to giving Denzel Washington and the movie a needling, a taunting, and a brutalizing. Given his lofty position, that would also carry some weight.

Now don’t get me wrong, trolls are trolls (especially if they are the Tolkienian persuasion) and are to be avoided, and brought to light at every opportunity. And if they happen to be rednecks as well, they certainly do need to be brought into the light of day. (Light, it seems, of a sunlight variety, causes trolls to turn to stone as any student of the Hobbit can attest.) That is just fine and dandy by me. In fact, I applaud anyone who helps to sanitize the redneck blood lines by ridding us of their influence.

However, and this is important, there are rednecks who should be your allies . . . and the allies of all sorts of people (dare I suggest types?) who are struggling against oppression and bigotry in this class society of ours. They are all on the same side of the civil rights equation and shouldn’t be alienated by a slip of the hyperbolic tongue. It doesn’t help your cause, and it only makes theirs all that more difficult.

Had I not recognized you as a fellow traveler in the art and practice of civil rights, someone who has, at least for me, sterling credentials, I wouldn’t have gone much further than the racist epithet: redneck trolls. Nor would you have done much reading if you’d run up against ‘n-word trolls’ — or ‘m-word trolls’ — or any of a number of other racist terms.

Now that brings us around to the closing paragraph:

So please don’t bother believing what the bigots tell you about this film, not even the trolls who claim to have Harvard degrees. You don’t have to be Black to feel beautifully about Denzel Washington’s fine new film, “The Great Debaters.” The “message” of this film is for anyone who still desires the capacity to dream higher than what you already are.

Here, I suppose you come close to redeeming yourself in spite of some rather grandiloquent attempts at grand eloquence. Not believing trolls, or bigots, or even folks with some fancy degree (Harvard being one), is very good advice. We should all heed your advice . . . whether our necks are black or red or brown . . . and we should, all of us, all celebrate the desire to dream higher than what we already are. Those of us wallowing in the under classes of our society have a hell of a lot more in common that we have that the power elites want us to understand and recognize.

Alas, your introductory paragraph does a great deal to continue the tradition of division and intolerance for those who are sometimes frighteningly mirrors of our own existence. It’s high time, in my not so very humble opinion, that all of us with our necks under the yoke of economic oppression were willing to celebrate our mutual successes and quit the divisive language. And it is high time that you, as one of our leaders, should watch out for those killer phrases that have our mutual antagonists smiling with delight at our antagonizing each other.

Fredegar N. MacMough (his friends call him Faddy) is a self-styled leftie, of redneck parentage, holding forth from one of those nasty little oil towns where the glories of Friday Night Lights sustain a population so used to being abused that they think things are just fine and dandy . . . where a peppermint patty world is an illusion foisted upon them because the boys did take state again.

You read it here first. See Jay J. Johnson-Castro’s Christmas letter to the President–gm

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Press Release
February 22, 2008

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD ANNOUNCES OPPOSITION TO FEDERAL JUDICIAL NOMINATION OF CCA GENERAL COUNSEL GUS PURYEAR

On June 13, 2007, President Bush nominated Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV for a position on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. Mr. Puryear currently serves as vice president and general counsel for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit private prison company. If appointed he would serve as a federal judge in the same jurisdiction where CCA is headquartered.

Since 2000, at least 260 federal lawsuits naming CCA, company subsidiaries or CCA employees have been filed in the Middle District of Tennessee. Such cases would constitute a conflict of interest for Mr. Puryear, and assigning them to other judges would not be an effective use of judicial resources.

Of greater concern is that Mr. Puryear lacks familiarity with the federal courts and has little trial or litigation experience. By his own admission he has tried only two cases to verdict; he has been personally involved in only five federal cases, most recently a decade ago. He is not admitted to practice before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is over the Middle District of Tennessee, and received only a “qualified” rating from the American Bar Association rather than a “highly qualified” rating.

Both Tennessee Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker strongly support Mr. Puryear’s nomination. Neither Senator has acknowledged the substantial financial contributions received from Mr. Puryear and his employer, CCA – which include over $80,000 to Senator Alexander and $27,000 to Senator Corker since 2004.

Further, Mr. Puryear mentioned in disclosure statements that he is a member of the Nashville-based Belle Meade Country Club. The fact that Mr. Puryear maintains membership in an exclusive, predominately white club that did not admit its first minority member until 1994, and reportedly does not afford voting privileges to female members but only to male members, is a matter of significant concern for a federal judicial nominee.

In an Associated Press national wire article concerning Mr. Puryear’s nomination, Vanderbilt Professor Stefanie Lindquist was quoted as saying his judicial appointment “might slide through as a compromise.” The National Lawyers Guild does not believe the people of Tennessee should have to compromise or settle for a less-than-qualified federal judge to represent their interests in U.S. District Court.

The National Lawyers Guild calls on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to vote down this unqualified, conflicted and controversial judicial candidate.

The UN Special Rapporteur for the Rights of Migrants, Jorge Bustamante, conducted an official tour of the USA in April and May of 2007. A report on that visit was released to the Human Rights Council on March 7, 2008. Below are sample findings from the report and a directory to sections of the report as archived here at the Texas Civil Rights Review.–gm

118. Children should be removed from jail-like detention centres and placed in home-like facilities. Due care should be given to rights delineated for children in custody in the American Bar Association “Standards for the Custody, Placement, and Care; Legal Representation; and Adjudication of Unaccompanied Alien Children in the United States.”

121. Whenever possible, migrant women who are suffering the effects of persecution or abuse, or who are pregnant or nursing infants, should not be detained. If these vulnerable women cannot be released from ICE custody, the Department of Homeland Security should develop alternative programmes such as intense supervision or electronic monitoring, typically via ankle bracelets. These alternatives have proven effective during pilot programmes. They are not only more humane for migrants who are particularly vulnerable in the detention setting or who have family members who require their presence, but they also cost, on average, less than half the price of detention.

Sections of the Bustamante Report archived at the Texas Civil Rights Review

Summary: Banned from Hutto without Satisfactory Explanation.

I.A.: Rights to Fair Deportation Hearings Violated

I.B.: USA ‘Long Way Out of Step’ with Rights to Liberty

II.A. & II.B.: The Spriri of 1996 and Mandatory Deportations

II.C.: Forty Local and State Agencies Recruited for Immigration Enforcement

II.D. & II.E.: A System of Morning Raids and Mandatory Detentions

III.A. & III.B.: Rebuilding New Orleans upon Migrant Labor Abuses

IV. & V.: Punitive, Inconsiderate, and Expensive Policies Should be Reversed

We have also converted the report of UN Special Rapporteur Jorge Bustamante to pdf format. (Get it here: 250kb).

Two quick responses from the CounterPunch audience. Both stand clearly on the side of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The first one is short and sharp:

is the rev. wright not a truth sayer? are not his arguments entirely valid here? politically they may be a disaster for obama, proof that all his talk about hope and cooperation is spurious in a racist society.

The second reply opens with a question: was I likening Sen. Obama to Saint Peter when I said that he denied Rev. Wright three times with the phrase ‘as if’? Well, I was thinking about the three denials that are recalled during the Christian holy week. Then the reader turns to liberation theology:

The mostly secular mainstream didn’t want to hear about liberation theology when Latin American Christian base communities were being slaughtered with weapons and training provided by Uncle Sam, and most won’t want to hear about it now. Nevertheless, when it comes to Truth, there is always and everywhere no time like the present.

Thank you for pointing out the parallels between Liberation Theology and the theology of certain African American pastors. And now in the Spirit of the Season, some food for thought from an Arab Christian:

‘Persecution does not make the just man to suffer, nor does oppression destroy him if he is on the right side of Truth. Socrates smiled as he took poison, and Stephen smiled as he was stoned. What truly hurts is our conscience that aches when we oppose it, and dies when we betray it.’ — Kahlil Gibran

To both readers, thank you. Without contradicting anything you have said, I offer an experiment in hope, that an ethic of toleration might be applied toward a more respectful treatment of Rev. Wright than the one we have thus far witnessed from too many parties and players in the Great American Presidential Election Game–gm