Daily Archives: 27 Jun 05
Open thread
What has been on your mind? What is the most helpful thing you did during the past month? What has been the most hopeful sign you’ve seen recently?
Local locksmith corrects key mistake
Via boing boing comes this story from the North Platte Telegraph. Having mistakenly swallowed the keys to his friend’s pickup truck and told it would be several days until he passed them, the perpetrator took his x-rays to a locksmith who was able to cut a replacement key from the silhouette on the film.
The first 25 weblogs
Scroll down for the list, in reverse chronological order. I know it depends somewhat on how you define a weblog, but some of the old-schoolers find the list fairly accurate. (Single Planet)
It is astonishing that while, by this count, there were only twenty-five weblogs by March, 1999, by a scant eight months later when Follow me Here was born in November 1999 it was the 8.570th weblog created just counting the ones using the Blogger tool (the only way I have to rank myself). That was when weblogs like mine had to have a small sidebar explanation of what a weblog was, and when references to weblogs and weblogging in the mainstream media were so exceptional, arising once every few months, that most weblogs linked excitedly to each one.
The Myth of American Exceptionalism
Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread? “Despite the exceptional character of American liberty, every American president has proclaimed America’s duty to defend it abroad as the universal birthright of mankind. John F. Kennedy echoed Jefferson when, in a speech in 1961, he said that the spread of freedom abroad was powered by ”the force of right and reason”; but, he went on, in a sober and pragmatic vein, ”reason does not always appeal to unreasonable men.” The contrast between Kennedy and the current incumbent of the White House is striking. Until George W. Bush, no American president — not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson — actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents’ ”excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability” in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11.
…There is nothing worse than believing your son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother died in vain. Even those who have opposed the Iraq war all along, who believe that the hope of planting democracy has lured America into a criminal folly, do not want to tell those who have died that they have given their lives for nothing. This is where Jefferson’s dream must work. Its ultimate task in American life is to redeem loss, to rescue sacrifice from oblivion and futility and to give it shining purpose. The real truth about Iraq is that we just don’t know — yet — whether the dream will do its work this time. This is the somber question that hangs unanswered as Americans approach this Fourth of July.” — Michael Ignatieff (New York Times Magazine)
Related:
The Power and the Glory: “The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary—is not new. It started as early as 1630 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when Governor John Winthrop uttered the words that centuries later would be quoted by Ronald Reagan. Winthrop called the Massachusetts Bay Colony a “city upon a hill.” Reagan embellished a little, calling it a “shining city on a hill.”
…The true heroes of our history are those Americans who refused to accept that we have a special claim to morality and the right to exert our force on the rest of the world. I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. On the masthead of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, were the words, “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.”” — Howard Zinn (Boston Review)
Sad Coincidence
Although, as I said, I object to his characterization as the ‘voice of Tigger’, hot on the heels of the death of Paul Winchell comes news that John Fiedler, 80, Stage Actor and Film Voice of Pooh’s Piglet, Dies (New York Times )
