Big Shots; Small Town
Despite all the efforts of Indiana University boss Michael McRobbie and his viceroy, Mark Kruzan, to turn Bloomington into a gargantuan megalopolis along the lines of, say, Karachi or Lagos, this burgh still remains, to some little extent, a small town.
Long Gone, Mostly
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To wit: Yesterday while The Loved One and I enjoyed a spectacular dinner of grilled swordfish (still on sale at Kroger for $7.99 a pound!) at a neighbor’s home, Bloomington chief of police Mike Diekhoff rang the bell and delivered a still-warm plate of berry cobblers made from scratch by his lively bride, Monroe County Circuit Court Judge Mary Ellen Diekhoff. And even though our hosts had promised their own homemade key lime pie, we felt compelled to dig into the cobblers as well after finishing up all our vegetables.
It was a decision none of us regretted.
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Don’t Tread On My Slave Trade
So, after gushing about how fab this holy land is yesterday, I’m back to pointing out the chinks in our Armor All™.
One historian specializing in African American studies presents a fascinating argument that the American Revolution was more a war to preserve slavery than a landmark for liberal governance in human history. Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman last week interviewed Gerald Horne of the University of Houston. Horne posits that the British were close to pushing for abolition in the colonies in the lead up to the Revolution. Reps of the slave colonies became panicky, acc’d’g to Horne’s argument, and thus the decision was made to take up arms against the King.
George III: Abolitionist
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I imagine the landed slaveholders of Virginia, Georgia, et al might have been driven to join the cause of independence because of the Crown and Parliament’s burgeoning anti-slave sentiments, but I doubt one can credit/blame the entire Revolution on the effort to preserve the slave trade.
Nevertheless, Horne’s is a needed exploration of how important slavery was to some of the Colonies back around 1776. Check out Goodman’s tête-à-tête with Horne here. Then you might follow up by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ call for reparations in a recent issue of The Atlantic magazine.
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It’s even more complicated than that – because there’s never just one reason to cook up a war. Think real estate speculation. All that land west of the Alleghenies? The English had treaties with the various Native tribes that they would not open the lands to settlement. Well, there were associations of landed gentry (among them, George Washington) who knew that selling land on speculation to settlers and developers would make them stinkin’ rich. Guess what Revolution did to those English treaties. Mmmm-hmmm.
Methinks there is a fever raging in B-town. The South joined the union to preserve Slavery? I’m not a historian but the 3/5 ths compromise and the comments of TJ equating the issue to holding a tiger by the nose – you want to get rid of it but don’t dare let go along with the comments of Jimmy Madison in Founding Brothers makes this argument too much of a stretch for Mayberry believer.
edited my avatar or whatever that thing is called.