One more perspective on AL Senate race

#ididnot

Big wheel turns slow hollis.

But it is turning  

Thanks for your link  

Just finished the podcast, very well done.  I will respond to a couple things, it will likely be TL, DR.

First, MG's title, Revisionist History, while effective clickbait for driving interest, does not do justice to the piece.

Revisionist history distorts facts to alter a conclusion for propaganda. 

Clarifying history, which is the main business of all historians, is sifting and discovering to make the factual conclusion stronger.

Gladwell did a great job of clarification here.

Next, the student's interview shows he was not an activist, but does not alter the fact that hundreds were set upon by dogs and blasted with fire hoses.  He becomes a symbol.  He is also outed as one of the old school folk who did not identify with African consciousness that was growing during those days, underscored by him referring to himself as not African and saying he is colored, not black.

Also the police officer, who was reviled by blacks for the picture and reviled by whites for escorting black children  into newly integrated schools, transforms into a symbol of the many officers who did assault demonstrators. 

Political art is often symbolic like the faked flag raising on Iwo Jima and Mccarther's fake pic of returning to the Phillipines in WWII. 

The sculptor explains his use of symbolism well.  Puts the art into political art.

So like the couple who shared an unplanned kiss in the Times Square photo at the end of WWII the student, dog, and cop transform into a symbol.

Thanks for bringing that podcast to my attention, hollis.  Good meat in there. 

I also liked MG bringing out the complaint that the "pain" is often left out of contemporary writing and art from the Movement. 

Much like the vanilla curriculum employed by many schools on King's birthday.  It is all "King had a dream for all people to live in peace."

Not in my class, sixth graders in a gifted program operating on high school level.

They learned that King was a social revolutionary who led a movement challenging deep seeded and powerful institutions against great odds and facing great danger.

I was a ten year old kid attending a segregated school in Albany, GA when MLK came to town. All the adults were freaked and scared.  I kept asking my mother why he was in town.  She did not want to answer but finally blurted out "He is trying to get the vote for colored people".  My head exploded.  

That was the first crack in my childhood safety bubble, the second was the JFK murder, then the Beatles.

I was never the same fir good or ill.