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final statement

OK
OK
Three months ago I was driving a truck.
It's an abusive industry.
It doesn't have to be, but it is.
It's full of backward people, that's why.

I drove all night,
picked up loads in the afternoon
and delivered them in the morning
400 or so miles away.

I listened to the satellite radio all night.
Two news stories came up.
Sherry Sherrod, a Southern black woman in her 60's
made a speech to the NAACP
about how she overcame her racial anger against white men
and decided that the real issue
was that of the "haves" versus the "have nots."

A conservative blogger or media person
took a very small snippet of her speech,
the part in the beginning
where she was describing her racism
and started a media fury
because of the intentional misrepresentation.

It really gets more complicated than that
and I, Our Graduate Student,
could give you more insights into it
that nobody seemed to discuss,
but that would be distracting right now.

The point is that
her speech was grossly and egregiously misrepresented,
she was vilified,
and she was fired.

There was a media uproar
when the speech was presented in its entirety
and it became quite clear
that the misrepresentation
had reversed her meaning completely 180 degrees.
The liberals were in high heaven.
It was 60's deja vu
all over again.
Rachel Maddow and Keith Oberman
made impassioned, exasperated half-hour speeches
full of indignant moral outrage.
Their sighs and gasps and dramatics were impressive.
They were in rare form.
All their careers they had waited for such a moment.
This is what liberal journalism students DREAM OF
all through college and graduate school.
They made the most of it.

And they were right.
They were given a nice fastball
straight down the middle
and they slammed it over the fence.
"Sherry Sherrod," they exclaimed
"almost lost her career."

They were right
and the truth was on their side that time.
But our country is still good in some ways
and thanks to the brilliant intellectual courage
of the men of The Enlightenment
and the continued struggles of American intellectuals
since then,
we have a strong Free Press,
and the truth came out.
She was vindicated, and elevated.
What could have been a bad outcome,
turned into a very good outcome.
She was honored and lifted by the ordeal.

Like the Chilean miners.
What started out as a disaster
turned into a great blessing.

Our Graduate Student was cheering for Sherrod,
but he took it a step further.
"She almost lost her career they say,"
Our Graduate Student reflected,
"But at least she HAD one."
I never did.
They never gave me a chance.
I never even had a career to lose.
"we never gave you a chance,"
said the waddling, spandex-wearing matron
bobbette bush at the aniak, alaska high school basketball game.

Then there was another news item on the radio.
It wasn't as big as the Sherrod case,
but it caught Our Graduate Student's attention.
mark williams wrote a letter to President Abe Lincoln.
The name was familiar to Our Graduate Student.
In 2000, during the Florida ballot battle,
mark williams was one of those right wing talkers
on kfbk radio in sacramento.
That's the station in sacramento where limbaugh got started
a year after Our Graduate student
wrote, copyrighted, published, and distributed
His 1982 Newsletters
which appear to have become the script
for limbaugh's political program.
limbaugh was an uneducated sportscaster from the midwest.
He had to get his ideas from somewhere.
Our Graduate Student's intellectual fingerprint
was all over limbaugh's program in the Hun metaphor,
"firmly ensconced in The Attila The Hun Chair,"
every day.
Similarly, it seemed to Our Graduate Student
that mark williams was taking a page from his book,
or, if you will, an idea from His 1982 Newsletters.
You see, these right wing chest-beaters
are an uneducated, illiterate mob.
Though it's possible
that williams may have accidentally
read a good book or two in his lifetime,
it's not very likely
and right-wing chest-beaters like him
know very little of creative literary expression.

But what that limbaugh crowd of right wing chest-beaters
over there at kfbk in sacramento DO know
is Our Graduate Student and His 1982 Newsletters
and the letter that Martin Luther King
wrote to Our Graduate Student.

Now that sonofabitch williams
was turning it backwards and inside out
just like they did with Sherrod's speech.

Dr. King's letter to Our Graduate Student
was a supportive letter
that transcended race.
Dr. King spoke to Our Graduate Student
as a comrade and a counselor.
"I've been there, Dave," he said,
"Let me help you.
Let me explain to you the political forces
that have been stirred up by Your Newsletters.
They are similar to the ones I encountered."
It was writer to writer,
truth teller to truth teller,
friend to friend.

But williams letter to Lincoln was altogether different,
180 degrees opposite and backward.
"Dear President Lincoln,
we blacks wish you didn't free us
'cause we're lazy and don't wanna work."

So it seemed like williams tried to copy Our Graduate Student's
literary technique but mangled it with mean-spritedness.

Our Graduate Student had had enough.
AGAIN.
He's 60 now and they've marginalized and impoverished him.
He never HAD a career
though he's an excellent teacher.
He was thrown off a bus
by a racist black woman
and ripped off by limbaugh.

Beaten down in abusive, exhausing work as a truck driver.

One more time, I've tried to explain it to you.
Can you hear me now ?

*******

Holocaust-deniers
History-deniers
Evolution-deniers
Conspiracy-deniers

Which are you ?
All of the above ?

You gotta love D'Souza, Ravitch and Richard Dawkins.
Here's Dawkins in
"The Greatest Show On Earth,
The Evidence For Evolution," (2009)
"These people have been coached to say, (p. 202)
'there are no fossils, show me the evidence,
show me just one fossil...'
and they say it so often that they come to believe it.
So I tried the experiment of mentioning three or four fossils
to this woman and not let her get away with
simply ignoring them."

"They are conspicuously happy to discount evidence (p. 283)
that doesn't suit them
in the case of the massive quantity and range of evidence
for the fact of evolution."

"Like the theory of continental drift, (p. 17)
an idea may even begin its career mired in ridicule,
before progressing by painful steps
to the status of a theorum or undisputed fact..."

"Such observations led Wegener to propose his (p. 274)
daringly heretical hypothesis of continental drift...

"One can almost hear Wegener's sceptical contemporaries
wondering, to use the street-talk of today, what he had been smoking.
Yet now we know that he was right. Or almost right. (p. 274)
(Almost right because Wegener (1880 - 1930) was right about
his theory of continental drift,
but not right in his guess about exactly how it worked,
because he was ahead of his time and the necessary
scientific information was not available to him.
It would be decades before scientific information caught up with him.
Similarly, Our Graduate Student is certainly right
about the conspiracy against him.
It's as plain as can be when you look at the map of his life.
The details and specifics ?
We encourage you to join us in the investigation.
You are intersted in the truth, aren't you ?

"Our present beliefs about many things may be disproved, (P. 17)
but we can with complete confidence make a list
of certain facts that will never be disproved.
Evolution and the heliocentric theory weren't always among them,
but they are now."

"today, there is no longer a doubt in any serious mind, (p. 18)
and scientists speak, at least informally,
of the fact of evolution...

"In the rest of this book, I shall demonstrate that evolution
is an inescapable fact,
and celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty."



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*******


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