The Public Eye: Overcoming George Bush’s Pottery Barn Foreign Policy
After six months as president, Barack Obama has put his own imprint on U.S. foreign policy. That’s fortunate because George Bush broke everything he touched. -more-
After six months as president, Barack Obama has put his own imprint on U.S. foreign policy. That’s fortunate because George Bush broke everything he touched. -more-
I probably first heard the term “Port Chicago” from a 1982 article by now-UC Berkeley professor Robert Allen and researcher-historian Peter Vogel about “the Port Chicago disaster and mutiny” in The Black Scholar magazine. I did not finish the article at the time. I was interested in all things African-American history in those days, and certainly would have been drawn to the subject of a Black naval mutiny. I’m sure I lost interest when I found that the “Port Chicago Mutiny” mentioned in the Allen-Vogel article was not a mutiny in the sense of the Bounty mutiny or a slave revolt-Black sailors taking over a ship from its white officers at gunpoint-but was more of a work stoppage, and, further, that it had occurred during World War II. I was born just a few years after V-J Day and grew up inundated with the subject. World War II was my parents’ war-or so I thought-and I was of a generation that sought desperately to separate ourselves from our parents and leap over them to a more distant past. -more-
Joe gave me an antique garden book as a 36th anniversary present. A true antique, over a century old: The Garden Book of California, by Belle Sumner Angier, 1906, Paul Elder and Company. It does not have an ISBN number, nor does the publisher’s address have a ZIP code. -more-
A few weeks ago, I made the dangerous trek out of Berkeley and into Contra Cost County. I took off my tie-dye, trimmed my mustache and put on dark glasses. True, the “Hate is not a family value” license plate holder was still visible but I parked far enough from the house to be safe. It was OK. We avoided politics. For all I know, they voted for Obama. Lots of people voted for Obama and, despite all my joking, they were actually very nice. -more-
The sky-blue Victorian villa—part Stick-Eastlake, part Gothic Revival, and proudly holding aloft a tower and weathervane on the northeastern corner of Francisco and Milvia Streets—is a striking sight. -more-