35,000 Philadelphia Supporters Hail Obama’s Speech on Race

Barack Obama was greeted by the largest crowd of his campaign on Friday night in Philadelphia. It was the biggest gathering of Obama supporters that the campaign had ever seen, exceeding the 30,000 who greeted Obama and Oprah Winfrey in December in Columbia, S.C. An estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people pressed into Independence Park to hear the Democratic presidential candidate, four days before Pennsylvania’s crucial presidential primary on April 22nd.

Beyond the stunning fact that more people came out for Obama’s rally in front of Independence Hall than any other event since he announced his candidacy, there was a remarkable spontaneous demonstration of support that occurred when his speech ended. At least 5,000 people had nowhere to go but up Market Street. Obama’s charge of the night: “Declare independence!” was with them. They started with the familiar “O-Bam-A.” By 7th and Market Streets, they had graduated to “Yes we can!” By 10th and Market Streets, with hundreds of supporters streaming in between cars on the road, they were just cheering. At first, a few Philadelphia policemen cops tried to move the surging crowd to the sidewalks, but it didn’t work. The police finally retreated to the sidewalks, and a full mile away from Independence Park, the Obama crowd was still marching.

Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech is now being hailed as one of the most powerful discourses on race ever given by a politician. Obama’s speech on race recognized that some blacks and whites still harbor significant anger and resentment. While condemning their hateful expression, he conceded that these feelings exist. Obama spoke from the heart, from his true experience of living in both our black and white cultures. His life, indeed his DNA, embodies a truly American experience. Obama mapped out his vision for getting beyond the distractions of race toward solving the real problems Americans face: the war, the economy, health, education and the environment.

Obama told the crowd that the United States is at a critical moment in its history, not unlike what the founding fathers faced in Philadelphia. “It was over 200 years ago that a group of patriots gathered in this city to do something that no one in the world believed they could do,” Obama said. “After years of a government that didn’t listen to them, or speak for them, or represent their hopes and their dreams, a few humble colonists came to Philadelphia to declare their independence from the tyranny of the British throne.”

The Illinois senator called Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton a “tenacious” opponent but said that it was time to move beyond the old politics of the 1990s. Hillary Clinton “is a tenacious campaigner and is a committed public servant,” he began. But her message, he said, is “that we can’t really change the say anything, do anything special interest game of so we might as well choose a candidate who knows how to play the game.” He mocked her “kitchen sink strategy” and then stated, “I’m not running to be the president who plays the same old game. I’m running to end the game.”

Thousands Rally for Obama in Philadelphia

Barack Obama’s Speech about Race

Technorati: Barack Obama, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Obama’s race speech, Obama’s speech on race, African-American, Black, race, racial, Obama’s Philadelphia speech, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania presidential primary, Pennsylvania primary, celebrities, photographs, video, videos, video of Obama’s race speech, culture, cultural issues, cultural, gay, GLBT, politics, political issues, political, 2008 election, social, social issues, social life, society, multimedia, religion, religious issues, news, political news, world news, world

Please Remember Me and Bookmark This:

World Aids Day: Leadership Must Keep the Promise

World AIDS Day 2007

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, which is observed each year on December 1st. It is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, with an estimated 38.6 million people living with HIV, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. Despite recent, improved access to antiretroviral treatment and care in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claimed an estimated 3.1 million (between 2.8 and 3.6 million) lives in 2005, of which more than half a million (570,000) were children. The concept of a World AIDS Day originated at the 1988 World Summit of Ministers of Health on Programmes for AIDS Prevention. Since then, it has been taken up by governments, international organizations and charities around the world.

While in recent years much attention has been focused on global AIDS, it is essential that we not overlook the fact that the disease remains a significant public threat in the United States, where it has become a nearly forgotten epidemic. Consider this: every 13 minutes, an American is newly infected with HIV, and 10% of them are children and adolescents under 24 years old. More than 500,000 Americans have died from the illness in the past quarter century; moreover, in the 30 minutes it takes many people to commute to work, AIDS steals the life of another American.

Philadelphia: The Pet Shop Boys

The Survivors: The Pet Shop Boys

From the Lyrics:

Many words may make it sound contrived
But somehow we’re alive

The survivors - Our heads bowed
The survivors - At memorials for other faces in the crowd

Teachers and artists
And Saturday girls
In suits or sequins
Or twinsets-and-pearls

If life is worth living,
It’s got to be run
As a means of giving,
Not as a race to be won
Many roads will run through many lives
But somehow we’ll arrive.

Stop AIDS: unaids posi+ive

World Aids Day 2007

Technorati: World Aids Day 2007, World Aids Day, AIDS, HIV, celebrities, personalities, gay, gay life, gay issues, African-American, GLBT, culture, cultural issues, cultural, social, social issues, society, world, world news, health, health issues, medical, medical issues, mental health, psychology, art, image, picture, Pet Shop Boys, Philadelphia, The Survivors, music, songs, video, videos, music videos, WordPress video
Spread the Word:

W. H. Auden: A Reactionary Tract for Our Times

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

W. H. Auden: A Reactionary Tract for Our Times

In June 1946, Harvard University observed its long-awaited Victory Commencement. For the first time since the end of WWII, alumni and graduates had a chance to gather in Harvard Yard. The ceremony was a time for the University to appraise all the changes the war had caused, and the even more profound changes that peace was about to bring. Twenty-six thousand Harvard alumni had served in uniform during the war, and 649 of them had died. The University itself had been integrated into the war effort at the very highest level. President James Bryant Conant had consulted with President Truman about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and William Langer, a professor of history, had recruited many faculty members into the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.

As if to symbolize that intimacy, the 1946 Commencement awarded honorary degrees to the Chiefs of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. More questionable was the choice of that year’s Phi Beta Kappa orator: Byron Price, who had served as Director of the Federal Office of Censorship, in charge of monitoring press coverage of the war. Price used the occasion to deliver a rather ominous exhortation to “the man of letters,” whom he accused, 10 months after the war ended, of still not doing enough for national morale. “How often,” he asked, “shall the seeker find between these myriad covers an ounce of literary beauty, or a thimbleful of spiritual elevation? We are served a fare of dissoluteness and destruction. We are asked to sneer at man and regard him as no better than the worm. We are invited to improve our minds by studying the endless sagas of criminals and harlots, moving in sordid surroundings, and worshiping only the flesh.”

Under Which Lyre

It was against this backdrop of war and peace, and a university caught between them, that W.H. Auden, that year’s Phi Beta Kappa poet, got up to deliver his own contribution to the festivities. If Auden was listening when Price issued his “commissar-like” advice to writers, he would have been revolted, but not surprised. In fact, his poem, Under Which Lyre, impishly subtitled A Reactionary Tract for the Times, was intended to be a retaliation against Price’s brand of official uplift. In 174 witty, neatly rhymed lines, Auden set out his prophetic vision of the challenges facing postwar America in general, and the postwar university in particular. Occasional poems usually fade pretty quickly, but even in 2007, the year of Auden’s centenary, Under Which Lyre remains one of his most charming and perceptive works.

Under Which Lyre begins by setting the scene, in language that is by by turns colloquial and quaintly literary. “Ares at last has quit the field,” Auden proclaims, invoking the Greek god of war. Drawing upon his memories of a bombed-out Germany, which he had visited in 1945 as an analyst for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, he writes, “in their convalescent state/The fractured towns associate/With summer flowers.” He then turns to a less somber kind of postwar scene, one that his listeners at Harvard would have recognized with a laugh:

Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
Through basic courses.

Yet even as Harvard returned to its civilian pursuits and petty vanities, with students struggling with the poems of Donne, and “professors back from secret missions” bragging about their adventures, Auden saw another kind of conflict beginning to take shape. This was the war between two opposing sensibilities, the two social and spiritual visions, that Auden named Apollo and Hermes. Apollo, the Greek god of light and music, became for Auden “pompous Apollo,” the patron saint of “official art.” Against him, Auden set Hermes, the trickster god, protector of thieves and liars, who is “precocious and undisciplined.” Both of these gods can make a kind of music, but Auden asks the reader to decide “under which lyre” he will take his stand.

The comedy of the poem lies in Auden’s description of Apollo, the ruling spirit of what he called “the fattening forties.” The danger to postwar America, Auden suggested, lies in the soft tyranny of institutions, authorities, and experts, of people who know what’s best for you and don’t hesitate to make sure you know it, too. Auden gives a wonderful catalog of the things these Apollonians want to impose: colleges where “Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge,” with courses on “Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport“; poems that “Extol the doughnut and commend/The Common Man“; even processed foods: “a glass of prune juice or a nice/Marsh-mallow salad.” In short, Auden was already predicting the dullest, most conformist aspects of American life during the Cold War years, the kind of prosperous mediocrity that gave the 1950s a bad name.

Auden’s Commandments for Free Spirits

But if it’s impossible to dislodge Apollo from his throne, Auden suggested thay you can still follow Hermes in private. That is why the last stanzas of Under Which Lyre offer a set of commandments for free spirits who refuse to fall into line:

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis
On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
Administration.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.

His advice was half-joking, but only half. Auden was reminding his Harvard audience that all the official apparatus of the university is superfluous to its highest purpose, which is to cultivate freedom and inwardness. It is a message that still needs to be heard today, when the expense of higher education forces so many students to look at it as an investment, rather than an adventure.

Auden knew that a society run by Hermes would be a disaster; but a society without any followers of Hermes in it would be a true nightmare. That message makes Under Which Lyre a truly American poem, a defense of the individual against the masses. The continued life of Auden’s Phi Beta Kappa poem is a reminder that, when the generals and censors and other powers of the earth are forgotten, it is the mere poet who remains.

h/t to Adam Kirsch at The Harvard Magazine.

Technorati: W. H. Auden, Auden, Under Which Lyre, Harvard University, education, higher education, art, gay, gay life, gay pride, GLBT, images, pictures, photos, photographs, photography, poet, poetry, literature, Greenwich Village
Be Social:

Three University of Chicago Students Named Rhodes Scholars for 2008

The University of Chicago

Thirty-two men and women from across the United States were named today as Rhodes Scholars for 2008. Of the 32 who were named, three of the students chosen as Rhodes Scholars are from the University of Chicago. The scholars were selected from 764 applicants endorsed by 294 colleges and universities.

Two of the three University of Chicago winners are from Washington, D.C., Nadine Levin and Andrew Hammond. The third University of Chicago student chosen is Isra Bhatty of Glenview, Illinois.

Technorati: The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Rhodes Scholars for 2008, Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, The University of Oxford, England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, art, image, picture, photo, photograph, photography
Be Social:

Historic Antioch College to Stay Open: Saved by Amazing Alumni Efforts

Antioch Hall: Antioch College, Yellows Springs (OH)

Earliest Known Photograph of Antioch Hall (1852)

Coretta Scott King (’51) Accepts The Horace Mann Award, Antioch (2004)

Glen Helen: The Antioch College Forest Preserve

Historic Antioch College Saved by Amazing Alumni Efforts

Antioch College won’t be shut down next summer after all. Antioch’s Alumni Board is confident that it can raise the tens of millions of dollars needed to halt the suspension of operations that the trustees had regarded as unavoidable only five months ago. Arthur Zucker, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Antioch University, which oversees the college, announced at a joint news conference with leaders of the alumni group on Saturday that the beleaguered institution would remain open for business beyond June 30, 2008, thanks to a “fantastic and unprecedented” fund-raising effort by Antioch’s alumni.

The 155-year old college, which is located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, is the residential undergraduate division of Antioch University. The agreement is subject to meeting a series of financial benchmarks. The alumni group needs to raise and transfer to the college at least $2-million by next Monday, and an additional $4.6-million in a period of weeks after that, for a total of $6.6-million by December 15. Further, jointly the institution and alumni group must collect additional amounts, $12-million by the end of next May, $26-million by June 30, 2009, and $19-million by June 30, 2010, for the college to remain open.

“I think everyone finally agreed that this college is just too important in terms of its place in American higher education, its place in history and its place in our social structure to let it die,” said Steve Schwerner, an Antioch graduate, former professor and former longtime dean of students. He is also a member of the Alumni Board and a parent of a graduate.

The alumni group has already secured $18-million in pledges from its members. “An enormous amount of work remains to be done, but we are energized and ready to rise to this challenge,” said Nancy Crow, President of the Antioch College Alumni Association. “Our goal is nothing less than the regeneration of Antioch College as a leader and innovator in liberal-arts education.”

Holly Zachariah has written a detailed article in The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) about the new agreement for Antioch to remain open, which interested readers can access here.

Voices of Recent Antioch Graduates

The Previous Announcement of Antioch College’s Imminent Closing

In an earlier article published in June, I wrote:

Antioch College, a 154-year-old liberal-arts institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, widely known for for its socially activist tradition, will close next year because of mounting budget deficits and dwindling enrollment, college officials announced on Tuesday.

The college in Yellow Springs (OH) is the undergraduate residential component of Antioch University, whose Board of Trustees voted over the weekend to shut the campus down. The Antioch Board members said that it was their hope that by closing the college now, a sound financial state might be restored that would enable them to reopen in 2012. Antioch University also has five nonresidential campuses around the country, all of which will remain open.

Paul Fain wrote in the Chronical of Higher Education:

“The decision was agonizing,” said one trustee, Barbara Slaner Winslow. “For many of us, the meeting was like a funeral,” said Ms. Winslow, an Antioch alumna who is an associate professor of women’s and social studies at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College.

Antioch officials said revenue from the college’s small endowment of $36.2-million and tuition from a projected fall enrollment of 309 students would not be enough to cover budget shortfalls, which have been exacerbated by the cost of maintaining Antioch’s historic campus, in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

“We really need a much larger critical mass of students,” said Tullisse A. Murdock, chancellor of Antioch University, noting that only 125 new freshmen were scheduled to arrive next fall. Of the decision to close the college, she said: “Certainly it’s going to be a huge disappointment to our college alumni.”

The trustees also declared a state of financial exigency, which means most of Antioch College’s 160 full-time faculty and staff members will be laid off by July 2008. College operations will be suspended at that point, but a university spokeswoman said an undetermined number of staff members would stay on to maintain facilities. The university will also establish a commission to determine the college’s long-term future, and some staff members might be included on that commission….

Antioch is perhaps best known for its liberal initiatives, such as eliminating grades and a sexual-offense-prevention policy from the mid-1990s that required specific “verbal consent” for every step of intimacy. But the college also has a long list of famous alumni, including Coretta Scott King, Rod Serling and Stephen Jay Gould. Its first president was the education reformer Horace Mann.”

Interested readers can read a detailed account of the earlier planned closing of Antioch in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription).

Cary Nelson, Ph.D., Professor of English at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote nostalgically about his experiences as an undergraduate student at Antioch College during the mid-1960s, which you can read here.

Technorati: Antioch College, Antioch, Yellow Springs Ohio, Yellow Springs, Ohio, Antioch College stays open, Antioch stays open, education, higher education, educational issues, school, schools, college, colleges, economics, culture, cultural, cultural issues, social, social issues, society, activism, Horace Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Rod Serling, Coretta Scott King
Be Social: