Celeste Headlee

"If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity."
John F. Kennedy 

As Americans, as humans, we seem to be incapable of learning from history.  Slavery is still a black mark on the history of our country that was founded as a place of liberty where all men are created equal.  We fought a war against each other to end slavery, we killed our brothers and fathers and husbands over an idea of freedom.  It was one of our finest and most tragic hours. We transformed our national shame into an example of ultimate sacrifice for principles.

"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." —Winston Churchill

We talked yesterday about how the income gap may have caused, at least in part, the financial collapse. Today we get two new studies that shed even more light on the cataclysmic forces currently moving our nation. Here's the first headline: The Institute of Policy Studies says that executives at the 50 firms with the most layoffs during the economic crisis took home nearly $4 Million more than a typical CEO. The worst offenders include the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Hewlett-Packard. And here's the second: The National Employment Law Project says the jobs that were lost in 2008-2009 were in higher wage industries, but job growth in 2010 has been disproportionately by industries with lower wages.

I spent the weekend mulling over coverage of Glenn Beck's rally in Washington. I had an immediate, almost visceral, reaction to the announcement that he was planning to "take back the civil rights movement," and that Beck had scheduled his rally for the same date as MLK's March on Washington, in the same location. For me, the inevitable question, "How dare he?" eventually became, "Why?"

I had no idea there was this much angst over changing names after marriage. Perhaps I'm less concerned about it because the name change doesn't carry emotional weight. My grandmother got married in 1939 and kept her birth name and she was a pioneer. And yet, my grandparents were married for almost four decades, happy, loving, and very much a cohesive unit. So I grew up accepting the idea that changing my name was my choice, that it had nothing to do with my commitment to the marriage. I never thought that marriage was about submission or ownership. Thanks to pioneers like my grandmother and the feminists of the 20th century, I've never felt shackled by traditional views of marriage or reproduction or family.

A friend of mine quit smoking when doctors found a lesion on her right lung. Another lost 250 pounds when he found out that the extra weight was killing him. And GM has reported more than $2 billion so far this year, after filing for bankruptcy last year.

Steven Slater is getting his 15 minutes of fame, and he will eventually get his day in court as well. Slater lost it after an argument with a passenger. He used the P.A. system to deliver a profanity-laden tirade, grabbed a couple beers out of the galley fridge, deployed the inflatable slide and zoomed down the slide to unemployment.

In some ways, I am a broken record. I keep asking why we can't talk about race in a healthy, constructive way. And the question comes up again in relation to the resignation of Shirley Sherrod from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In short, here's what happened: she spoke at a NAACP banquet in March about how she overcame her own racial prejudice to help a white farmer in Georgia [hear and read her interview on The Takeaway]. She says her experience with vicious racism against blacks in the South, and the murder of her father by a white farmer, made her hesitant to help the whites who applied to her at the USDA. Conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart posted a highly edited portion of the video on the website, biggovernment.com.

Every morning, Celeste Headlee scours the country’s newspapers in a quest for ideas and we're sharing her findings. Here's her list for today:

In this new book, "Acting White," Stuart Buck has the guts to take on an issue that has marred Bill Cosby's reputation and strained relations between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson. Buck is a white guy who adopted two brown kids, one from Haiti, and in his thoughtful, exhaustively researched book, I hear clearly the voice of a loving father.

Each morning, Celeste Headlee scours the country’s newspapers for interesting stories. Here's her list for today:

Today, music fans around the world remember the work of Gustav Mahler, who would be 150 years old today. Ljubljana, Slovenia kicks off "Mahler Year," a year dedicated to the artist who lived and worked in the city from 1881-1882; and musicians in New York plan to kick off the NYC Summer Mahler Project. Not bad for a man who, in his lifetime, received little recognition for his 11 symphonies.

As long as we've had cameras, we've had “ruin porn.” It's the deliberate effort to publish images of a city or a region that sensationalize devastation, while choosing not to print photos of beautiful landscapes or majestic architecture.  Residents of New Orleans complain that reporters fly into Louis Armstrong International Airport and ask their guides to show them the best examples of ruined neighborhoods and flood damage. 

In an article from Vice UK, Thomas Morton writes about a "French filmmaker who came to Detroit to shoot a documentary about all the deer and pheasants and other wildlife that have been returning to the city. After several days without seeing a wild one he had to be talked out of renting a trained fox to run through the streets for the camera."

Race and ethnicity have complicated our reactions to films since “Birth of a Nation” came out in 1910 and Josephine Baker seduced the French as the “Siren of the Tropics” in 1927.  In nearly a hundred years, Hollywood still doesn't know how to handle race in casting.  And no group is immune to this exclusion:  Mexicans were horrified by Charleston Heston's portrayal of a Mexican officer in “Touch of Evil;” Bruce Lee reportedly lost the lead role in "Kung Fu" because he was Chinese; the Inuit Eben Olemaun became the white Eben Oleson in “30 Days of Night;” the “Prince of Persia” became the “Prince of California” with the casting of Jake Gyllenhaal; and it even goes the other way with fans of Thor expressing outrage that the Norse god will be played by black actor Idris Elba.

 

Each morning, Celeste Headlee scours the country’s newspapers for interesting stories. Here's her list for today:

Each morning, Celeste Headlee scours the country’s newspapers for interesting stories. Here's her list for today:

Each morning, Celeste Headlee scours the country’s newspapers for interesting stories. Here's her list for today:

As Robert Byrd passes, an era in race relations ends. Byrd started his political life as an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan. In 1944, Byrd wrote the following in a letter to Senat...

It's a busy news day.  Lawmakers worked through the night in order to send the financial overhaul bill out of committee; the President speaks about it from the White House before he leaves for the G8 summit; oil hits the white sand beaches of Florida for the first time; hurricanes begin to form off the coast of Mexico.  But the story that stays with me, the headline that breaks my heart, is the renewed disappointment among black farmers who have waited for years to get justice and will now have to wait even longer.

Each morning, Celeste Headlee scours the country’s newspapers for interesting stories. Here's her list for today:

An Asian carp was found for the first time beyond electric barriers meant to keep the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.

A fishermen caught it near Chicago's South Side, about six miles from Lake Michigan. Scientists fear that if the carp reach the Great Lakes, they could ruin the region's $7 billion fishing industry.  And I agree that a lot of jobs and livelihoods are at stake and I understand the fear of fishermen, the sense of despair upon hearing that a dreaded carp has been found six miles from Lake Michigan.

But the Great Lakes are the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, with 20 percent of the planet's fresh water, and they encompass some of the most fragile and diverse ecosystems in the country.  To reduce this to an economic story is to miss the significance of a possible environmental disaster.