Generals asking Congress to Ban Torture and Close Guantanamo Prison

I received this today from MoveOn.org

"Dear MoveOn member,
"We are Americans and in our America, we do not torture, we do not imprison people without legal recourse, and we do not give any president unchecked power. Congress must act quickly to rein in this over-reaching president and overturn these un-American acts."
Clicking here will add your name:
Sign the Petition!
It hasn't hit the news wires yet, but retired Generals Robert Gard and John Johns are going public today with something big. They're calling on Congress to ban the use of torture, restore the right to trial and shut down the disastrous prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
You can be sure the blowback from the right wing will be serious. But there's a growing chorus of judges, scholars, military experts, and regular folks who believe that President Bush's abuse of our Constitution is making us less secure. The generals join it just in time: There are new reports that even some Bush administration insiders are pushing to shut down Guantanamo.1

This could be a tipping point in the fight to restore our liberties. Can you join Generals Gard and Johns TODAY—and call on Congress to stop torture, close Guantanamo, and bring back the right to trial? Clicking below will add your name to the petition. (You can read the full petition text in the box to the right.)"

http://pol.moveon.org/endtorture/one_click_sign.pl?id=10573-2066035-TjyFeH&t=4

Marriage

There is a concept that goes like this:
The only way a marriage can work is if the man completely gives up the notion that he is an equal partner in the union. He is fact a programmed automaton. His job is doing exactly what the wife says and nothing more or less. Now to make this work the man must hide the fact that he is her yes man and is completely henpecked. Because if she finds out she will get rid of him. So the husband must act like he is a real man but behave like an obedient child. There are some men who have this down to a science. When they are with other men or when they are out of sight and sound of their wives a great transformation takes place. They become a man's man wonderful to be with and not at all the quiet soft-spoken-never disagreeing person he is when around his wife.
So what do you think of this concept.

Facts/Stories/Headlines that make me crazy

1. Returning soldiers struggle to find therapists: Waiting lists grow as military trims payments for mental-health care
2. Dafur refuges continue to suffer
3. We lost the war on drugs and Drugs are it is destroying much of young America
4. America consistently knows less about the world, math, history, geography, and literature than all industrialize nations.
5. There are more scientist, computer software engineers and other scientist in many other nations than in America.
6. Europe and Asia are moving a head of us in almost every aspect of an economy.
7. We have the worst health care of any industrialized nation.
8. We have one of the highest infant mortality rates of industrialized nations
9. Our life expectancy is lower than most industrialized nations.
But on the bright side we have more reality shows than any other nation.

Comfort in a tight-knit community
Baltimore photographer celebrates the quilting women of Gee's Bend, Ala.
By Glenn McNatt
SUN ART CRITIC
Originally published June 10, 2007

The quickest way to get from Baltimore to Gee's Bend, Ala., is to fly into Montgomery, then rent a car and drive south a couple of hours until the two-lane blacktop of the county highway dead-ends in front of the single dirt road that serves the community.

The first time that photographer Linda Day Clark made the trip, in 2002, it was raining and close to midnight when she got there. There wasn't a light to be seen or a sound to be heard, except for the chirping of crickets rising from the swamp bottom.
"I felt like I'd landed in the middle of nowhere," Clark recalls. "In the dark and the rain, those unpaved roads through the woods made it seem like an adventure."

Clark, a 43-year-old professor of fine art at Coppin State University, had come to Gee's Bend on assignment for The New York Times to photograph the hard-working African-American women whose colorful, boldly patterned quilts had put their tiny community of 700 souls on America's artistic map.

Their handiwork is the subject of a major exhibition that opens Friday at the Walters Art Museum. Titled Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, the show presents 45 stunningly beautiful yet decidedly functional bed-coverings whose endlessly inventive designs and startling color harmonies have the joyful spontaneity of jazz improvisations.

On the same day, the museum will open a companion exhibition of Clark's sumptuous color photographs of the women she met in Gee's Bend and the tree-covered landscape of red earth, blue sky and caramel-colored river they call home.

The photographs capture both the centuries-old isolation of Gee's Bend, a former cotton plantation built on low-lying ground hemmed in on three sides by water, and the strong bond of community among its inhabitants, all of whom are direct descendants of the African slaves brought there to work the land.

Buoyed by their faith in God and proud of the traditions handed down by their forebears, the quilters of Gee's Bend took Clark into their homes with the kind of gracious hospitality that made her feel more like a member of their large, extended family than a visitor passing through.

"I felt like I was home," Clark recalls. "My family is from the South, and they're also very religious, so I'm used to that deep Southern culture. But it's even more extreme in Gee's Bend because they're so far out in the country."

Nights in Gee's Bend
Since her first visit five years ago, Clark has returned to Gee's Bend every year to continue photographing. Usually she stays about a week each time in the modest, one-story house of Mary Lee Bendolph, whose dramatic red, white and black quilt of blocks, strips and half-squares is one of the highlights of the Walters show. At night, Clark climbs into the big, old-fashioned bed in Bendolph's guest room and slips under one of the color-splashed quilts that outsiders think of as great art but that Bendolph regards as merely a lovely bedcover to keep her visitor warm.

"In Baltimore, I go to sleep hearing ambulances and police sirens and helicopters overhead, but there all you hear are the crickets," Clark says. "You pull one of those wonderful old quilts over you, and you're asleep in a second."

Most nights, just before she drifts off, Clark can also hear Bendolph quietly singing gospel hymns to herself.

"She has this beautiful, low, raspy voice that makes me cry," Clark says. "I'm moved to tears because it's so beautiful -- and not only her singing but also how incredibly her faith is integrated into her life."

An unbroken bond
Bendolph is among Gee's Bend's best-known quilters, in part because she was the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning article in 1999 by Los Angeles Times reporter J.R. Moehringer.

The article offered an intimate glimpse at daily life among the Benders, as well as a sympathetic portrayal of their struggles: how during the civil rights movement in the 1960s they struggled to get the vote, then struggled to keep their jobs after whites in the neighboring town of Camden shut down the ferry that provided their principal access to the outside world.

Yet the Benders persevered. They learned to make the hour's drive around the river to the nearest store and kept their children in school. They formed a cooperative to sell quilts to the big department-store chains. They held on to a way of life born of geographical isolation in an era when the farm culture that sustained their forebears was rapidly disappearing.

Wilcox County, where Gee's Bend is located, is still one of the poorest jurisdictions in the country, and you get a sense of the depth of its isolation from Clark's photograph of the single unpaved road that leads into and out of the Bend.

The picture shows a narrow track of brick-colored soil running toward the horizon through tall trees. It's a pared down, quintessentially American version of the 19th-century French painter Camille Corot's revolutionary landscape A View Towards Paris (now the pride of the Baltimore Museum of Art), except at the end of Clark's road there's no great metropolis, no shining city on a hill, just more red-clay earth and piney woods.

"I'm interested in quilts, but I'm more interested in this microcosm of a culture," Clark says. "For instance, I met a woman there named Arlonzia Pettway whose great-grandmother was a slave on the old plantation. She actually could remember sitting on a quilt and listening to her great-grandmother tell about how she was captured and where she was held before she was taken on a ship.

"I mean, how many people can have that kind of direct connection to someone who went through the Middle Passage? I'm fascinated by the unbroken bond that runs from those African slaves to this group of people who didn't ever come north, who weren't part of the Great Migration; I'm fascinated by that unbroken thread of history that could disappear before we give it its due."

Clark's photograph of Pettway has a heroic character that clearly reflects some of the awe the artist must have felt in her presence. But there's also a quality in all the portraits that, for want of a better word, can only be called love: It's the warm feeling you have about people whom you've come to care about not just because of what they've managed to accomplish in the world, but because of who they are as human beings.

"We're family," Clark says. "Mary Lee is like my mother. She's adopted me, as many of the women have. On the other hand, these Gee's Bend ladies are fierce. You don't mess with them."

Clark tells a story from her first visit to the community, an incident she witnessed one day while the quilters were selling their wares at the cooperative.

Hungry stranger
One of the customers, a young woman, seemed hungry but was obviously reluctant to ask for something to eat. Perhaps she feared imposing on people whom she thought of as having little enough for themselves.

"But Mary Lee said, 'I'll fix you some lunch,'" Clark recalls. "At first, the woman said no, but you could see she really wanted some. So we drove her to the house, and Mary Lee whipped up some fried chicken and sweet potatoes. For this total stranger! That's the thing about Mary Lee; she's so open and giving."

Clark chuckles as she recalls the episode.

"The idea of food is funny," she says. "On that first trip, I almost starved myself. Everyone would say, 'Can I fix you something to eat?' and I'd always say, 'Oh, no, don't bother.' I didn't realize there were no restaurants or stores in Gee's Bend and that if someone doesn't cook for you, there's no place to eat. So I learned quick."

glenn.mcnatt@baltsun.com