Hello, Angry Black Book Chatters! After last week’s stimulating conversation around the Prologue to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, it’s clear there’s a real hunger to dig into the text.
Without further ado, here’s an overview of the first chapter, The Purpose. Continue reading
Posted in Allan, Angry Black Reader Participation, Read Me!
Tagged President Obama, Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky, The Beatles
The Angry Black Lady Chronicles welcomes you to the first installment of our book chat. We will be reading and discussing Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, a chapter per week.
Background and links on the life and work of Saul Alinsky can be found here. Rules for Radicals can be purchased or downloaded here, found at your friendly local bookseller, or viewed as a .pdf at this link.
Without further ado, let’s begin with the Prologue. Continue reading
Posted in Allan, Angry Black Reader Participation, Read Me!
Tagged Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky
Billy pretty much re-writes this one on an as-needed basis — this is the 2011 version (video after the jump), performed this past November at Keele University in the UK. Verily, he is the wisest of men!
Sample lyric:
Things have not been this bad
since the days of Margaret Thatcher
So stay calm, carry on
and watch X Factor…
The World Wide Web is wonderful
if you’ve got something to sell
but opinions often summon up
a focus group from hell.It’s best not to get distracted
and stay focused on your goals
and take my advice, don’t feed the trolls
(their mum’ll bring them, you know, milk and biscuits before they have to go to bed).
And some of you wonder why I love this man so much. How could I not?
Actual screenshot of Glenn Beck's chalkboard (see lower right)
The American political right has done its best for decades to turn the name “Saul Alinsky” into a potent unifying symbol of evil leftie radical theory and practice, and oh did you know he was one of them Jews? And to be clear, he was and remains a great influence on some of the best-known political organizers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
But before he was a code-word and a dog-whistle, he was a man who did a great many things, and wrote about them with style, clarity and wit.
We here at Angry Black Lady Chronicles are conducting a book chat on Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. (Links to purchase or download the book are included at that post, and a reader provided a link to a .pdf of the text.) Reminder: we will begin this weekend with the preface as the topic of our first discussion.
So before we begin, I want to give our readers an overview of his life and work, and links where you can learn more about him and the movements for change he led and/or inspired. Continue reading
Posted in Allan, Angry Black Reader Participation, Read Me!
Tagged Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky
No reason. Just ’cause I love it, and I sometimes walk around singing “I loovvee you, I am the milkman of human kindness….” (video after the jump).
If you’re lonely, I will call
If you’re poorly, I will send poetryI love you…
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pintIf you’re sleeping, I will wait
If your bed is wet, I will dry your tearsI love you…
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint
(I actually really love this performance, but can’t embed it, so if you like the song, check that one out, too).
Posted in Emily L. Hauser, Now Hear This!
It’s the reliance on such “facts and data” that allows Gingrich to sleep at night after publicly dubbing Barack Obama “the food stamp president.”
During an exchange with Fox News analyst Juan Williams during a debate in South Carolina on Jan. 16, Gingrich defended previous statements that poor kids lack a strong work ethic, that they should be put to work as janitors (child labor laws be damned), and that black Americans should “demand jobs, not food stamps.”
“Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” Williams asked.
“No,” Gingrich responded, to roaring applause and rolling laughter. “I don’t see that.”
“It sounds as if you’re speaking to belittle people,” Williams added later in the exchange.
“Well, first of all, Juan,” Gingrich said, “the fact is, more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.”
Over the course of a few months in 2010, I periodically blogged about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Strength to Love. Last MLK day, I returned to the project and wrote the following (which I have very slightly edited), in an effort to remember that he was a flesh-and-blood human who first and foremost served a flesh-and-blood community. (The rest of the Strength to Love posts, each of which can be read independently, can be found here).
Chapter eleven – Our God is able.
Given my powerful tendency to look at the world through my It’s All About Me glasses, you will perhaps understand (though not, I hope, condone) why I was disappointed (again) upon reading this chapter.
I struggled with chapter nine so mightily that I gave up my MLK blogging for not-quite four months; I struggled with chapter ten so mightily that I then gave it up again, this time going four and a half months. And dear reader, I like chapter eleven least of all.
As a self-described “believing Jew and the wife of a deeply moral atheist,” there’s just nothing for me here. This is a chapter — a sermon — written by a member of the Christian clergy in order to reassure his Christian flock. And a very particular flock, at that:
Posted in Culture Critic, Emily L. Hauser, Musings, Read Me!, Respect
Tagged Martin Luther King Jr., MLK
Readers may feel free to dedicate this song to whomsoever they feel it best dedicated to (video after the jump).
There you are standing in the bar
And you’re giving me grief about the DDR*
And that chip on your shoulder gets bigger as you get older
One of these nights you’re gonna get caught,
It’ll give you a pregnant pause for thought
You’re a dedicated swallower of fascismTime up and time out
For all the liberties you’ve taken
Time up and time out for all the friends that
you’ve forsaken
And if you choose to waste away like death is back in fashion
You’re an accident waiting to happen
*I’m pretty sure the reference here is to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, aka East Germany. In the clip below, Billy swaps out “DDR” for “USSR.”
I thought this:
was going to be the book-related thing that I most irrationally wanted to somehow recreate in my life, given the whole “I’m a Jew” thing, and all.
But it turns out it’s this:
Posted in Cute Shenanigans, Emily L. Hauser, Read Me!
Tagged BOOK CHRISTMAS TREE, BOOK STAIRCASE, THE JOY OF BOOKS