Carl,
I was thinking about you and the fact that you've said that you were visually
impaired as a youngster. I'm not denying that fact, but from what you've
written, you were not nearly as disabled as I was as a child. My early
childhood memories are filled with visits to the eye doctor and eye surgeries.
And when I didn't have actual surgery, I was examined in an operating room
under ether because it was easier for the doctor to examine my eyes when I was
under anesthetic. I was profoundly affected by those experiences. I was phobic,
for one thing. I was terrified of shoe stores because back then, shoe salesman
wore light colored jackets and I thought they were doctors. I was frightened of
a lot of other things as well, walking on a lawn, at one point. For years, in
high school, college, and graduate school, when I was in a class where certain
medical conditions or procedures were described, I'd feel faint and have to
leave the room. At one point, many years later, I was with my husband at a
doctor's appointment and I smelled ether and felt panicky. And I believe that
having always seen myself as different and damaged, had a very negative effect
on my outlook on life. You are upbeat. I am not. Of course, there are other
things as well. You're male and part of the white majority, and it is only in
retrospect, that you define yourself as a visually impaired child. But when you
were a child, you didn't see yourself as different or damaged. I'm female and
knew that I was a member of a minority group that was disliked by a majority of
Americans during my formative years. When you became blind, you joined an
organization that taught its members that blindness isn't a handicap, only a
nuisance, and that message was drummed into its members just as relentlessly as
Christianity was by the church you joined. But my first encounter with
blindness was when I was seven years old and my parents enrolled me for piano
lessons at the Lighthouse in Manhattan, and I then began attending the
children's recreation program. And within a year I went to the summer camp run
by the New York Institute for the Blind. I won't go into what that summer camp
was like because it would take too long to do so right now. But as a naïve
partially sighted child, encountering totally blind children, some of whom were
very weird, to put it mildly, for the first time, was a shock. And it caused
all kinds of identity issues which didn't become resolved for decades.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2018 8:27 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The New York Times' Shameful Obituary of
Historian William Blum
In order to save costs, newspapers used very cheap paper and cheap ink. The
result was print that was not clean. It also rubbed off on
the hands. After going through a paper the size of the NY Times, or
the Seattle Times, my hands would be black. In 1945 I carried the Seattle
Star, a six day a week paper. No Sunday edition. After folding a paper and
tossing it onto the customer's porch, my shirt would come untucked and I'd
shove it into my pants. After about forty papers were delivered I headed home.
I can remember looking down at my shirt as I rounded the last turn and heading
for the door. Black!
My shirt front was black. I had not noticed it until I was just about home,
where I would encounter the wrath of my mother.
Of course she laid into me, telling me of how hard it was to keep running the
washing machine, and how I should think of all that when I was getting my hands
all dirty. Naturally I hadn't thought about it, or I wouldn't have touched my
shirt, thus avoiding the strong lecture and the slaps. But as an adult I
passed much of the blame back to mother...not that she had any control over our
poor income. But mother bought my shirts at the J. C. Penney bargain basement
and at a couple of dime stores that carried some cheap clothing. Woolworth and
Kress. I was long in the waist and the cheap shirts had almost no shirt tail
for tucking in. Because we had to be frugal and buy on the cheap, I wore holes
in my socks, holes in the soles of my shoes, and wore my shirts and pants a
second year. Since I was growing straight up like a weed, by the end of the
first year my sleeves were already above my wrists, and my pants were above my
ankles.
We lived in a very small, poorly built house on the side of a very steep hill.
A switchback path snaked up the hill from the highway, past our kitchen door
and on up to a dirt road above us. We did have a grand view of Lake Union and
beyond Capital Hill we looked at the snow capped Cascades. That highway went
from Canada to Mexico, highway 99. It sounded like an angry river during the
day. At least we lived high above it, out of range of the fumes that blackened
the houses along the sides. Growing up as a visually impaired boy, long before
anyone ever said, "visually impaired", and being among the very poor in a
community of upper middle Class families, had its hard times, but it also
toughened me up, something I would need in later life.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/16/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I grew up as a legally blind person who couldn't see well enough to
read newspapers. Using a magnifying glass was too difficult, although
it helped with reading books. I suppose that the newsprint was too
small. At any rate, I always felt locked out of this really important
source of information until the CCTV reading machine was developed.
And then, I couldn't afford one until the Ethical Humanist Society to
which we belonged, loaned or gave me the money. I can't remember
which. But that must have been in the mid 1960's. And even then, the
newspaper was too unwieldy to put under the machine. A friend of mine
used to cut out articles for me. It took me a very long time to
discover that the newspaper wasn't necessarily a font of wisdom. One
of the podcasts I listen to is "Citations Needed", and it's all about
how we're manipulated by propaganda that is implanted in the points of
view of news stories. One of the hosts is a reporter for FAIR, which
is a media watchdog. Fair has a podcast called Counterpunch, a much
less sophisticated podcast about the media. But ever since I began
using the computer to read articles and even before I joined the Blind
democracy list, people were sending me material from alternative news
sources and I was also reading mainstream media stories and was able
to understand how facts can be emphasized or omitted so that my
opinions could be manipulated. After I began reading the material that
Sylvie was posting and also listening to Democracy Now, I began to
discover that I could trust certain journalists more than others, and
that I could listen to and read a number of articles about an issue, and come
to my own tentative conclusion about what the reality might be.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2018 11:05 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The New York Times' Shameful Obituary
of Historian William Blum
According to undocumented scraps of yellowed notes in my dad's folder,
a distant cousin was one of the founders of the New York Times.
Henry Jarvis Raymond (January 24, 1820 – June 18, 1869) was an
American journalist, politician, and co-founder of The New York Times,
which he founded with George Jones.
Obviously Henry Jarvis Raymond came from the wealthy, conservative
side of the family forest. The "Pure" Jarvis stock had been settled
in the Grafton, (West)Virginia since the mid 1750's...at least. They
were mostly working class. Farmers, miners and Trackers. But in
those days it was not uncommon to be the distant cousin of just about
everybody. I've mentioned that my several times Great Uncle was
Jefferson Davis. An aunt who lived in the Grafton area was Anna
Jarvis, founder of Mother's Day. My grandmother Jarvis' brothers,
Samuel and James Hickman, and a cousin John Hickman were all pastors
of large congregations. But my direct linage consisted of miners,
loggers, farmers and Radicals. Searching back to John Jarvis, a
farmer in (West)Virginia, I seem to be the first Jarvis in that line, who
attended college.
But back to the New York Times. It was nicknamed, "The Gray Lady". I
used to buy a copy at the news stand on my way home from the Drapery
Factory. If I found a seat on the bus, I'd read the Editorial section
and leave most of the paper on the bus. The majority of the NY Times
was about as bland as the Seattle Times(no connection) only bigger.
Going back to the mid 1950's, I can't figure out how that paper earned
the label of Liberal Press. For much of my youth, I trusted the major
papers, believing that they reported All the news. But as I grew up,
I saw how the Press could manipulate the news, and which news was
published, and which was not. I saw honest, caring people crucified
because they held different opinions than those of the Nation's
Masters. I saw my name and my fiancee's name(later my wife,
Cathy)dragged through the Seattle PI. I watched as close friends of
my parents were labelled Communists, and fired from their jobs. And
later, I watched as close friends of Cathy's and mine were attacked by
so called investigative reporters, and left wounded by the side of the
road. I learned to never trust a word I read until I have proof that it
represents factual information.
Seldom has the Working Class had a national Public Platform, a
People's Press.
And the experiment called PBS has been corrupted by the private sector
until it no longer, if it ever did, represents the voice of the people.
If we are going to fight for Truth, then we must explore everything we hear.
Find the source. Learn what is driving the people behind the news.
Engage one another in dissecting the day's news. Find out why certain
news reports are not put forth.
Protecting our freedom is constant hard work. Not that we should turn
our backs on the joys of life, but we must be aware that if we do not
maintain a free press, we will lose what free choice we still have.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/15/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, there are two things to consider in relation to this. First,
the guy who wrote the obituary is not a Liberal. He's a Conservative.
Second, if the New York Times were ever a liberal paper, it changed
quite a while ago, certainly by the time it unquestioningly supported
W. Bush's story about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Actdually,
I think perhaps there's a third point to make, which is that probably
The New York Times was never as liberal as everyone thought it was.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2018 5:11 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The New York Times' Shameful Obituary
of Historian William Blum
So Donald Trump believes the Press is Liberal?
Carl Jarvis
On 12/15/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The New York Times' Shameful Obituary of Historian William Blum
Jens Schott Knudsen / Flickr
You know you’ve lived well-well enough to rattle the
establishment-when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it
runs about you (FAIR.org, 6/20/13).
That distinction was achieved by William Blum, historian and critic
of US foreign policy. Once a State Department computer programmer
who aspired to “take part in the great anti-Communist crusade,” he
quit government in
1967 out of disgust with the Vietnam War and became a founding
editor of the Washington Free Press, one of the first alternative
papers of the New Left.
In books like The CIA: A Forgotten History (re-released as Killing
Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) and
Rogue
State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, Blum documented the
violent and anti-democratic record of the US empire; he was a
reference that FAIR frequently turned to when noting what was
missing from the corporate media’
s version of history.
How did the New York Times (12/11/18) frame this remarkable life?
With this remarkable headline:
William Blum, US Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85
Yes, to the Times, the most important thing about Bill Blum’s life
is that Osama bin Laden once remarked to Americans, in a tape
released from hiding, that Rogue State would be “useful for you to read.”
“Blum denounced the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New
York and Washington,” obituary writer Sam Roberts acknowledged, “and
said he would not want to live under an Islamic fundamentalist regime.”
But, Roberts scolded,
“
he did not disavow the recommendation or express regret that bin
Laden, the orchestrator of those attacks, shared his disdain for the
policies carried out by the department where he had once worked.
It’s unclear what formulation Roberts was looking for from Blum;
should he have denied that his book would be “useful…to read,” or
wished aloud that bin Laden had been a supporter of the State
Department policies? There are certainly some policies where you’d
find the State Department, Al Qaeda and the New York Times on one
side, and Blum on the other-such as the invasion of Afghanistan that
bin Laden hoped to provoke with the 9/11 attacks, and the protection
of Idlib, Al Qaeda’s last stronghold in Syria, from Syrian
government attack. Should the Times “express regret” that it finds
itself on the same side as the 9/11 orchestrators? The editors would
no doubt protest that they backed the invasion of Afghanistan and
the defense of Idlib for very different reasons than Al Qaeda would,
but that’s a distinction that they don’t grant their ideological enemies.
If it wanted to give a better sense of the relationship between
William Blum, the US foreign policy establishment and Islamic
extremism, it might have noted that it was William Blum who spotted
and translated (with David
Gibbs) the interview Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s
national security adviser, gave to the French publication Le Nouvel
Observateur (1/15/98). In the interview, Brzezinski boasted of
launching a secret program in 1979 to undermine the government of
Afghanistan, a covert operation that he correctly predicted “was
going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” Asked by the
interviewer, “Do you regret having supported the Islamic
fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?”
Brzezinski responded:
“
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or
the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the
liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?
When Brzezinksi died in 2017, his New York Times obituary did not
bear the headline, “Brzezinski, Official Who Boasted of Promoting Al
Qaeda, Dies at 89″-though surely that is more relevant to
Brzezinski’s legacy than bin Laden’s book review is to Blum’s.
The Blum obit achieved what former FAIR staffer Peter Hart described
as “peak NY Times” with this petty put down:
“
He also reiterated his unpopular, but not unique, position that
American intervention abroad had been breeding enemies and inviting
terrorism.
It’s not clear how “unpopular” Blum’s views were-in a 2013 YouGov
poll,
61 percent agreed with the statement, “In the long run, the United
States will be safer from terrorism if it stays out of other countries’
affairs”
-but what is certainly “not unique” was the Times’ attempt to use an
obituary to settle ideological scores.
Jim Naureckas / FAIR
#al qaeda #cia #jimmy carter #killing hope #new york #new york times
#osama bin laden #
