Tag Archives: “The PBS NewsHour”

“On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” by #RENEENICOLEMACKLIN #RENEENICOLEGOOD, Fatally Shot By An #ICE Agent In Minneapolis, Less Than A Mile From The Site Of #GeorgeFloyd’s Killing

Posted on by toddpanther

Thanks to #JuliaWright for posting this to the #MumiaAbuJamal listserv!


i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

           ribosome

           endoplasmic—

           lactic acid

           stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

           now i can’t believe—

           that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

**********

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Renee_Good

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DTTMEyLDxvD/

https://lithub.com/renee-nicole-good-murdered-by-ice-was-a-prize-winning-poet-heres-that-poem/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&utm_id=01KEETCCMN6S2C99NV1SV0F0VE&_kx=N7ZUy87lZmRlOJp97-NPk11XNcFSDpign4V7F2qCtew.U5D8ER

***********

***********

#NewYorker: The Lives and Loves of #JamesBaldwin #NewYorker@100

Posted on by toddpanther

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/18/baldwin-a-love-story-nicholas-boggs-book-review

ABOUT THE ARTICLE AUTHOR/BOOK REVIEWER:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Menand

Since the reviewer seems to know more than the biographer, I listened to this twice!!! LOL!!!!

THE NEW BOOK REVIEWED:

ABOUT THE BOOK’S AUTHOR:

https://www.whiting.org/content/nicholas-boggs-0

By the way, this one @NewYorker #NewYorker book review is better than #EddieGlaude’s entire Baldwin book.

Book Review: The Commuter: Eddie Glaude Attempts to Confront James Baldwin’s Truths

Profiles In Courage, 4/29-4/30/2024

Posted on by toddpanther

MAY 4TH UPDATE:

MAY 5TH UPDATE:

Interesting That These Rich, Famous Network Anchors/Hosts…..

Posted on by toddpanther

…..have openly demoted themselves to special correspondents. I’d like to think it’s a public commentary on the limitations of network anchoring and a true hunger to produce 20th-century, middlebrow magazine-like narrative–and those professional aspects might play a part. But hearing these goodbyes, it really sounds more like the intimate results of a work-life balance self-inventory, a real understanding that they are in a post-COVID/pre-old-age-illness vortex. (I mean, even Amy Goodman–who used to helm Democracy Now! no matter how sick she got!–actually took a day off last week to be part of a relative’s graduation.) In Chuck’s case, it’s almost like someone in his family told him, “You’re missing it.” Well, now he, Judy and Rachel won’t.

SEPTEMBER 10th UPDATE:

Judy, Barbara And Juan: Random Thoughts About A Journalism-Filled Holiday Weekend

Posted on by toddpanther

Watching and, frankly, enjoying the unapologetically hagiographic network television tributes to the semi-retired Judy Woodruff and newly-deceased Barbara Walters over the weekend, and then waking up to this Juan Gonzalez speech on Democracy Now!, shows how stark differences in mainstream American journalism can be–or at least, used to be, pre-Web and pre-1,000 channels. I accept my membership in Juan’s camp. But it’s clear to do today and tomorrow what he did means using Substack, etc. Effective mainstream journalism has this weird history of coming out of the American muckraking and capitalist traditions, and the millions made by mass advertising created a lot of space for approaches that don’t exist today. So you have to make them yourself, the way I.F. Stone and those folks did.

What’s also interesting to me is how in America, “alternative” spaces, if created by middle-class whites, can eventually become mainstream–or, as some critics of the mainstream would say, co-opted. We remember that at its creation almost 50 years ago, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and All Things Considered, the newsmagazine of National Public Radio, were silent critiques of, and alternatives to, commercial mainstream news. (Note that among NPR’s alumni is former Philadelphia radio journalist and now Leftist legend Mumia Abu-Jamal.) Almost 30 years ago, Democracy Now! was a radical, almost anarchist critique of the million-dollar media institution it now is. 😉 I guess it now sees itself through that Gonzalez lens of outsider-within-the-inside. Which makes me think: is the middle-class, millionaire blond public television anchor Judy Woodruff just a “purer” version of her commercial counterpart, the long-ago-gone-Hollywood Barbara Walters? It’s a good, fair question.

In 2023 and beyond, more and more truthtellers must struggle with Amiri Baraka’s words, applied to race but easily, in this monochromatic circumstance, given to class:

***

I know it’s hard to be Black, and we’re all controlled by white folks.

[W.E.B.] Du Bois said we always have the double consciousness.

We’re trying to be Black, and meanwhile you got a white ghost hovering over your head that says, “If you don’t do this, you’ll get killed. If you don’t do this, you won’t get no money. If you don’t do this, nobody’ll think you’re beautiful. If you don’t do this, nobody’ll think you’re smart.”

That’s the ghost.

You’re trying to be Black and the ghost is telling you to be a ghost.

***

I appreciate Walters intervening Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. But I appreciate more that she said a few years ago that in today’s commercial news media climate, no one would care about it. I will appreciate what Woodruff soon will teach me about parts of America of which I know nothing. But I still see ghosts in my TV tube. And with money and stardom on the line, very few Juan Gonzalez-es who will challenge powerful people like Woodruff’s and Walters’ employers.