Caricature printemps israélien

MLK: il faut modifier la citation erronée!

Je partage l'avis de l'auteur et de ceux qui s'opposent au "montage" présenté sur le monument. La citation hors contexte ne rend pas justice à MLK.

"LAST MONTH, Hurricane Irene forced the indefinite postponement of the official dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. The delay could prove fortuitous if the people in charge use the added time to do some erasure and re-inscription of the quotation on the side of the main sculpture — and this time get it right.

The quotation reads: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” On first reading, it seems an odd choice, both for its obscurity — “I have a dream,” for example, is nowhere in the monument — but also its inscrutability. What did Dr. King mean by “drum major”? Without context, this part of the monument is baffling.

With context, as a column by The Post’s Rachel Manteuffel on the opposite page last week made clear, it gets worse. Read the 5,000-word sermon from which the quote was taken, and you find that the import is almost the opposite of what the civil rights leader intended. The words on the monument, edited not by a historian but by an architect concerned about space, are a ham-handed truncation of what Dr. King said, turning a conditional statement into a boast. The sermon is complex and open to interpretation, but one thing is clear: Dr. King does not claim to be a drum major for anything. The whole speech, in fact, is about the evils of self-promotion.

“The Drum-Major Instinct,” which Dr. King delivered on Feb. 4, 1968, is about the folly of wanting to feel important, of seeking recognition and praise. That is a basic human impulse, he said, but it is dangerous and can lead to many social ills, including bigotry: “A lot of the race problem grows out of the drum major instinct, a need that some people have to feel that they are first and feel that their white skin ordained them to be first.”

Dr. King argued that the instinct can be harnessed for noble ends, but only by doing good works and not by seeking accolades for doing them. Notably, he sought no such accolade himself. “If you want to say I was a drum major,” he said, “say that I was a drum major for justice.” Remove that “if” — as the architects of the monument did — and you are perversely left with the sort of bragging that Dr. King decried.

The poet Maya Angelou, who knew Dr. King, told The Post this week that the misquote makes King look like an “arrogant twit” and called for it to be changed, at whatever the cost. We agree. Generations of Americans are going to learn about this hero by what they see when they visit his monument. It is not too much to ask that what they learn be right."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-monumental-misquote-on-the-martin-luther-king-jr-memorial/2011/09/01/gIQAkmaKvJ_story.html

Polls are for strippers (Sarah Palin)

J'adore l'expression pour laquelle je ne trouve pas de traduction juste en français... Il y a là de quoi nourrir quelques humoristes! Profite-t-elle encore un peu de la publicité et de la couverture médiatique ou songe-t-elle sérieusement (difficile d'utiliser sérieusement ici..) à se présenter?

"As a testament to the large degree of media influence she still enjoys, Palin's rousing speech fueled even more speculation about the possibility of challenging President Obama - even though her aides already acknowledged the decision wouldn't be announced until later this month. Unless she delays her decision, yet again. But why say no to a run when it would cost her relevance?

In what was perhaps her most candidate-sounding speech yet, Palin wowed a star-struck audience but also defended the influence of the Tea Party and her own viability on the national stage. A recent Fox poll found that even 71% of Republicans do not wish her in the race.

"They're for strippers and cross-country skiers," Palin said of polls in general.

Palin told the audience that the challenge is not simply to replace President Obama in 2012, "it's who and what we will replace him with."

To that end, she knocked the "permanent political class" and her fellow GOP rivals - perhaps aiming at Mitt Romney and Rick Perry - on raising big campaign money from corporate donors, saying she would like 2012 candidates to fight "croney capitalism."

"Our country cannot afford more trillion dollar thank you notes to campaign backers," she added. "Just like you, I'm not for sale."

Palin also introduced her own prescription for the ailing economy - total elimination of the corporate income tax."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/sarah-palin-still-flirting-with-presidential-run.php?ref=fpb

In Honor of Teachers (NY Times)

En ce début de trimestre... La toile est de Norman Rockwell.

"Since it’s back-to-school season across the country, I wanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers. Like so many others, it was a teacher who changed the direction of my life, and to whom I’m forever indebted.

A Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll released this week found that 76 percent of Americans believed that high-achieving high school students should later be recruited to become teachers, and 67 percent of respondents said that they would like to have a child of their own take up teaching in the public schools as a career.

But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid, and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywide failure.

A March report by the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that one of the differences between the United States and countries with high-performing school systems was: “The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same high status as it once did, nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy in the world’s best-performing economies.”

The report highlights two examples of this diminished status:

• “According to a 2005 National Education Association report, nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years teaching; they cite poor working conditions and low pay as the chief reason.”

• “High school teachers in the U.S. work longer hours (approximately 50 hours, according to the N.E.A.), and yet the U.S. devotes a far lower proportion than the average O.E.C.D. country does to teacher salaries.”"

Pour la suite:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/blow-an-ode-to-teachers.html

DSK à la maison?

"Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the embattled former head of the International Monetary Fund, emerged on Saturday afternoon from a building in TriBeCa where he had been staying for the past few months, dragging heavy pieces of luggage and loading them into the back of a dark blue van.

Accompanied by his wife, Anne Sinclair, Mr. Strauss-Kahn got into the van, grinning as a crowd of photographers rapidly clicked the shutters of their cameras. A moment later the van headed east, apparently bringing to a close a bizarre chapter that began in May, when Mr. Strauss-Kahn was arrested on a plane that was about to depart for France and hauled back to Manhattan where he was charged with the sexual assault of a housekeeper at a Midtown hotel.

Normally a globe-trotter, Mr. Strauss-Kahn led a sedentary life while attending to his criminal case. For much of that time he was under house arrest in Lower Manhattan, staying in two different apartments near the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street.

On Saturday Mr. Strauss-Kahn was believed to be on his way to his home in France; the driver of the van told reporters that his destination was Kennedy International Airport.

Later in the day, Mr. Strauss-Kahn and Ms. Sinclair were seen arriving at the Air France terminal at the airport before going through security, The Associated Press reported.

The airport is where Mr. Strauss-Kahn was forced to extend his stay in the United States, on May 14, when detectives removed him from a plane bound for Paris after the housekeeper, Nafissatou Diallo, told investigators that he had assaulted her just before leaving the Sofitel New York, near Times Square. Eventually, questions about her credibility arose, and on Aug. 23 a State Supreme Court judge dismissed the charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn at the request of the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn still faces a civil case filed by Ms. Diallo, but with the end of the criminal case and the return of his passport Mr. Strauss-Kahn regained the mobility that he lost in May."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/nyregion/dominique-strauss-kahn-appears-to-be-headed-back-to-france.html?_r=1&hp

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New slang et les répercussions du 11 septembre en peinture

CNN demandaient à des artistes d'illustrer les répercussions des attaques du 11 septembre. Parmi les oeuvres présentées, j'ai retenu New Slang de Marcus Kenney.

'The New Slang'
Artist's statement: The 10 years following the September 11 attacks have seen many words added to our everyday vernacular. Arab words like "jihad," "Taliban," "fatah," "Ramadan" and "al Qaeda" are now commonplace. Characters like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Atta, Chemical Ali and Sarah Palin have been introduced. Slang words like "dirty bomb," "safe house," "water boarding," "sleeper cells" and "the Green Zone" are referenced daily. We are now aware on a map where once obscure locations like Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and even Guantanamo Bay are found. There are phrases such as "shock and awe" and "mission accomplished," and of course the many new acronyms like WMDs, TSA and 9/11, to name a few. I am a father of three, and most of the words and phrases I chose to include in this work are ones my children have been hearing and learning about over the course of the past 10 years. I used a child-like, cut-and-paste technique to add to the realization that these words, phrases, places and people are as much a part of our children's vocabulary as words like "Pearl Harbor," "Nazis" and "POWs" are to older generations. This is one of the many profound impacts to our culture post-September 11, 2001.

Pour les autres oeuvres:
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2011/09/specials/911.ripple/index.html?hpt=hp_c2