The origin story of New Orleans is a tale of rampant corruption, unchecked greed, fiendish vice, and gross incompetence – not much has changed!
Join me on an epic journey of discovery as I trace the route of the first French explorers to this area by paddling down Bayou St. John and walking overland to the French Quarter, exploring the geography and history of the city along the way.
[1] B.F. French. Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida, Including Translations of Original Manuscripts Relating to Their Discovery and Settlement (1875). Albert Mason, Page 24-25
[2] Lawrence N. Powell. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (2012). Harvard University Press, Page 11-15
[3] Philomena Hauck. Bienville: Father of Louisiana (1998). Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Page 12-13
[4] Richard Campanella. “Link to the Past: From French Colonists to the Beginnings of Jazz, Spanish Fort Traces its History Across Three Centuries” (2019). Times Picayune/New Orleans Advocatehttps://richcampanella.com/wp-content…
[5] Hauck, Page 23-25
[6] Hauck, Page 6
[7] Hauck, Page 44-57
[8] Powell, Page 25-32
[9] Richard Campanella. Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans (2008). Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Page 109-110
Sky Gilbert responds more than adequately to a demand to “Cancel Shakespeare” that also appeared in The Line recently:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company. National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
Allan thinks that Shakespeare’s language is difficult and old fashioned, and that students today find analyzing the complexities of his old-fashioned rhetoric boring and irrelevant. Yes, Shakespeare essentially writes in another language (early modern English). And reading or even viewing his work can be a tough slog. Not only did he invent at least 1,700 words (some of which are now forgotten today), he favoured a befuddling periodic syntax in which the subject does not appear until the end of a sentence.
But a study of Shakespeare’s rhetoric is important in 2021. There is one — and only one — exceedingly relevant idea that can be lifted from Shakespeare’s congested imagery, his complex, sometimes confusing metaphors — one jewel that can be dragged out of his ubiquitous references to OVID and Greek myth (references which were obviously effortless for him, but for most of us, only confound). And this idea is very relevant today. Especially in the era of “alternate facts” and “fake news.”
This idea is the only one Shakespeare undoubtedly believed. I say this because he returns to it over and over. Trevor McNeely articulated this notion clearly and succinctly when he said that Shakespeare was constantly warning us the human mind “can build a perfectly satisfactory reality on thin air, and never think to question it.” Shakespeare is always speaking — in one way or another — about his suspicion that the bewitching power of rhetoric — indeed the very beauty of poetry itself — is both enchanting and dangerous.
Shakespeare lived at the nexus of a culture war. The Western world was gradually rejecting the ancient rhetorical notion that “truth is anything I can persuade you to believe in poetry” for “truth is whatever can be proved best by logic and science.” Shakespeare was fully capable of persuading us of anything (he often does). But his habit is to subsequently go back and undo what he has just said. He does this so that we might learn to fundamentally question the manipulations of philosophy and rhetoric — to question what were his very own manipulations. Shakespeare loved the beautiful hypnotizing language of poetry, but was also painfully aware that it could be dangerous as hell.
In fact, Shakespeare’s work is very dangerous for all of us. That’s why students should — and must — read it. Undergraduates today hotly debate whether The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, or whether Prospero’s Caliban is a victim of colonial oppression. Education Week reported that “in 2016, students at Yale University petitioned the school to ‘decolonize’ its reading lists, including by removing its Shakespeare requirement.”
It’s true that Shakespeare is perhaps one of the oldest and whitest writers we know. (And sometimes he’s pretty sexist too — Taming of the Shrew, anyone?). But after digging systematically into Shakespeare’s work even the dullest student will discover that for every Kate bowing in obedience to her husband, there is a fierce Lucrece — not only standing up to a man, but permanently and eloquently dressing him down. (And too, the “colonialist” Prospero will prove to be just as flawed as the “indigenous” Caliban.) William Hazlitt said: Shakespeare’s mind “has no particular bias about anything” and Harold Bloom said: “his politics, like his religion, evades me, but I think he was too wary to have any.”
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Malta and British cities are victim to German bombs, while the Japanese advance in Burma causes a refugee crisis. In the Philippines, 80,000 Allied POWs walk the Bataan Death March.
Sources:
IWM C 4743, CL 2377
Bundesarchiv
From the Noun Project: Watchtower by Eliricon
Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Fabien Tell – “Weapon of Choice”
Wendel Scherer – “Defeated”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Cobby Costa – “From the Past”
Cobby Costa – “Flight Path”
Wendel Scherer – “Growing Doubt”
Jon Bjork – “For the Many”
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
3 days ago (edited)
Under our previous episode I told you about how YouTube has been age restricting these videos, effectively censoring them and turning the format into an echo chamber that doesn’t reach beyond the viewers who already know about it. As I explained we feel that it’s a great disservice to education and remembrance, and it has affected me deeply personally making me question why we do this. Two things happened:
1. You collectively gave us the most amazing reception and reminded us of how important the work we do is. I can’t thank you enough for the amazing comments, many of them where kind, supportive, and motivating far beyond what I feel we deserve. You lifted my spirits and brought me out of the slump I was in, cementing, and confirming that what we do matters. In the name of the entire team: thank you so much, it is an immense honor to have you all with us.
2. YouTube did not age restrict the video, and even cleared it for monetization, leading to that it once again reached a viewership like before the string of age restrictions we were struck with. We haven’t heard any explanation from YouTube and we won’t. Furthermore, I am painfully aware that these decisions depend completely on the whims of the individuals at Google who review the videos. We also know that these individuals are different for every video, so I fear that that this state of affairs will not remain. Already, this video was judged as “not suitable for all advertisers” and will therefore be recommended to viewers less often in YouTube’s system. Hence, although it pains us, and is against the principles we stand for, we have also prepared a version of this video with all images documenting the atrocities we expose blurred out – we can only hope that we don’t need it.
I’d like to end with an anecdote out of my motivation to create this series. Many, many moons ago, when I was in senior high at boarding school in Sweden, Elie Wiesel – author, chronicler of the Holocaust, and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald came to our school. It was in 1986, the same year that he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work, and if I remember correctly he had connected a lecture tour to his reception of the award.
In any case — I had the privilege of speaking to Mr. Wiesel in a small group. He explained something that has stayed with me ever since. To him, his experiences were not defeating, the entire Holocaust was not a defeat, not only had humanity been victorious in the end, but he and others had survived to tell the tale — which to him was a special kind of victory that came with the responsibility of sharing and educating.
Mr. Wiesel, a kind, warm hearted man, full of humor and life despite the horrors he had lived, passed five years ago. It is for him, for the other survivors of every ethnicity faced by any kind or terror, and for those who didn’t make it through that we do this — to celebrate their life and continue turning their suffering from defeat into victory by remembering even after they are gone.
Yours,
Spartacus
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Arthur Chrenkoff provides some background on the evolution of Marxist thought as they abandon efforts to rouse the working classes of the west against their capitalist oppressors and switch to attempting to rouse the “wokeing class” against their deplorable racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist white male cisgendered oppressors:
In developing his philosophy, Karl Marx posited human history as a struggle of two sections of society: the minority who hold the all power and the powerless majority. In Marx’s time, the minority was termed the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, or simply The Capital, those controlling (owning and benefitting from) the means of production, while the majority was called the working class, or the proletariat, the masses who sell their labour, and whose collective toil makes the capitalists rich. The essential dynamic of a society is one of power: who has it and who doesn’t, and how it’s exercised (or as Lenin said, “who whom?”). It’s a zero sum equation: all or nothing, the one or the other, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. There is a moral dimension to this dichotomy: the former, by virtue of their position, are the villains, the latter the virtuous. It’s also absolutist: the individual doesn’t matter and individuality is an irrelevant illusion; you are the class to which you belong.
One of the most important aspects of this group dynamic is that the dominant class uses its position and power to shape the society in accordance with its needs. Thus, all the institutions, laws, traditions and phenomena reflect the interests of the ruling class; they are designed to benefit them and only them and keep their power entrenched. And what benefits one class invariably harms the other: the masses. You can thus say that in a capitalist society everything’s classist.
The twentieth century dashed the hopes of Marx’s disciples that the proletariat would revolt against and overthrow their capitalist oppressors. The working class was bought off with better working conditions and rising incomes: a house, a car, and a football game. While elsewhere communism triumphed through coups and foreign invasions, in the Western world genuine revolutions did not happen; capitalism is still around. While the working class might have disappointed and let down Marxists, the basic Marxist thinking has not changed: the society is divided into two mutually hostile groups, the oppressors and the oppressed. Now we just need to find the different oppressed and we’ll have another crack at destroying capitalism and creating our socialist utopia. Out with the purely economic divisions, in with racial, gender and sexual ones. Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class.
Fast forward to 2021, and the neo-Marxist struggle continues to gather wind in its sail. On the one side the power-holders: white, male, straight; on the other the powerless: women, people of colour, other sexualities. The actors might have been changed but the essential drama remains the same: the struggle of the virtuous but powerless oppressed majority against their dastardly rulers and the system created for their benefit and everyone else’s disadvantage. Just as in the past every aspect of society was biased against and harmful to the proletariat, so now it is against the proletariat 2.0: everything’s racist – and sexist, and homophobic and transphobic. This is also why the activists describe racism as “systemic”; not because there are still Jim Crow laws in existence, and legal segregation and discrimination, but because the system created by the “white” society by its very nature must be oppressive and hostile to anyone non-white. Piecemeal fixing problems and gradual reforms are useless; the only solution is a radical societal transformation that elevates the oppressed and casts down the oppressors.
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One of the phrases in the mouth of managers or bureaucrats that indicates almost unfailingly that they are about to commit an act of betrayal is, “We believe passionately in.”
The only thing that most managers or bureaucrats believe in passionately is their career, in the broad sense of that term: for they are quite willing to abandon or sacrifice a career completely in the narrow sense if it is in the interest of their career in a broader sense.
I learned this in the hospitals in which I worked. As soon as a hospital manager said “I believe passionately in the work that Department X has been doing,” I knew that Department X was about to be closed down by that very same manager.
Thus, when I read that a publisher claimed that “We believe passionately in freedom of speech,” I knew at once that the publisher was about to withdraw a book from publication that it had previously advertised for publication.
