obituary

Damn!

Bernie Mac dies at 50 -- chicagotribune.com: "Comedian and Chicago native Bernie Mac died early Saturday morning from complications due to pneumonia, his publicist confirmed.

Mac, 50, had been hospitalized for about a week at Northwestern Hospital, according to his spokeswoman. A few years ago, Mac disclosed that he suffered from sarcoidosis, a rare autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in tissue, most often in the lungs."

(Via My Twitter Feed.)

I just got an email from a fellow blogger saying that he saw NBC report that the newscaster died today of a heart attack.

Wow!

CONFIRMED!

Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press" and a political analyst for "NBC Nightly News" and the "Today" program, has died.

Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, came on air during a special report Friday afternoon and said Russert collapsed and died while at work in the NBC news bureau in Washington, D.C.

"This news division will not be the same without his strong, clear voice," Brokaw said. "He'll be missed as he was loved greatly."

Russert, 58, joined NBC News in 1984. He took over the helm of "Meet the Press" in December 1991, according to his biography on the show's Web site. Russert has interviewed every major figure on the American political scene, his biography said.

Earlier this year, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

A moment of silence.

Smoke streaming from Ground Zero illuminates the night skyline of lower Manhattan in a view looking east from New Jersey. Photo taken the night of Sept. 16, 2001, by USGS field-crew members Todd Hoefen and Gregg Swayze.

Here's the Victims List.

You can read my story, two years after the fact.

It's also updated.

You know you have a September 11 story.

Now it's your turn to share it.

Post it. Link to it.

We want to know.

UPDATE BY LIZA SABATER:
Kos speaks --Steve

*****

The Rude Pundit is responsible for my finally meeting Steve. Lee had just released the CD of his awesome one-man show and he threw a party to mark the event.

At he time I was a homeschooling mother of two and sometime consultant so I had barely any time to drop by. Lee said the magic words : Steve is coming.

O. M. G.

Having the opportunity to meet two of my superheroes in one night was too good to pass up and so I begged and implored the patriarchy at home to release me. As fast as I could, I oiled myself into a pair of jeans and scooted to the West Village.

When I got there once I gave a big hug to Lee I jumped all over Steve and to say he was a bit taken aback but loving it is not to be off the mark. I needed to let him know how much he meant to me as a writer, as an activist and as a blatina. I needed to cram as much in as little a time and thusly went to town.

Believe it or not, he blushed.

Steve was a muscular writer but in person he was could be quite unassuming. "Stop it!" He said it many times and so after the fangirlishness susbsided, we just shot the shit.

At that time neither of us had medical insurance --an issue of which we wrote about occasionally. I knew he had problems with his kidneys but once he told me the litanny of ailments he had and I told him ours, we had a bit of a bitch fest about doctors and money and the whole 'culture of health' in this country. I gave one last hug for good measure, hoping it would not be the last.

UPDATE BY LIZA SABATER :
For my eulogies, please go to Steve you are one of the reasons why I am still blogging and Just so you understand how important Steve Gilliard is to my work in the blogosphere

****

I didn't know Steve Gilliard, but he was a big name in blogging when I was just barely poking around wondering what Daily Kos was all about. Two diaries on Daily Kos cover his death better than I can:

Steve Gilliard has died, by Rosebuddear

and

Steve Gilliard - R.I.P. by Meteor Blades

This photo from Campus Progress:

Once heard someone say of Gilliard an utmost complement: There are those who bullshit and those who don't and Steve was one of those who don't. To me, that is a great compliment in this world.

So ... how are you feeling about it?

Kurt Vonnegut, the post-modern Mark Twain, died yesterday after suffering for two weeks of brain injuries related to an accident at his NYC residence.

I have to admit to being ignorant about his work --he's one of many American writers I overlooked during my college years to focus on his Latin American counterparts.

I got how funky he could be through his essays and interviews as well as his constant criticism of the Bush administration. Yet it's his becoming the subject of the Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen urban legend that made him take cool to a whole 'nother level.

The man was what myths are made off.

Here's the brilliant hoax and here is a parody featuring Yoda --yes, The Yoda from the Star Wars movies.

"The university is in ruins ... Power ... no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone of the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select – it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless ..."

Jean Baudrillard is the philosopher I seem to always forget.

I don't know which one came first into my hands, whether it was The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers) (Radical Thinkers) or For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. All I know is that Baudrillard (along with Roland Barthes) was one of the first people to show me how to think about humanity not as a given but as a deliberate construction stemming from our desire, fear and lust for Power.

Baudrillard, through his look at American culture, his ponderings on advertising and his photographic musings, taught me to look at Man and Woman literally as auto (self-made) nomies (signs). I learned with him that History becomes in this quest for autonomy, a matrix of Power through meaningful domination.

I learned with Baudrillard, far before the creation of the web and the proliferation of the anonymous personae that litter the blogosphere, that we are fictions battling to be taken on as truths. Twenty years ago and before we even heard of blogs as noise machines, I learned from hims that it is not truth we seek to unravel through writing, punditry or blogging but the spectacle of being truthful.

I have much to thank Baudrillard for his gift of knowledge even if it is a knowledge that I always seem to forget. He has inspired my distrut of cultural absolutes (truth, evidence) and its perpetuation institutions (academia, media) through his piercing discussions of American culture. Ironically, he made very real and accessible the Marxist and Nietzschean philosphies that inform my creations. He ended up making real the unreal reality of reality makers.

After the jump you'll find Arthur Kroker's euology forwarded to me from the C-NET listserve.

It's not just the pantsuit.

It's not just the scorch-earth singing.

It's the fact that the Godfather is there, in all his black and white glory behind her, like a guardian angel.

She, octaroon daughter of an Ecuatorian and an American, resplendent in technicolor white.

Before her, a roomful of jaws agape standing, and clapping and testifying; while a Jamie Foxx, one of the true believing fanboys, standing there, stunned and speechless seconds before the closing of the clip.

With just one performance she rises to feminist icon for a whole generation of girls with her possessed, Cassandra-like interpretation ...

This is a man's world
But it would be nothing, nothing
Not one little thing
Without a woman or girl.

Hell yeah, Christina.

PREACH!

In 1980, I was a college freshman. I entered school with an inchoate feminism, a sense of rage that I was treated differently because I was a woman, that there had been things that had already happened to me in my 17 years that made it clear to me that being a woman came with baggage that seemed unique to my sex. But I didn't really have a name for it.

I had done a lot of reading. I began reading at three, taught by a father who sensed my hunger for knowledge, and it's true that I spent much of my childhood not outside communing with the nature who has become my teacher at this point in my life, but, rather, nose buried in a book. Still. The voices that spoke to me prior to college were rare.

One of the first courses I took was "Introduction to Women's Studies." And one of the first texts I ever read was "I Stand Here Ironing." When I read just a few minutes ago that Tillie Olsen had died, it was as if I was standing on a beach and the tide was running out beneath my feet. I could feel the sand moving me back almost 30 years, and I was standing there, ironing. Reading. Remembering that the text had had an impact on me, but not remembering exactly what that was. Just that it moved me.

And, as I read through the story of Tillie Olsen's experience, an experience that I now feel obligated to read about more fully, I cringed in recognition.

I wrote a post about the good stuff that happened in 2006. Everytime I sat down to write about the bad and the ugly of last year, I'd become paralyized by the massive amounts of badness and uglyness that permeated the year.

There was the triumvirate of firecrotch (Lindsay Lohan), skanky chocha (Paris Hilton), and white trash poontang (Britney Spears).

Ugh Britney.

Anorexia became the new black with Nicole Ritchie it's standard bearer. Yeah sure, anorectics have been banned from catwalks across the globe what with four dead models sacrificied to the disease but when we still have a coked-out yet incredibly rich Kate Moss prancing around ... well ... no wonder it's still considered hot in Hollywood.

There was also the crazy whacked out Tom Cruise with his scientology slave Katie Holmes and their tethan child. And Star Jones. And Donald Trump. And Kid Rock and Pam Anderson.

But those are just the entertainment.

What about Darfur?
Do you remember the devastation of Lebanon?
Then there's the never ending carnage in Iraq.
And the immigration raids.

Do you know where habeas corpus went?

How about Mark Foley?
Ted Haggard?
Samuel Alito?

The thing is ... all of this is too abstract, too far away when compared to the death of my niece Lydia.

    

There has got to be meaning to this juxtaposition :

James Brown, the hardest working man in show business who took shit from nobody and represented the emerging black powered pop culture revolution. He dies on Christmas day.

Gerald Ford, the man who had to clean Richard Nixon's shit while nurturing the emerging white supremacist neo-con movement introduced by his presidency. He dies the day after Christmas.

James Brown, no matter how fucked up his situation, he always seemed to be able to overcome through hard work and determination. His foibles? Pardonnable because even though he was superhumanly talented, his shortcomings and humble beginning just made him more like us.

Gerald Ford, on the other hand, never seemed to break a sweat. His photographs in the White House make it look like he is more like a vacationer than a president; just passing time before his time to go. And his biggest foible? Pardoning Nixon, and letting him skip free from the consequences of his corrupt actions.

Seriously. There has got to be some meaning to these seemingly asynchronous deaths. The universe is never that clueless or random.

There was a time, barely remembered today, when the idea of bipartisanship really seemed reasonable. There was once a kind of Republican, now driven to the verge of extinction, called the "Eisenhower Republican." Today, the equivalent beast would be called a "Moderate Democrat." The Republican Party itself has largely purged itself of Eisenhower Republicans in its radical shift to the right.

I have always been a Democrat. But even the earliest President I remember, Richard Nixon, though a crazy, paranoid, power hungry SOB, could be ideologically reasonable, as evidenced by his establishment of the EPA. But Nixon, probably unintentionally, began the decline of the Eisenhower Republican. Some of those he brought into government are the very same "barking crazy rightwingers" who have systematically been destroying our nation under Bush. That, combined with Nixon's spectacular and televised downfall, discredited the reasonable, moderate Republican. The Democrats, then more liberal than now, were ready to take advantage of Nixon's downfall, and the far right wing Republicans, then marginalized but poised to strike, were ready to begin their plans to take over the nation through lying, stealing and cheating.

One man had a small chance of saving the Eisenhower Republican: President Gerald Ford.

Gerald Ford, the last of the Eisenhower Republicans who had any chance of saving the Republican Party from the barking crazy rightwingers, has died.