Culture

September represents International Underground Railroad Month and several Michigan-based institutions, organizations and individuals continue to share the story of abolitionists, slaves and others.

“The Underground Railroad was not a physical railroad. It was a network of people across racial identities who helped people fleeing enslavement,” the Michigan’s History Center writes on its website.

Canada, where slavery was outlawed beginning in 1834, was a destination place for Black Americans during that period. It was about three decades before America’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Jamon Jordan, city of Detroit historian, told the Michigan Advance that the city’s proximity to Canada made the Motor City an important destination for Black slaves.

On this day in 1831: Blackburn slaves escape for freedom

“There were some radical African Americans and some white allies who were highly opposed to slavery and they were very active in this area,” said Jordan, a Detroit resident who operates history tours business and teaches at the University of Michigan. Many of his tours include Detroit Underground Railroad sites.

Because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, slaves captured in the northern U.S. could still be sent back to their slave owners.

The Detroit “stations” were essential in the path toward freedom because of its close proximity to Canada.

One of them was Second Baptist Church, Michigan’s oldest Black congregation, which was founded in 1836. Slaves were held there in the basement under the church’s sanctuary until they could continue their journey to Canada.

Today, the church offers tours of the institution to the public led by the Rev. Lawrence Rodgers.

The Underground Railroad Living Museum Flight to Freedom Tour is a “storytelling” reenactment of the original Underground Railroad passage that operated between 1840 and 1863. It is led by Historic First Congregational Church of Detroit.

Detroit’s Gateway to Freedom International Memorial statute is perhaps the most popular visual representation of the Underground Railroad era in the Motor City. Dedicated in 2001, it is located in Hart Plaza on the city’s riverfront. Ed Dwight, an African American sculptor, designed the statue.

Several Black and white people were prominent Underground Railroad “conductors.” They included Seymour Finney, a white Detroit businessman and George DeBaptiste, an African American businessman. Black and white residents founded the Detroit Anti-Slavery Society in 1837.

“Detroit was one of the most critical stops on the Underground Railroad, because it was generally the final stop before achieving freedom,” the Detroit Historical Society writes on its website. “There are at least seven known paths that led freedom seekers from various points in Michigan to the Canadian shore and it is estimated that 200 Underground Railroad stops existed throughout Michigan between the 1820s and 1865. The Underground Railroad ended in 1865 with the end of the Civil War and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.”

In Battle Creek, a statue stands that lifts the abolitionists effort of Sojourner Truth, who lived in Michigan during her final years. The former slave and women’s rights advocate died on Nov. 26, 1883. She is buried in Battle Creek’s Oak Hill Cemetery.

The Michigan Freedom Trail Commission “preserves, protects and promotes the rich legacy of the Underground Railroad and the antislavery movement in Michigan,” according to its website. Jordan is a member of the commission.

The commission plans to offer on Saturday its “Heritage Gathering,” an annual fall series of virtual and in-person programs.

Kimberly Simmons, an African American author and historian, former Michigan Freedom Trail Commission member and

Detroit River Project (DRP) founder, believes that the Michigan and Ontario, Canada, region should be better promoted as the important part of the Underground Railroad story. Simmons is a fifth-generation Underground Railroad descendant of a family that found freedom in the Detroit area in 1835.

The DRP, a nonprofit organization, is carrying out an effort to promote the U.S. and Canada for inclusion on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site list.

“We are the centerpiece for freedom and resistance,” Simmons, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada, told the Advance about the region.

The North Buxton community in Ontario, for example, recently held its annual Underground Railroad celebration. The rural community east of Windsor was established in 1849 as a haven for and by former African-American slaves who escaped to Canada to gain freedom. It is home to a museum that chronicles the history of Black people in Canada.

The community’s history includes Mary Ann Shadd, an anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. Shadd was the first Black woman publisher in North America, according to many accounts.

The celebration held between Sept. 2 and 4 featured a parade and several other community events.

At DRP’s request, then-U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Southfield) and current U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) in 2021 co-sponsored a resolution affirming the Detroit and Ontario region’s importance in the Underground Railroad story.

“[T]he legacy of African Americans is interwoven with the fabric of democracy and freedom in the United States,” a portion of the resolution read.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and Twitter.

A political battle is brewing in Washington, D.C., over plans to build a National Museum of the American Latino and the portrayal of American Latino history. Last year, the Smithsonian Institution opened a temporary preview exhibition inside the National Museum of American History that has become the focus of controversy within the Latino community, as Republican lawmakers and others challenge what one conservative writer described in The Hill as an “unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history.” We speak to two historians who were hired to develop a now-shelved exhibit on the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s for the museum. Felipe Hinojosa is a history professor at Baylor University in Texas, and Johanna Fernández is an associate professor of history at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. We discuss their vision for the first national museum dedicated to Latino history, which Hinojosa describes as “complex” and “nuanced,” and how conservative backlash has sought to stymie and rewrite their work. “These conservatives are using fear to essentially push through their agenda,” says Fernández, who warns that the rising wave of censorship throughout the U.S. could be a “repeat of the Red Scare.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to look at a brewing controversy at the Smithsonian Institution over plans to build a National Museum of the American Latino. In 2020, Congress passed funding to create the museum, along with an American Women’s History Museum, but there’s been a deep divide in Washington over how Latinos should be portrayed in the museum. Last year, the museum opened a temporary exhibit inside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The exhibition is called “¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States.” Republican lawmakers and other conservatives within the Latino community have attacked the exhibition, leading the Smithsonian to halt plans for a future exhibition on the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s. In its place, the Smithsonian is now planning an exhibition on salsa and Latin music. This fight is exploding into public view in the midst of National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15th to October 15th.

This is Jorge Zamanillo, the founding director of the National Museum of the American Latino, giving a brief tour of the current exhibit in a video posted by the Smithsonian.

JORGE ZAMANILLO: Well, Latino history is American history. And to tell that full story and to tell that full history, we have to acknowledge our colonial past. So, here, we feature a portrait of Popé, the sculpture. He’s a Tewa leader, organized the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. We feature Toypurina, who was a medicine woman. That was a post-colonial rule. So these are important stories to feature and highlight how important they are in shaping our future. And these communities were around for hundreds of years before European colonization. So that’s important on how that led to shaping our history. …

Lulu, in “¡Presente!,” we further explore how racism and colorism developed during the colonial period. And we have a few examples from Puerto Rico that illustrate this point for visitors. This 1973 poster by Augusto Marín emphasizes that role of Black Puerto Ricans in the abolition of slavery on their island in 1873. We can also find deep historical meaning in Latino music and dance traditions. This outfit belonged to Tata Cepeda, an icon of Puerto Rican Bomba music. Bomba is a family of rhythms and dances with African and Caribbean roots that has historically offered Black Puerto Ricans a space for creative resistance and renewal.

Bringing it back to today, here’s a great photo by Joaquin Medina documenting the Black Lives Matter movement in Puerto Rico. For us at the museum, “Latino” is a label that brings together racially and regionally diverse communities. Representing both our commonalities and our differences is a core part of our work.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Jorge Zamanillo, the founding director of the National Museum of the American Latino.

One vocal critic of the museum’s exhibition has been the Cuban-born Congressmember Mario Díaz-Balart, who threatened in July to block funding for the museum — he serves on the House Committee on Appropriations — and later backed down on his threat after he met with Jorge Zamanillo and Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the overall Smithsonian Institution. After the meeting, the museum changed parts of the exhibit featuring a foam raft used by Cuban refugees to flee the country. The original exhibition text said the refugees were, quote, “escaping Cuba’s economic crisis.” In July, the text was changed to add a reference to Fidel Castro and, quote, “Cuba’s dictatorship, political repression, and economic crisis,” unquote. Some of the first public criticism of the current exhibition came from a group of conservative writers who penned a column in The Hill last year claiming the exhibit offered a, quote, “unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history,” unquote.

The controversy comes as the Smithsonian is seeking to raise enough money to build the museum, which will cost an estimated $800 million. The New York Timesreports $58 million has been raised so far.

We’re joined now by two historians who have been hired to develop the now-shelved exhibit on the Latino civil rights movement of the '60s for the museum. Felipe Hinojosa is a history professor at Baylor University in Texas. He's also the author of the book Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. Johanna Fernández is an associate professor of history at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. She’s also the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History of the United States.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Johanna Fernández, let’s begin with you. What has happened? I mean, the idea that this museum was going to be built either across the Mall from the Museum of African American History or in the Tidal Basin, but this, your “¡Presente!” exhibit, has led to this kind of uprising on the right. Can you explain what the current exhibit is, what the one that has been shelved is, at least for now, that you and Professor Hinojosa have been the creators of?

JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: “¡Presente!” — well, thank you for covering this evolving crisis. “¡Presente!” is the current exhibition at the Molina Family Gallery within the American History Museum at the Smithsonian. It’s an exhibition in waiting while the actual building of the Latino History Museum goes up in 10 to 12 years.

What is important about “¡Presente!” is that it really outlines the contours of Latino history, which are complicated. One of the points it makes is that the largest Latino population in the United States was integrated after the United States war with Mexico in 1848, which is responsible for giving the United States its contemporary boundaries. Half of the United States was acquired during that war, and the people who were in those Mexican lands remained in the now borders of the United States. And the integration of those people into a hostile America is part of American history. The “¡Presente!” exhibition also highlights the acquisition by the United States of Puerto Rico in 1898 and also discusses the ways in which U.S. foreign policy and economic policy has driven people out of Latin America and into the United States. So, what’s important is that it establishes the question: Who are Latinos? How did they get here? And what’s their relationship to their communities and to the nation and the world?

Unfortunately, conservative Latinos don’t want to hear that narrative. They want a narrative that emphasizes Latino military service and business success among Latinos in the United States.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Felipe Hinojosa, you come from — you work and come from Texas, a state at the forefront of some of the culture wars that we’re experiencing today. Could you talk about how you learned of the concern here, and what you were told by folks at the Smithsonian about what needed to change or didn’t need to change in terms of the work you were doing?

FELIPE HINOJOSA: Well, thank you, first off, for having me.

Yes, I am from Texas. I’m from the Rio Grande Valley, born and raised in Brownsville, Texas. That has shaped a big part of who I am. It shapes a big part of the work that I do.

Writing about and teaching on the Latino civil rights movement has been a centerpiece of the work that I do and that I’ve collaborated with other historians in doing. And I think in joining with this work with the Smithsonian, I think, for me, the biggest joy and the biggest thrill was to be able to present these questions that Johanna has just mentioned. The larger and broader questions of who are we and who are we as a community and what is our relationship to the nation were central questions for Latino civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

We worked on this exhibit, on the “Latino Youth Movements” exhibit, with the Smithsonian for two years. We were 65% complete. And the sort of rumblings that started to happen came immediately after the piece that was published in The Hill. I believe it was summer of 2022 when that came out. And there was some concern in terms of the kind of material that we would be presenting. But I think, for us, our major concern was to just make sure that we were telling a truthful story, a complex story and a nuanced story about how Latinos have grappled with their relationship to the United States.

The critiques that came to us and what we were told in terms of what could be and could not be included, I think, were alarming to us. And when the email came in November of 2022 that this exhibit was going to be paused or canceled, I think it confirmed our fears of the fact that the Smithsonian was not viewing the Latino civil rights movement as a broad enough story, as a story that would raise the kind of funds that this museum needs to open in 10 or 12 years. And I think, from the work, certainly, that we have done and the work that we were engaged in for two years, nothing could be further than the truth. What’s bigger and what’s more, I think, central than young people asking themselves and their communities how they can make this a nation that is better for all?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Johanna Fernández, this whole issue of political leaders putting pressure on a museum to basically override the historians that the museum has chosen to develop its exhibitions?

JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: Well, I think we have to look at this conflict in the broader history of the last 10 years, when conservatives have launched a calculated and broad-sweeping campaign to essentially eliminate the teaching of Black American history, Latino history, ethnic studies, women’s history and LGBTQ+ history in the schools. And now what we see is that through this witch hunt and by smearing historians and curators as Marxists, these conservatives are using fear to essentially push through their agenda. And now, again, this has reached a federal museum, and not just any federal museum, but the largest network of museums in the world, which is known as the Smithsonian. In many ways, this sounds and looks like a repeat of the Red Scare or previous moments of repression in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Professor Fernández, what is your response to them sending you this email saying they’re putting your next exhibition on pause? To be clear, “¡Presente!” is now in that temporary National American History Museum space, and the one you’re doing on the civil rights movement is the one that is paused, saying that they want to appeal to a larger audience, especially because they’re fundraising, and so they’ll shelve the civil rights issue and do instead an exhibition on salsa music and Latin music.

JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: I think we have to say that there is no more integral matter in the United States than the struggle for freedom, democracy and to redefine the United States as a country for all. That’s integral and core to the American imagination. So, to say that this issue is a minor one is really to not understand the very essence of American history, upon which the American Revolution and its determination to fight for liberty and the pursuit of happiness is core.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Hinojosa, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the — in Texas itself, there clearly is a very significant and strong conservative population in the Latino community. So, not only is this a national ethnic struggle, there’s also a class component to how people view history. What’s your sense of why it is so important to tell the story as you have researched it and looked into it throughout your career versus what some of the political leaders of your state might want?

FELIPE HINOJOSA: Well, first of all, I would say a lot of political leaders are often disconnected from the grassroots community. They don’t understand what the community is asking for. I’ve been in the classroom for over 20 years. Students are wanting more of this history, wanting to better understand how Latinos have shaped Texas politics, have shaped the history of the United States — and not just Latino students, by the way. I’m talking to students of all backgrounds that are very invested in telling a bigger story of American history and having a broader understanding of it.

The other thing is demographic change, the demographics of the state of Texas. Texas is now a Latino-majority state. And so, to have those demographic changes that have taken place in the last 20 years across the state, I think, signaled to us a tremendous responsibility to teach this history, to have a better understanding of the contributions of this community. We are not perpetual foreigners. We are not people that are new to this nation. We have contributed for generations to make this country what it is today, and in particular in my home state of Texas.

And the idea is not to simply talk about a liberal-versus-conservative idea of history. The idea here is to tell a story that is complex, that is nuanced and that gets at this idea of democracy, that gets at how different people from different sections of society have made this country what it is today, and I think in particular the state of Texas. I mean, there’s a reason why Texas history classes fill up the way that they do at universities across my home state of Texas. People love this history. They respect it. They admire it, as they should. But we need a bigger telling of it. We need a bigger story, a story that brings in marginalized voices, voices that have been silenced throughout history. And I think our exhibit was one small step to try to do that, not only at the state level, but at the national level.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you give, perhaps, some examples of [inaudible] that you wanted to put forth in the civil rights exhibit, especially in terms of Texas, a history that many Americans perhaps may not be aware of, whether it’s the Crystal City uprising in the early ’60s or other aspects of Texas Latino history?

FELIPE HINOJOSA: Yeah. In particular, we were looking at the ways in which Latinos in the state of Texas and across the Southwest and across the country have not waited for the nation to do something for us. We’re not sitting idly by. Historically, what we’ve done is we’ve taken matters into our own hands for political participation.

You mentioned Crystal City, in 1963 gaining ground to the Crystal City’s City Council. There was a group of five Mexican Americans that won those City Council seats. That was a huge, huge shift and, I think, a call to the state of Texas that Mexican Americans were serious about political participation. They went on to form La Raza Unida Party. They ran a candidate for a governor here in the state of Texas. And that’s the kind of history that we want to tell, one of agency, one of power, one that gets at how Latinos have not simply waited on but have acted upon to make this country more democratic and more representative for all.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Hinojosa, we want to thank you for being with us, of Baylor University in Texas, and Johanna Fernández, professor of history at the City University of New York: Baruch College. And, Juan, thank you so much for your book, Harvest of Empire: Stories of Latinos in America. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

In Spectrum WT v. Wendler, students at West Texas A&M University have challenged campus president Walter Wendler's decision to cancel a drag show.

The event, presented by the group Spectrum WT, would have been a fundraiser for the suicide prevention group The Trevor Project. But a far-right federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump, Matthew Kacsmaryk, has ruled in Wendler's favor.

Kacsmaryk, known for his Christian fundamentalist views and severe social conservatism, is the judge who infuriated reproductive rights activists when he issued a ruling in favor of banning the abortion drug mifepristone.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

In his Spectrum WT v. Wendler ruling, Kacsmaryk wrote, "The First Amendment does not prevent school officials from restricting 'vulgar and lewd conduct' that would 'undermine the school's basic educational mission' — particularly in settings where children are physically present."

But according to The New Republic's Matt Ford, Kacsmaryk's ruling is "considerably out of step with the other federal courts."

Ford, in an article published on September 26, explains, "As Law Dork's Chris Geidner noted last week, federal judges in four other states have cited the First Amendment in rejecting drag show bans. But that part is not surprising: Kacsmaryk, who worked as a lawyer for a conservative Christian legal organization before Donald Trump elevated him to the federal bench in 2019, has often ruled against protecting LGBTQ Americans from discrimination."

Kacsmaryk, Ford argues, "appears to place his own moral views over Americans’ free speech rights."

READ MORE:'Missed the mark': Judge shoots down Tennessee GOP anti-drag show law

"Unfortunately for Spectrum WT," Ford reports, "they found themselves before Kacsmaryk…. Kacsmaryk concluded that drag shows as a whole have no First Amendment expressive purpose — a conclusion he reached only after twisting existing free speech precedents beyond recognition."

READ MORE:'X-rated': Doug Mastriano to propose ban on public drag shows after high school's 'queer prom'

Read The New Republic's full report at this link.

LINCOLN — After gaining federal permission, the family of a famed poet/author plans to trek to a remote corner of South Dakota in October to retrieve a century-old monument dedicated to a heroic mountain man.

The goal is to finally unlock a mystery hidden inside the monument, erected at the direction of writer John Neihardt as an “altar to courage” of the subject of one of his poems: Hugh Glass, who crawled, limped and paddled 200 miles after being mauled by a bear and left for dead in 1823.

The mauling was depicted in the 2015 movie “The Revenant,” which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass.

Neihardt wrote that he placed a time capsule in the “bosom” of the concrete monument. The capsule, he wrote, includes an “original manuscript” from him, the author of “Black Elk Speaks,” a million-selling book about the remembrances of a Lakota medicine man.

The monument sits on U.S. Bureau of Reclamation land. The agency recently determined that the Neihardt family rightly owns the monument and gave the OK for the family to remove it from its current site, along Shadehill Reservoir near Lemmon, South Dakota.

Coralie Hughes, a granddaughter of Neihardt, said her family plans to haul it to the Neihardt State Historic Site, a museum dedicated to the poet/author, in Bancroft, Nebraska.

‘No idea’ what will be found

Family members, she said, plan to proceed carefully in breaching the monument after picking it up on Oct. 23-24.

“We have no idea what we’re going to find,” said Hughes from her home in Indiana. “We want to be very careful. We don’t know where the objects are.”

She said it has not been determined exactly when the family will reveal what was inside the time capsule, if it is successfully found. Tentative plans are to do that at the spring conference of the Neihardt Foundation, which is scheduled April 27 at Wayne State College.

Displayed in Bancroft

The monument and its contents will be displayed at the Neihardt center in Bancroft, where the writer began his work on “The Cycle of the West,” a collection of five epic poems about the frontier which included the “Song of Hugh Glass.”

“It will be another attraction for our center. There’s a great story to go with it,” said Marianne Reynolds, the executive director of the Neihardt State Historic Site.

Unlocking the mystery of what’s inside the monument will be the culmination of a saga begun in June when a contingent from Wayne State College trekked to Lemmon in response to a challenge issued by Neihardt — to return to the monument site after 100 years, read some poetry,and “celebrate” as mountain men might have.

The original monument was erected by Neihardt and members of a now-defunct “Neihardt Club” at the college, which the author/poet attended and was known in 1923 as Nebraska Normal College. A local rancher and local judge also helped, as did the head of the South Dakota State Historical Society.

Wayne State contingent led by professor

Wayne State history professor Joseph Weixelman, who specialized in Western history, led a contingent of Wayne students.

But the contingent was denied permission to breach the monument, due to uncertainty about who exactly owned it, and who exactly could give permission to break into it.

The concrete monument was originally poured and created on private ranch land, but later, the property was obtained for federal reservoir, on which a park, managed by the State of South Dakota, now sits.

Just recently, the Bureau of Reclamation accepted the ownership claim of Hughes and other Neihardt desendants, and OK’d its removal to the historic site dedicated to Neihardt, the poet laureate in perpetuity of Nebraska.

Bureau spokeswoman Elizabeth Smith said that agency, in consultation with historians and to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act, determined that the monument “was not of significance as a federal historic resource.”

She said that since the monument was moved sometime after the reservoir was built, “it no longer retains historic integrity” as outlined in the federal act.

‘We still own the legend’

Allowing it to be displayed at the Neihardt Center, Smith added, will provide “a long-term public benefit.”

Astrid Blumer, the proprietor of the Summerville Store and Cafe, a local gathering spot near the reservoir and monument, said it will be a little sad to see Neihardt’s monument removed. But, she said, a larger, state historical marker, erected by the State of South Dakota in the 1970s, will remain.

“So the story will not be forgotten,” Blumer said. “And that’s what important.”

“It’s a great story. We still own the legend,” she added.

Lemmon recently held its annual Hugh Glass Rendezvous to commemorate the bicentennial of the mauling.

Hughes said that the family’s wish is to crack into the monument as a family, and not have a large group looking over their shoulders.

“If you’re resorting to hand chisels and brushes, you don’t want a herd of people around,” she said. “It could easily take two days to chip our way in.”

There’s some uncertainty about whether anything is left inside the time capsule. The monument was reportedly inundated by floodwaters at least three times as it sat alongside the federal reservoir.

Hughes said it was in total keeping with her grandfather’s personality to erect such a monument, then bury a time capsule inside for others to unearth in 100 years.

“He had a great sense of humor, and he could make anything into an adventure,” she said. “He was so much fun.”

Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

Tony Morton, a former South Park writer, is on a mission to "lampoon" right-wing activist group Moms for Liberty, which "has been at the forefront of a national movement to ban books (or even yearbooks) containing race, gender, LGBTQ themes, and sexual content," The Daily Beast's Kate Briquelet reports.

Briquelet writes "For Morton, what started as comic relief is morphing into a fundraising campaign, one that will create pages for each state. 'My plan is to disrupt this hate group for as long as possible with billboards, pamphlets, background information and other tactics,' Morton said. 'They have no interest in truly educating children and would rather actively prevent them from learning the true history of our country. I have a lot of support around the country so I'll continue updating my website about this group in each state so people are fully aware.'"

Morton's website, MomsForLiberties.com, features "swastikas encircling the 'parental rights' juggernaut's logo, a leadership page that boasts Hercules actor turned conservative pundit Kevin Sorbo as their minivan driver, and a listing of items the moms have 'banned for fun' including the board game Sorry. 'Those who are taught to say 'sorry' are weak,' the fake site for the far-right group declares. 'NEVER apologize for your actions because your actions are probably warranted if you're white.'"

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Briquelet notes that MomsForLiberties states, "We are an extremist organization that prides itself on making sure that freedom of speech and choice only applies to those who believe gays are demonic. Hitler actually wasn't that bad so Jews should stop overreacting, any transgender are considered trash and need to be disposed of, current teachers in this society should be under the control of fascists who know better, and that any teachers who disobey deserve to be handled by any means necessary and this includes physical control."

Morton's overall objective, Briquelet adds, is to "combat the growth of Moms for Liberty across the country, as concerned parents assemble groups of their own including Stop Moms For Liberty, Our Schools USA, Defense of Democracy, and Red Wine and Blue. In Pennsylvania, citizens launched an organization Grandmas For Love."

READ MORE: DeSantis appoints Moms for Liberty founder to Florida Ethics Commission: report

Briquelet's full article is available at this link (subscription required).

Ariel and Barbie have quite a bit in common: They’re both frozen in time, and they both yearn to live as humans do.

The fantastic seascapes and perfect dollhouses of “The Little Mermaid” and “Barbie” might appear whimsical. But I see these settings – and the characters who inhabit them – as figurations of death.

In my forthcoming book, I consider the relationship between mermaids and Barbie dolls. In the case of the 2023 films, I couldn’t help but think about how Ariel and Barbie make the same ironic choice: to leave the stasis of their deathlike existence for a human life – which ends in death.

These dead girls offer insights about living. Embracing death’s inevitability brings some freedom, as well as access to truths about time and the natural world.

‘I am dead yet I live’

Ariel and Barbie are not your typical dead girls – at least in the literary sense.

The dead girl trope goes back to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who drowns herself after being driven to madness by Hamlet’s erratic, abusive speech. But dead girls have long populated folktales about sleeping beauties and myths of goddesses traversing the underworld.

Today, the trope is often found in noirish mysteries. These narratives frequently prioritize the development of a male protagonist – a detective who grapples with his own mortality while solving a crime that regularly involves sexual violence.

David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” which first aired on ABC in 1990, wields this version of the trope. FBI agent Dale Cooper investigates the murder of Laura Palmer, a homecoming queen whose corpse is discovered wrapped in plastic. Though Laura Palmer has been victimized, she isn’t voiceless. She appears in flashbacks and has recorded her feelings and desires in diary entries.

In Showtime’s 2017 reboot, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the afterlife version of Laura tells Cooper, “I am dead yet I live.”

Ariel and Barbie are their films’ protagonists, and they don’t die via murder. But they nevertheless actualize Laura’s words: Choosing flesh over immortality is to live and die, too.

Barbie and Ariel choose life – even as they know it will ultimately end in death.

Jonathan Knowles/Stone via Getty Images

Dreaming death in fish tails and pink

“Do you guys ever think about death?” asks the character known as “Stereotypical Barbie,” played by Margot Robbie, a few scenes into the film. The irony is that Barbie is already dead, cheerfully doomed to repeat the same pink day, devoid of food, conflict and sex.

Barbie’s dreamworld is home to many iterations of its title character, including Mermaid Barbie. There are also a number of Kens. They are coupled, but they aren’t having sex. As Stereotypical Barbie declares, Barbies don’t have vaginas, and Kens don’t have penises.

Fish tails don’t typically feature vaginas either. The virginal Ariel is stuck in her fin, fathoms below.

Ariel and Barbie don’t get periods and can’t get pregnant. They’ll also never go through menopause.

In their films, the protagonists reject dollified existences and choose human life with its opportunities for sex and unavoidable death. Ariel leaves the ocean’s eternity for the prince’s land-world after she saves him. Barbie sacrifices physical perfection – her own and Ken’s – for the possibility of authentic intimacy and the spontaneity of an aging female body. The latter leads her to visit the gynecologist’s office at the film’s conclusion.

Hollywood films promise happily ever afters, but those weren’t the main draw for audiences of “The Little Mermaid” and “Barbie.”

I think that part of what drove theater attendance this summer was a subconscious attraction to the deathlike repetition of timeless dreamworlds, whether underwater or plastered in pink.

As dead girls, Ariel and Barbie are appealing vessels because, in them, time stops: You can’t be out of time when there is no time to begin with.

A water-bound mermaid and an ageless doll present a “timeout,” especially for girls and women pressured to achieve specific education and other life goals within certain time frames. Fish-tailed mermaids and Barbie dolls are free from ticking biological and career clocks – although they imagine or play at the things determined by those clocks, too. As a doll, Barbie gets to have any and all jobs, trading one for another whenever her player gets bored. She can be a doctor, an astronaut or even president of the United States.

Audiences might go to the movies to escape reality. Yet, Barbie and Ariel choose to enter reality, leaving their respective dreamworlds. Such outcomes make the films relevant to the summer of 2023: The dead girl can’t age, but her perpetual youth signals the future’s promises, even when there is no promise of a future.

Ariel chooses to leave behind her fish-tailed existence for life on Earth.

Robbie Goodall/Moment via Getty Images

‘This sad, vanishing world’

In her fish-tailed state, Ariel sings about wanting to know about fire and its causes, questions applicable to this summer’s reckoning with global warming. Humans have scorched the planet to fulfill a desire for, among other things, plastic – the very material that made Barbie possible.

The unprecedented heat in the summer of 2023 demands that everybody listen to another ticking clock, the one counting down to environmental ruin.

Ariel and Barbie choose to live in the world their audiences inhabit, even though the characters are fully aware that humans are destructive and cause suffering.

“The Little Mermaid” is explicit about how humans hurt the ecosystem, a critique made by Black mermaids in older folk tales and recent literature inspired by them. Ariel and Eric inevitably sail away, leaving her home under the sea and his coastal kingdom. The bittersweet ending suggests they, each equipped with knowledge of the other’s world, will carry insights about environmental harmony to other places.

“The Little Mermaid” and “Barbie,” I believe, reveal a truth found in many sacred stories. If you accept that you are dead already and that time is always passing away, you might gain the freedom to truly embrace the brief life you do have in what the Hindu deity Krishna described as “this sad, vanishing world.”

Or as W.B. Yeats wrote, “Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?”

Katie Kapurch, Associate Professor of English, Texas State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On Sept. 8, 1966, TV viewers were transfixed by the appearance on screen of a green-hued, pointy-eared alien called Spock. But beneath the makeup, actor Leonard Nimoy fretted that this would be the end of his promising career.

“How can I play a character without emotion?” he asked his boss, Gene Roddenberry. “I’m going to be on one note throughout the entire series.”

Nimoy thought he looked silly wearing the prosthetics that turned him into a Vulcan, at one point issuing an ultimatum: “It’s me or the ears.”

Nimoy’s misgivings were just one of many problems the writers, producers and cast faced during “Star Trek”‘s troubled journey to the screen. Culled from their recollections, this is the story of how “Star Trek”’s mission to explore strange new worlds was almost over before it began.

Seeds of inspiration

The ingredients of “Star Trek” had been slow-cooking in creator Gene Roddenberry’s brain for years. At first he wanted to write a show about a 19th-century blimp that journeyed from place to place, making contact with distant peoples.

‘Star Trek’ creator Gene Roddenberry in the early 1960s.

Mutual of New York (MONY)/Wikimedia Commons

Deciding instead to set the show in the future, Roddenberry drew upon his youthful immersion in science fiction magazines like Astounding Stories. Also important was his experience as a World War II bomber pilot, which caused him to ruminate on human nature: Would we ever outgrow our obsession with violence? And from C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, Roddenberry borrowed the idea of a courageous captain burdened by the duties of command.

With tiny Desilu Studios interested in making the show, Roddenberry pitched “Star Trek” to the networks. CBS passed after Roddenberry botched the pitch. But NBC bit and ordered a pilot episode, which was eventually titled “The Cage.”

NBC responds to the pilot

Watching “The Cage” now is a disorientating experience. In the captain’s chair is a sullen man called Pike, played by star Jeff Hunter. There is no sign of future series regulars McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, Checkov. Spock is there, but not quite the inscrutable Spock we would come to know. He shouts and, more than once, breaks into a wide grin.

The opening to ‘The Cage,’ ‘Star Trek’‘s first pilot episode.

The role of chilly logician and second in command is instead taken by “Number One,” a character played by actress Majel Barrett.

“Number One” wouldn’t make it past this trial run. In tests, some men and a surprisingly large number of women objected to her stridency, which was out of touch with the gender norms of the time. NBC doubted that Barrett could carry such a prominent role (and even thought Roddenberry had cast her because she was his mistress).

“The Cage” – a complicated story about alien mind-control – was an ambitious pilot. When Roddenberry presented it to NBC, the programming executives were blown away. But the sales and marketing department wasn’t convinced. Not enough action, they thought. It would be hard to promote. Pass.

“Star Trek,” it seemed, was dead.

Striking gold with Shatner

Roddenberry pleaded with NBC for another chance. He assured them he could make it action-driven, that it didn’t need to be high concept. A television miracle happened when NBC commissioned that rarest of things: a second pilot.

Roddenberry wanted Jeff Hunter to return as Captain Pike, and arranged to screen “The Cage” for him, reserving Desilu’s projection room for March 25, 1965. But Hunter was a no-show, sending his wife in his stead. “This is not the kind of show Jeff wants to do,” she told Roddenberry. “Jeff Hunter is a movie star.” Pike relinquished command.

William Shatner as Captain Kirk.

NBC Television/Wikimedia Commons

The ebullient Canadian actor William Shatner was hired to play the ship’s captain, now named James R. (later James T.) Kirk. For Leonard Nimoy, the casting of Shatner, a stage actor accustomed to playing scenes big and loud, was the key to unlocking Spock.

“Jeff [Hunter] was playing Captain Pike as a very thoughtful, kind of worried, kind of angst-ridden nice guy,” Nimoy later told Shatner, in an interview for Shatner’s book “Star Trek Memories.” “Pike didn’t have the clarity or precision of character against which you could measure yourself.”

Shatner’s clear-cut performance carved out space for Nimoy to shape his saturnine Spock. “For lack of a better metaphor, on a bright sunny day, the shadows get very clear.”

The second pilot, bolstered by the Shatner/Nimoy tandem, was a winner. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was a rollicking story about crew members irradiated in deep space and acquiring godlike powers. NBC liked it and commissioned a full season of “Star Trek.”

Righting the ship after a stormy start

Triumph quickly turned to panic for Roddenberry and for Desilu studios. Roddenberry needed scripts for the series – fast. He solicited stories from veteran TV writers, from sci-fi magazine and novel authors, and even from his office staff. His secretary Dorothy Fontana went on to become perhaps the most celebrated and prolific writer for the show.

But script problems would dog the young series. Veteran TV writers, unused to sci-fi, struggled to work within the universe Roddenberry had created. Sci-fi luminaries had boundless imaginations but little grasp of the practicalities of writing for television. Their scripts often called for casting and staging that would consume the budget for a feature film, let alone a fledgling TV series.

Roddenberry also wasn’t the best at managing the fragile egos of his writers. He took it upon himself to rewrite every script that made it on-screen, and his pages were often slow to arrive on set. Scripting was a constant source of tension and delay.

For Desilu, the elation of getting “Star Trek” picked up was dampened by the financial reality of producing the show. Network policy was to pay a set amount for each episode, calculated at something like 80 percent of the cost of production. For a small outfit like Desilu, deficit-financing both “Star Trek” and their other new show, “Mission Impossible,” required some accounting wizardry. Both were budgeted at US$200,000 per episode, with NBC kicking in $160,000. Any over-budget costs were born by the studio alone.

Tiny Desilu kept its head above water into the second season of “Star Trek” before finally drowning in debt. Studio owner and “I Love Lucy” star Lucille Ball was forced to sell to Paramount. Had she been able to hold on a few months more, she would have seen “Star Trek” picked up in 60 countries. Had she retained the rights long-term, Desilu would have benefited financially from endless reruns of the show’s 79 episodes. Network-friendly deals also ensured it would be many years before the cast would gain financial security from their iconic roles.

With the premiere date rapidly approaching, NBC chose an episode titled “The Man Trap” to be the first to air. It is, in truth, a run-of-the-mill “Star Trek” episode. The network liked that it featured a creature – a shape-shifting, salt-guzzling monster – with which the show’s heroes could do battle.

Although NBC’s marketing team had not initially seen the potential of “Star Trek,” by the time “The Man Trap” aired, they were able to trumpet the show in a glossy, multipage promotional brochure:

“As the Apollo moon shot moves steadily from the drawing board to the launching pad, STAR TREK takes TV viewers beyond our time and solar system to the unexplored interstellar deeps … the STAR TREK storylines will stimulate the imagination without bypassing the intellect. While speculating in a fascinating way about the future, the series also will have much to say that is meaningful to us today.”

A half-century later, we are on the cusp of a new CBS series set in the universe Roddenberry created. (CBS acquired the rights to “Star Trek” some years ago following a complicated series of corporate maneuverings.) Titled “Star Trek: Discovery” and scheduled for release in January 2017, the new series has no doubt had to contend with its own casting controversies, script problems and budget constraints.

The writers of the new show certainly know enough about Trek’s turbulent beginnings to temper expectations: “If you go in with open minds and open hearts, you may be rewarded,” they told a crowd eager for news at the Star Trek: Mission New York convention held over Labor Day weekend. “Whereas if you go with a set of impossible-to-realize expectations, which even you cannot specifically define, then we’re bound to fail.”

Stephen Benedict Dyson, Professor of Political Science, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With the death of Jimmy Buffett, the feathers of his loyal network of fans – affectionately known as Parrot Heads – collectively drooped.

Over the course of his career, Buffett earned their love by transforming himself into a kind of musical shaman who offered transport from the banalities of everyday life to the bounty of a never-never land of eternal sun, endless sandy beaches and bottomless boat drinks: Margaritaville.

As a young fan in the 1980s and 1990s, I marveled at the power of Buffett’s music to carry his audience to this fantastic utopia, seeing in it nothing more than a bit of harmless fun.

But as I matured and eventually became a professor of philosophy, I came to see Buffett’s music as less an expression of optimistic pleasure-seeking and more a reflection of a profoundly pessimistic assessment of the trials and tribulations of life. Now his work strikes me as a closer companion to the pessimistic conclusions of the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer than to the hedonism of leisure culture.

I see this hidden pessimism – which underlies most of Buffett’s music – as the key to its enduring power and allure.

An escape to Saint Somewhere

Half troubadour and half travel agent, Buffett has long been in the business of selling escape.

Escapism was not only the driving force and centerpiece of his 30 studio albums and the main plotline of his three novels. It was also the heart and soul of his billion-dollar business empire, which included two restaurant chains, a line of frozen dinners and a fleet of hotels and casinos.

These myriad products, as their varied taglines and marketing campaigns tout, promise to carry their consumer away from the monotony of suburbia to the galleys of some imaginary Caribbean Island – “Saint Somewhere,” as Buffett put it in his 1979 hit “Boat Drinks.”

Buffett readily admitted his commitment to supplying his fans with some relief from reality. In his 2004 appearance on “60 Minutes,” he gleefully professed, “I sell escapism.” When interviewed by Sports Illustrated in 2007 he said, “I’m just doing my part to add a little more escapism to an otherwise crazy world.”

The question remains, however: Why are people so consistently drawn to Buffett’s special brand of escapism? Or to escapism in general?

Answering this question uncovers the pessimistic heart of Buffett’s work.

Just a little relief

Buffett himself ventured an answer to this question in the afterword of his 2004 novel, “A Salty Piece of Land”: “… now, more than ever, we don’t just enjoy our escapism – we NEED it.”

For Buffett, escapism was not merely something fun, some fiddling flight of fancy that can be taken up or discarded at will.

It is something essential to our survival – something that, as he put it in his 1974 track “Trying to Reason with the Hurricane Season,” “cleans [us] out” so that it’s possible to move on with life.

To love the music of Jimmy Buffett, in other words, is not to love life. It is to pessimistically admit that life is difficult and that it needs to be escaped every once in a while just to be endured.

In Buffett’s music one catches a glimpse, however fleeting and even false, of the possibility that somewhere out there, somewhere beyond the persistent struggles and disappointment of life, there lies “somewhere warm,” as he puts it: some utopia where all our fears and anxieties might be wiped away and we can heal from whatever grieves us, whether the heartache of a breakup or the trauma of having “[blown] out a flip-flop,” or “stepped on a pop top.”

“When I look out at my audience,” Buffett noted in a 1998 interview with Time magazine, “I see people who are caring for aging parents and dealing with tough jobs, adolescent kids, and they look like they could use a little relief.”

And that’s what he endeavored to give them: a little relief from the woes and worries of their lives.

The role of good art and good music

Buffett’s first big hit, “Come Monday,” originated from his own need to escape a particularly dark period of life.

“I was deathly depressed and living in Howard Johnson’s in Marin County,” he confessed to David Letterman in 1983, “and this song kept me from killing myself.”

Fortunately, he explained to Letterman, “it hit, and I was able to pay my rent and get my dog out of the pound.” It was his capacity to respond to the overwhelming difficulties of life in this spirit of comedic melancholia that made Buffett’s music so special.

His songs acknowledge what everyone already knows to be true: that life can be excruciatingly painful and is often too much to bear, but that one must nevertheless find a way to move on. It is this pessimistic subtext to Buffett’s escapism that made it so achingly irresistible.

In this sense, Buffett’s music exemplifies what the 19th-century pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thought of as the ultimate power of art.

To Schopenhauer, good art grows from a recognition of the difficulties of life, and it endeavors to respond to them by offering a momentary respite from its otherwise relentless slings and arrows.

For these reasons, Schopenhauer saw in art – and in music, especially – a way of escaping reality, of being carried away into a fantasy land that everyone knows can never exist, but that is nonetheless comforting to contemplate.

The value of art, according to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic perspective, comes from how it creates an imaginary space where one can momentarily hide from reality to summon the courage to continue on – and perhaps to even learn from that hiatus how to laugh at the gallows that confront every living creature.

By this pessimistic measure, Buffett’s music was high art, for what it did so well was to help its listeners to escape the onslaught of modern life and teach them to laugh again – not in hedonistic ignorance of its difficulties, but in spite of them. What Buffett and all of his fans secretly know is that such escapist reveries are not merely an optional lark but a necessary tool for survival.

As Buffett himself put it in his 1977 hit “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”

Drew M. Dalton, Professor of Philosophy, Dominican University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.