Update 4/7/8: France has established contact with the pirates, the crew is safe, yet still on board, but more news soon.

 

H oly cow! Pirates on Friday seized a huge luxury yacht off the Somali coast. Le Ponant, a three masted schooner, can hold 64 passengers and is designed for cruising in some style.

 

According to the BBC, the French government has not had any contact with the captured vessel or its 30 crew members being held hostage. Le Ponant was apparently headed from the Seychelles to the Red Sea, most likely to a formerly French port in Djibouti.

 

The crazy part for me is that in Kuramathi in the Maldives, Maverick II, the yacht I was on, was anchored next to Le Ponant. I waved to crew members as they ferried guests to and from shopping on the island. I hope everything turns out well for them.

 

The BBC said that there have been 27 pirate attacks off the Somali coast in the last year. I'm thanking my lucky stars because Maverick II passed through Bab El Mandeb, the straights separating the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden, where Le Ponant was hijacked.

 

We stayed to the eastern, Yemeni side of the straight, because of the regular piracy on the Somali coastline. It seems like le Ponant's course took them up the western side of the Gulf. And it was a bit scary for us when tiny fishing boats would pass close to us, because we weren't sure if they were pirates.

 

Apparently, Maverick II wasn't big enough prey, because the Beeb said that pirates recently tried to board a 600-passenger vessel.

 

While we had plans to fend off a pirate attack - shotguns, rocket-powered line launchers, flares - it seems clear we wouldn't have been able to defend ourselves, if the pirates could board le Ponant, which was huge compared to Maverick II.

 

W hat can I say when Amy Goodman says it so much better than me? In her weekly column, this time called "Where Do We Go From Here?":

It has been 40 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. King was there to support striking sanitation workers, African-American men who endured horrible working conditions for poverty wages. While King’s staff was opposed to him going, as they were scrambling to organize King’s new initiative, the Poor People’s Campaign, King himself knew that the sanitation workers were at the front lines of fighting poverty.

I went to Memphis on Dr. King’s birthday. There I interviewed Taylor Rogers, one of the striking sanitation workers who marched with King. He told me:

"Back in 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers-we were tired of being mistreated, overworked and underpaid. We decided that we were just going to stand up and be men and do something about our condition. And that’s what we did. We stood up, and we told [Mayor] Henry Loeb in the city of Memphis that 'I am a man.'"

Link to the Rest of Amy Goodman's Column ...

 

M uch of what has crossed my desk today is of interest, a strange occurence, almost a defeat of Sturgeon's Law.

 

First, I got my quarterly newsletter from the great folks at the Hartford Catholic Worker. Sarah Karas' piece about Frances Crowe and Juanita Nelson offers inspiring words from writer Marianne Williamson:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us...As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Liberation, then should apply to our burgeoning prison populations. The Catholic Workers suggest that with crime and punishmentrestorative justice is an answer.

 

Next, a friend sent me an email about Brian Toolan, the former editor of the Hartford Courant. He is now the business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. When a head honcho like Toolan takes a lower job in the journalism hierarchy, one wonders: he either needs work (which is fine), or he wants to work and can't find anything to suit his prior experience (which is bad for journos).

 

Elsewhere, Heather over at Urban Compass went to Hartfprd City Hall this morning for the conference by watershed maven Mary Rickel Pelletier and Nancy Stoner of the National Resources Defense Council.

 

And Christine Stuart at CTNewskunie quizzed John Larson a question or two about Benedict Lieberman. Colin McEnroe goes to town on Lieberman's statement yesterday about the hyperpartisanship of the Democratic Party.

 

And if it is a home invasion, expect M. Jodi Rell to swoop in and make political gain of it. She said it is a "random act that has absolutely no rational reason behind it." Aside from the redundancy of "rational reason," McEnroe on his radio show made a fine point: can't the Governor even give the victims a few minutes to collect themselves after the tragedy?

More on Gov. Rell...

 

H ope springs eternal. You wait all winter long for this one day. Sometimes it snows. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes traffic on the George Washington Bridge makes you miss Joe DiMaggio hoisting the World Championship banner. Sometimes Mark McGwire goes yard into the black seats in centerfield on Rivera in the top of the 11th. And the Yankees can't muster anything in the bottom frame, and you go home sad.

 

Sometimes, the sun shines gracefully on the Bronx, and you watch the players line up on the infield for the first pitch, and you sing the National Anthem. Sometimes you sit on the third base line because your dad got box seats and took you out of school for the special day. And in the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees have the bases loaded against the Rangers, and pinch hitter Bobby Murcer hits a grand slam to the cheers of 57,000.

 

Yep. Some days it's heaven to win. When people ask why I am a Yankees fan, it's because of moments like that when I was eight years old. The brand imaging got me as a youth. Thurman. Reggie. Lou. Goose. Lousiana Lightning.

TO More story and photos...

 

O kay people. Gas is approaching $4 a gallon. Diesel is already over that benchmark. With the attack of a major pipeline in Iraq this week, prices are bound to rise.

 

There is no getting around the fact that the days of cheap oil are over. The answer: simple, beautiful, bicycle.

 

Come help the Central Connecticut Bicycle Alliance celebrate using the bicycle as transportation at our annual dinner:

 

When: Wednesday, April 9 at 6 P.M.

Where: The Adams Mill Restaurant 165 Adams, Manchester

How Much: $45 per head/ $40 if you bring a table of 8

Register online here.

What else: Silent Auction, Awards for Super Commuters, Volunteers and a whole lot more.

 

This is the third time CCBA will be having said feast, and we want you to come support bicycle and pedestrian advocacy in Central Connecticut.

 

A bunch of us from Hartford are going to ride out there, so if you want to join us in a bicycle caravan, let me know.

 

Link...

 

O bama's speech on race invites the nation to a conversation. Where we want to take the dialogue he initiates is entirely up to us as a people.

 

Two gentlemen in West Hartford's Shield Street Post Office yesterday afternoon seemed attuned to Obama's call, as they stood in the front foyer discussing politics and the Iraq war. Best part was that one man was black, and one was white.

 

I marveled that 100 years ago, that moment in this country was close to impossible, but now it is commonplace, and expected.

 

Me, I respond to Obama's offer by marrying the war on drugs to his comment that "when [white Americans are] told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time." It's time for us to confront a major facet of race relations in this country: our massive non-white prison population.

 

Other folks apparently want to keep the dialogue at the lowest common denominator: reptilian hatred. In my email inbox this week, I received a photo of Chelsea Clinton holding a t-shirt proclaiming "My mom is getting her ass kicked by a Negro." Photoshopped tears in Chesea's eyes betray her happy grin to a look of surprising agony as she displays the small t-shirt like she is trying it on.

 

The only word missing that sounds like it should be there is "Help!" The message feels crafted to appeal to kinship of skin color kind. I see two plausible interpretations, both of which arrive at the same conclusion: "If you are white, then you should be supporting Clinton."

Link...

 

C atch the Drive By Truckers in New Haven at Toad's Place Tuesday night. They played an epic two and a half hour show in Northampton Friday night. They led off with this anti-war gem, "That Man I Shot."

"That man I shot, I was in his homeland
I was there to help him but he didn’t want me there
I did not hate him, I still don’t hate him
He was trying to kill me and I had to take him down."

It's a long song, and the last verse provides the powerful kicker to reward us for listening.

"That man I shot did he have little ones
That he was so proud of that he won't see grow up?
Was walking down his street, maybe I was in his yard
Was trying to do good I just don’t understand."

As I danced in the crowd, surrounding by people trying to have a good time, I had to work past the buzz kill of security guards patrolling the general admission people. It made me think of Frantz Fanon's classic work on the psychology/psychopathology of colonization, The Wretched of the Earth.

"On another level we see the native's emotional sensibility exhausting itself in dances which are more or less ecstatic. This is why any study of the colonial world should take into consideration the phenomena of dance and of possession. The native's relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed and conjured away. The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits. At certain times on certain days, men and women come together at a given place, and there, under the solemn eye of the tribe, fling themselves into a seemingly unorganized pantomime, which is in reality extremely systematic, in which by various means-shakes of the head, beding of the spinal column, throwing of the whole body backward-may be deciphered as in an open book the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself. There are no limits-inside the circle...There are no limits-for in reality your purpose in coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity, to dissolve in a volcanic eruption. Symbolic killings, fantastic rides, imaginary mass murders-all must be brought out. The evil humors are undammed, and flow away with a din as of molten lava."

Sunday morning, a time for light, fun thoughts.

 

C leaning off my desk to study for labor law, I came across this gem, from the Feb. 21 minutes of the Hartford 2000 Monthly Meeting:

C. Discussion Items

 

1. Mayor's Visit: Folks were glad that Mayor Perez came to the January meeting, spent so much time with us, and had prepared himself to answer our questions. We believe that the relationship between the Mayor and H2K has improved over the past year. Folks were, however, disappointed that he never reached the Group B questions and folks felt he had been less than specific in some of his answers. It was also agreed, however, that we need to be more assertive in focusing his attention on specific questions and in identifying what, exactly, we are asking him to do.

That says it all, really.

 

B aseball season approaches, and the Red Sox players showed today what a good labor organization can do for workers.

 

The Sox are slated to square off against the Oakland in Japan to open the season, but after learning that the trainers, equipment staff and coaches would forfeit a $40,000 agreed-upon bonus, the players voted to boycott the games. They beat management, and the support staff will now get more for a game than I made in the last two years. This is probably the first and only time you will ever this from me, and it hurts my fingers to type the words, but hooray for the Bosox!

 

Elsewhere around the globe, Vice President Dick Cheney is in Oman today fishing on the Sultan of Oman's yacht. The fishing in that part of the world is tremendous. He's over there calming the Sultan's fears of war with Iran and maybe to partake in Oman's glorious health care system, rated 8th in the world according to the World Health Organization. A guy with a heart like Cheney could use some help.

 

Obama's speech yesterday has the pundit class in accolades - the Times editorial board called it a Profile in Courage, ranking it rhetorically with something from Kennedy or Lincoln. I admit that I had tears welling up when I got to the end of his speech and was reading about Ashley and the old man.

 

More on Obama and Israel link...

 

I f I were a judge, I would probably have to recuse myself from writing about J. Stan McCauley and his firing from Hartford Public Access Television. I may be too close to the situation to write about it fairly. I probably shouldn't be poking a stick into this hornet's nest, either.

 

But after I read Dan D'Ambrosio's one-source puff piece in the Hartford Advocate last week about McCauley's internet television station hpatv5.org, and then when I went to Hartford Public Access' website, accesstv.org, and saw that it linked directly to McCauley's website, I said to myself that something was amiss, and I needed to explore it more.

Link...