“You know something people, I’m not black but there’s a whole lotsa times I wish I could say I’m not white.” — Frank Zappa, 1966

BY JONATHAN VALANIA As I write this, Hillary Clinton is exit-polling ahead of Barack Obama in West Virginia by a fairly astonishing margin of 40 points. Which is why I am thinking the time has come to take the right to vote away from white people, at least until they come to their senses. Seriously, I just don’t think they can be trusted to exercise it responsibly anymore. I give you Exhibit A: The last eight years. In 2000, Bush-Cheney stole the election, got us attacked and then got us into two no-exit wars. Four years later, white people re-elected them. Is not the repetition of the same behavior over and over again with the expectation of a different outcome to very definition of insanity? (It is, I looked it up)

By this point you either think I am joking or are calling me ‘elitist.’ I assure you I am neither. Not that I can hear you, what with the deafening hiss of the latte machine on the dashboard of my Volvo and the NPR set for ‘deaf.’ But understand that I am saying this for the good of the country and, in fact, for the good of white people. Because when I read depressingly accurate stories like this one in the Financial Times, where a buncha slack-jawed yokels from Cow’s Ass, West Virginia, all lifelong registered Democrats, adamantly tell a British journalist that under no circumstances could they vote for Obama for president, and if it came to it, would vote for McCain because, well, nobody is dumb enough to come out and say it but THEY WOULD VOTE FOR MCCAIN JUST BECAUSE HE IS WHITE. Just like their daddy did, and his daddy did before him, and so on.

And what do they have to show for it: inter-generational poverty, pervasive ignorance, and a disproportionately high number of people living in mobile homes — in short, analog minds ill-equipped to thrive in the digital future. Broke, dumb and emphysemic is no way to go through life, son. As of this year, West Virginia has the lowest college graduation rate in the US, the second lowest median household income. And when they get one tiny sliver of a chance to change this situation, i.e. an election, what is their game plan? Voting for the white guy. Why? Because, to paraphrase Ed Rendell, some people in this state just aren’t ready to vote for a black man. That’s just childish, like saying ‘I don’t like broccoli.’ Grow the fuck up. And get a clue: the day poor, under-educated white and black people finally figure out that what truly divides us isn’t race but in fact class is the day the Republican party goes out of business.

Seriously, West Virginny coal-crackers voting for a Republican is like the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. Letting these people vote is like putting a loaded shotgun in the baby’s crib and hoping for the best. I don’t know about you, but I am against putting a loaded gun in the baby’s crib and hoping for the best. Having said all that, The Trailer Park Effect is only part of the problem with letting white people vote. Here are some other problem areas:

The Angry Male Voter
This voter is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, goddamnit. He votes in a blind rage, growling and spinning tornado-like in the voting booth like the Tasmanian Devil himself. What is he is so mad about? What ISN’T he mad about? The price of this, the cost of that, illegal immigrants this, homosexual weddings that. And so who does the Angry Voter pull the lever for? Someone who is the man he always wanted to be: A rich S.O.B. with a botoxed blonde trophy wife who will quietly, and with a smile, my friend, fuck over guys like the Angry Voter to give the very richest some much needed tax relief.

The Scared Voter
These include, but are not limited to, the so-called Security Moms. Just like a conservative is a liberal that’s been mugged, the Security Mom is a Soccer Mom that’s been 9/11-ed. Their vote is guided by a little Casper the Scaredy Cat Ghost voice inside that says: Islam’s weird and trying to kill me. They all voted for George Bush because he was the one that would keep them safe, because he was President when the 9/11 attacks happened and despite being given ample warning about the gravity of the threat…HEY, WAIT A MINUTE. Too late, the lever has already been pulled. Heh-heh, suckers.

The Greedhead Voter
These guys, with their power ties and their Comcast Towers, don’t so much vote in the election as they underwrite the results, to the tune of untold millions in campaign contributions, soft money and lobbying fees. Their motivation: Keep the game rigged for maximum profit, and maintain the steady migration of prosperity out of the hands of the middle class and into the arms of the highest tax brackets. A high tide can’t lift all boats when you have drilled large holes in the bottom of the middle class. Don’t believe me, read Screwed: Undeclared War On America’s Middle Class.

The Ralph Nader Voter
Like the racist hillbillies hard working Americans of West Virginny, the Ralph Nader voter is also like the turkey voting for Thanksgiving. They want change, they want progressive initiatives, greater corporate accountability, peace, prosperity and social justice for all, bless their bleeding tie-dyed hearts. And so they get on board any high-minded Cinderella third party candidacy that comes along promising all the above. These candidacies promise more symbolic value than any substantive electoral impact, so what’s the harm, right? Two words: Florida 2000. George W. Bush beat Al Gore by just 543 votes. The lesson learned (please God, I don’t ask for much but LET THIS LESSON BE LEARNED) is that while every vote may not be counted, every vote counts.

The Values Voter/The Flag Pin Voter
The God, Guts & Guns crowd. These are people who vote every four years solely to beat back the ever-encroaching homosexual menace. It’s a dirty job keepin’ the fags down — the nastier side of doing the Lord’s work — but somebody’s gotta do it. Many of these voters have serious doubts about Obama’s patriotism. You would think that jumping through the flaming hoops of the Dem primaries for 14 months despite almost daily death threats against him and his family just because he thinks he could make America a better place would mean more than 10 million pledges of allegiances, hand over your heart — but you would be wrong. No, that crap doesn’t matter. These voters always know which guy to vote for, he’s the one wearing the flag pin — that means he loves America more than you and me put together. As Sinclair Lewis so famously said, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” Enough said.

The Undecided Voter
Their vote is like throwing stones in a pond on a moonless night. You hear the splash but you don’t know where it went in. Anybody who tells a pollster on the eve of an election that they are still — STILL, after endless debates, 24-7 media coverage and non-stop dueling campaign ads on TV — undecided is either stupid or lying, and probably both. After being reminded that a LOT of people died to ensure their right to vote and the very LEAST you could do is make up your fucking mind, these people should be slapped across the forehead with a wet mackerel until they leave the polling place.

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RELATED: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Democratic presidential primary in West Virginia over Senator Barack Obama in voting fueled by strong turnout among the white, working-class voters who have spurned Mr. Obama in recent nominating contests. Mrs. Clinton appeared headed for a strong victory in the primary, with early returns showing her with a 2-to-1 margin. In recent days, even Mr. Obama, who has not campaigned heavily in the state, has all but conceded the contest to her. Given Mr. Obama’s leads in the popular vote and delegates, the West Virginia results are likely to have little practical effect on Mrs. Clinton’s chances at winning the nomination. The West Virginia electorate included 2 in 10 white voters who said race was an important factor in their vote and more than 8 in 10 of them backed Mrs. Clinton. Yet Mr. Obama continued far outpacing Mrs. Clinton in the battle for superdelegates — the party leaders who have a vote on the nomination — picking up four endorsements by midday. And in a sign of the diminished optimism in the Clinton camp, one of her staunchest loyalists, James Carville, said that Mr. Obama would probably be the Democratic nominee. MORE

HUFFINGTON POST: Indiana Rep. Joe Donnelly endorsed Obama this morning, moving Barack’s gap to the nomination 149 delegates. The press release is below. UPDATE: New Orlean Mayor Ray Nagin, another superdelegate, has also endorsed Obama (statement below). Also, the Washington Post reports that one of Clinton’s pledged delegates from Maryland has announced that he will support Obama at the convention. UPDATE: Former DNC Chair (and Colorado governor) Roy Romer makes three. UPDATE: Anita Bonds, the chairwoman of D.C.’s Democratic party came out, rather unexpectedly, for Obama late last night. MORE

FIREDOGLAKE: MSNBC is predicting a 2 to 1 split — meaning Clinton would get 19-ish delegates and Obama would get 9-ish, give or take while we wait for real, honest-to-god results that aren’t just based on exit polls. And Chuck Todd says that Obama only has to get 23 percent in either KY or OR to clinch the delegate requirement — he says that Clinton would have to pull off a close to 91% victory margin in every remaining state in order to win, which is most likely impossible. MORE

POLITICO: Democrats picked up a northern Mississippi House seat in one of the most conservative-minded districts in the country Tuesday night — an upset that will reverberate darkly through a House Republican caucus already reeling from losses in special elections in Illinois and Louisiana. With all precincts reporting, the Democratic nominee, Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers, defeated Republican Greg Davis, 54 to 46 percent. The results amount to a rebuke of the Republican strategy of trying nationalize the race by tying Childers to Sen. Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Obama held low approval ratings in the district, but the nearly $2 million that GOP groups poured into northern Mississippi failed to make the race a referendum on the national political landscape. Republicans dispatched a lineup of heavy hitters in the campaign’s final week, including a pre-election stop Monday by Vice President Dick Cheney. President Bush, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and First Lady Laura Bush recorded automated calls urging voters to support Davis. A GOP House leadership aide told Politico last week that “if we don’t win in Mississippi, I think you are going to see a lot of people running around here looking for windows to jump out of.” The $1.27 million that the NRCC spent in the heavily Republican district amounted to nearly 20 percent of the committee’s entire cash-on-hand. The committee has now spent more than $3 million to defend three conservative House seats, losing all three of them, and it is ill-equipped financially to compete fully in an ever-widening playing field for November. MORE

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN]

BY JEFF DEENEY Possibly the largest and most elaborate memorial we’ve seen so far is the mountainous pile of stuffed animals, votive candles and other assorted personal objects stacked up on the corner of American Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. There’s a reason for its enormity: On Jan. 13, three young Latin kids from nearby neighborhoods were killed here in an auto accident that rocked the community and spurred an outpouring of sympathy for the victims’ families. The accident was a hit-and-run — the other vehicle’s driver, Hanifasim Saed Presley, fled the scene on foot but was caught not long after and charged with vehicular homicide.

The centerpiece of this memorial is the actual bumper of the car that Wilfredo Treveno, 18, Esteban Santiago, 19, and Louis Figueroa, 17, — aka Fredo, Macho and Lou — were riding in the night they died. The bumper is anchored to a lamppost and acts as something of a buttress for the rest of the structure. Other objects of remembrance and mourning are nestled inside it, as if under an amphitheater’s protective dome. The memorial is growing old at this point, nearly four months after carnage, and its weather wear shows. The fur on the stuffed animals has become matted, their colors washing out. Balloons have deflated, some of the votives have been knocked over and broken on the sidewalk, and junk food wrappers and other pieces of garbage have blown into the midst of the memorial and stuck there like flotsam washed up on a beach.

Like other Latin memorials we’ve documented, the presence of Catholic iconography is strong here in the form of votive candles bearing the images of Saint Clara and Saint Anthony; the former is the patron saint of good weather, perhaps placed here as a hope that the memorial will endure, and the latter is the patron of the poor. Also, there are photographs of the boys in various life-stages taped to surrounding lampposts. One shows a little boy’s face circled in red marker in a Little League baseball photo. The team is dressed in orange and black and there’s a sign propped in front of them that reads, “Norris Square baseball, Orioles, 2001.”

A MySpace search turns up an elaborate memorial page replete with a flashy, custom graphic design and a photo album with nearly 100 pictures of the victims. These were the good kids some readers might have been hoping to find memorialized in this series — kids without criminal histories, kids who don’t flash gang signs or money rolls, kids that don’t advertise their thug lifestyle by posting pictures of their illegal handgun collections on the Internet. In some pictures, the boys pose tough but you can tell it’s a charade. They called their crew “No Limit,” but you can tell it’s just a name for a group of school friends, not an organized drug set. The boys’ eyes are clear and bright, their smiles broad. The party pictures posted here are positively wholesome, not nasty; no red eyes peering through blunt smoke haze, no half -naked young women or proudly brandished liquor bottles here. These kids knew how to have genuine fun — they weren’t ashamed to goof around and were self-confident enough to risk looking corny, making silly faces for the camera.

Fredo was a part of the celebrated North Philly dance troupe Groupo Fuego, and the memorial page has pictures of him in full regalia on Market Street, dancing with a pretty, elaborately costumed young woman as a part of a Puerto Rican pride parade.

Not surprisingly, the page’s comment section has been busy with statements of grief, remembrance and adulation for the boys. One of the comments links to a homemade music video made by two neighborhood boys named LOS and JR. The video has footage of a young Latin boy rapping at the memorial site on American Street, the boys’ gravesites and inside the church where their funerals were held. In each shot, he’s surrounded by a large pack of friends and family all wearing airbrushed hoodies and t-shirts bearing warm messages for the deceased, hanging their heads ceremoniously. The raps are a little stilted, lacking a natural’s smooth flow, the video certainly isn’t Hollywood quality and when the boy sings he tends to come in off key, but it’s a stirring devotional display based on homespun technological ingenuity.

It’s hard to determine why, exactly, Presley fled the scene on foot after the accident. Newspaper accounts said Presley was driving at a high speed but didn’t mention DUI charges, nor do any DUI charges appear in the court system. The only other charge appearing in court records for Presley prior to the accident is a disorderly conduct from December, 2006. A bench warrant was issued for Presley in October of last year, presumably after he failed to complete the 25 hours of community service he was assigned by the court for pleading no contest to the charge. The bench warrant was withdrawn later the same month, but there’s a chance that Presley didn’t know this. Maybe he fled on the night of the accident not because he knew the extent of the damage he caused but because he thought he was already wanted by the law.

The details are too scant to draw firm conclusions, but Presley will likely spend a good chunk of the rest of his life behind bars both for causing the accident the killed three bright, beloved young kids and for fleeing it, possibly as a partial result of not doing a paltry 25 hours of community service for a misdemeanor charge. It’s the kind of bad, patently dumb decision that has to be hard to share a jail cell with.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeff Deeney is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in PW, City Paper and the Inquirer. He focuses on issues of urban poverty and drug culture. He is currently working on a book about life in the crossfire of poverty, drugs, guns, and the bureaucracies designed to remedy them, all of which informed his experiences as social workers in some of the city’s most dire and depleted neighborhoods.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Now playing on Phawker Radio! Why? Because we love you, ya big dummy!

BY ED KING ROCK EXPERT How can I review Welsh import Duffy’s Rockferry album without getting caught up in the UK retro-pop marketing race? “If you like the sound of Amy Winehouse but are put off by the extraneous skank angle, try Duffy!” That works for me. Beside, there’s no topping Winehouse’s take on Lenny Bruce’s “Girl Singing” bit, and the cost of producing bubblegum with Sugar in the Raw is prohibitive.

Duffy’s the cute, ever-so-slightly sassy good girl of swingin’ ’60s culture. She’s at her dinner club best on the title track and the late-’70s-style take on ‘60 Motown, “Warwick Avenue”. You remember Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’,” don’t you? The only difference is that Duffy is waxing nostalgic over an era she never sniffed from the tip of a rubber nipple let alone lived. At other times, such as on “Sleeping Stone” and “Delayed Devotion”, the late-’70s smooth soul production familiar to older listeners of Philadelphia’s WDAS betrays the Brigitte Bardot hairdo and all-around To Sir With Love packaging. There’s not a thing wrong with this sound when done well, but I note this as a warning to any middle-aged rock nerds hoping to get even a knuckle’s worth of the depth to a great Dusty Springfield performance.

The 6/8 slow burn of “Syrup & Honey” adds a needed dash of gravitas to Rockferry, but when Duffy slips into a kewpie doll kazoo tone on the chorus, singing “Baby, baby, baby,” she compares unfavorably to the girl power once displayed by Stiff Records’ teen would-be sensation Rachel Sweet, on her cover of “B-A-B-Y”. “Hanging On Too Long”, with it’s “Heard it Through the Grapevine” string arrangements and Duffy’s open-hearted performance, confirms the singer’s true place in pop: she’s the latest offering in the UK’s endless supply of “up with soul” singers, from Lisa Stansfield to Lulu. She’s doing her part from across the Atlantic to preserve a bit of the innocence lost from our own musical tradition. By the time Rockferry hits on the savvy “Rehab” response “Mercy”, with its chorus of Brit-pop reaffirming “yeah, yeah, yeah”, Happy Hour is in full swing. Tomorrow’s another day at the office.

DUFFY: Mercy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ed King likes a lot of things, but mostly he likes to be left alone. Ed has kicked around the outer orbits of the periphery of local scene for some time. He was there when Tuxedomoon played Revival. Ed likes all things great and some things good. Anymore, what falls short of those simple criteria gets harder to bear. He appreciates you respecting his privacy at time like this.

PHILADELPHIA - EarthLink Inc. is pulling the plug on its troubled wireless high-speed Internet network in Philadelphia, once touted as a model for how big cities should deploy Wi-Fi. The Atlanta-based Internet service provider said Tuesday that it could not find a buyer for the $17 million network and that talks to give it to either the city or a nonprofit organization had failed. City officials have said it would cost taxpayers millions each year to operate the network.

“It’s been an unfortunate situation,” Chief Executive Officer Rolla Huff told The Associated Press. “It was a great idea a few years ago, … but it’s an idea that simply didn’t make it.” EarthLink, which will give current customers until June 12 to switch to another provider, said it even offered to donate the Wi-Fi equipment to someone and give them an additional $1 million. Meanwhile, EarthLink filed a federal suit Tuesday that seeks to remove its Wi-Fi equipment from city street lights and cap its potential liability at $1 million.

Four years ago, Philadelphia officials announced the EarthLink deal with great fanfare that attracted attention from cities in the United States and around the world. But the technology itself proved to be difficult to deploy and, at times, unreliable. EarthLink later admitted that its Wi-Fi business model had not panned out. MORE

ONE SENTENCE EDITORIAL: Thank You, iMayor! 

Philly sports fans know plenty about anguished tears, but on last night’s 6 p.m. Action News broadcast, Gary Papa shed tough guy tears while reading a report about Eagles coach Andy Reid visiting sick kids at CHoP. So verklempt was ol’ Gary — a cancer survivor and father of two — that he actually couldn’t go on and had to throw it back to Jim Gardner, who made it all better with a joke about how Papa’s breakdown would surely be on YouTube within minutes. Sure enough, DMac comes through with the clip….The Francis Albert Sinatra commemorative 42-cent stamp goes on sale today, in time for the 10th anniversary of The Chairman’s death. Right now, the stamps are only available in Hoboken (Frank’s hometown), NYC and Vegas (baby), but you can order them at USPS.gov as well. Too bad they’ll probably be obsolete in a month or two when they raise the postal rates again. What, Mr. Sinatra doesn’t rate a Forever Stamp?…Courtesy of yesterday’s HuffPo, a vintage clip of Bill O’Reilly — sporting what looks to be a dead wombat on his head but upon closer inspection is actually his real hair — from the days when he was building his journalistic credentials on “Inside Edition.” Apparently not understanding what it means to have a musician “play you out,” Bill starts waving the F-bomb like it was a miniature version of Old Glory. God bless America! – Amy Z. Quinn

NEW YORK TIMES: Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82. A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked. Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”

Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.” MORE

[via the current issue of Vanity Fair]

In 1968, with the country divided over the war in Vietnam, the Democratic Party struggled to rally behind a candidate. Amid this political turbulence, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, guided by a set of principles and his burning opposition to the war, entered the race. The party establishment reacted with dismay, but his candidacy, coming just five years after the assassination of his brother John F. Kennedy, filled the electorate with hope—a hope that met a violent end just a few months later.

By Thurston Clark

Two months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy traveled to Asia on an itinerary that had originally been planned for J.F.K. During the trip, he visited a girls’ school in the Philippines where the students sang a song they had composed to honor his brother. As he drove away with CBS cameraman Walter Dombrow, he clenched his hands so tightly that they turned white, and tears rolled down his cheeks. He shook his head, signaling that Dombrow should remain silent. Finally he said in a choked voice, “They would have loved my brother.” Dombrow put his arm around him and said, “Bob, you’re going to have to carry on for him.” Kennedy stared straight ahead for half a minute before turning to Dombrow and nodding. It was then, Dombrow said, that he knew Bobby would run for president and realized how much he loved him.

A deep, black grief gripped Robert Kennedy in the months following his brother’s assassination. He lost weight, fell into melancholy silences, wore his brother’s clothes, smoked the cigars his brother had liked, and imitated his mannerisms. Eventually his grief went underground, but it sometimes erupted in geysers of tears, as had happened in the Philippines. He wept after seeing a photograph of his late brother in the office of a former aide, wept when asked to comment on the Warren Commission Report, and wept after eulogizing J.F.K. at the 1964 Democratic convention with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

Kennedy was still mourning his brother and endeavoring to live for him when he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York in the autumn of 1964, telling a friend that he wanted to ensure that the hopes J.F.K. had kindled around the world would not die, and saying in his victory statement that he had won “an overwhelming mandate to continue the policies” of President Kennedy. And at first it appeared that his 1968 presidential campaign—challenging his brother’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic Party’s nomination—would be another homage to J.F.K. Bobby announced his candidacy on March 16 in the caucus room of the Old Senate Office Building, the room that his brother had used for the same purpose. He stood in the same spot and began with the same sentence: “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.” After saying that he was running to “close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old,” he concluded with a passage that made him sound like his brother, perhaps because it had been contributed in part by Ted Sorensen, who had been his brother’s speechwriter: “I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President. But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election. At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to the moral leadership of this planet.”

Some advisers had urged him to excise this passage from his speech, arguing that it represented the kind of New Frontier hubris that had ensnared America in the Vietnam War, which Kennedy now fervently opposed. Washington Post reporter David Broder would disparage the speech’s reliance on “the nostalgic rhetoric of the earlier Kennedy era.” But Bobby’s “right to the moral leadership of this planet” line turned out to be closer to the truth than even he, or Ted Sorensen, realized at the time. At stake was not so much Americans’ moral leadership as their belief that they were worthy of such leadership.

In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans’ belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people. Americans saw news footage from South Vietnam, such as the 1965 film of U.S. Marines setting fire to thatched huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters and flamethrowers, and realized that they were capable of committing atrocities once considered the province of their enemies. They saw federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities and asked themselves how this could be happening in their City upon a Hill.

Nevertheless, on the day that Kennedy announced his candidacy, it was by no means obvious that 1968 would become a watershed year. Most of the year’s momentous events would occur after Kennedy’s March 16 announcement, with many of the most shocking ones unfolding during his campaign. Had you told anyone in the Senate caucus room that morning that during the next 82 days President Johnson would decline to seek a second term, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy would both be assassinated, and America would suffer its worst racial disturbances since the Civil War, they might have believed that one or two of those things might happen, but not all, nor in such quick succession.

After concluding his announcement, Kennedy took questions ranging from skeptical to hostile. But as he left the Capitol, supporters screaming his name grabbed at his clothes and leapt in the air to see him, much as his brother’s supporters had in 1960. Anyone witnessing this and hearing the New Frontier echoes in his announcement would have been justified in assuming that his campaign would indeed be an extended tribute to his brother. Instead, March 16 would be the end rather than the beginning of such a tribute, and during the next three months he would run on issues his brother had seldom raised and in a manner, at times, his brother would have found undignified.

Richard Nixon, who had lost the presidency to J.F.K. in 1960, watched Kennedy’s announcement from a hotel room in Portland, Oregon. John Ehrlichman, one of several aides in the room with Nixon, later wrote, “When it was over and the hotel-room TV was turned off, Nixon sat and looked at the blank screen for a long time, saying nothing. Finally, he shook his head slowly. ‘We’ve just seen some very terrible forces unleashed,’ he said. ‘Something bad is going to come of this.’ He pointed at the screen, ‘God knows where this is going to lead.’ ” MORE

Text excerpted from The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, by Thurston Clarke, to be published this month by Henry Holt and Company, L.L.C.; © 2008 by the author.

Photographs excerpted from A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties; photographs and text by Bill Eppridge; introduction by Pete Hamill; to be published this month by Abrams; © 2008 by Bill Eppridge.

BY JEFF DEENEY Back at the beginning of April I spent an afternoon hanging out with Saddiq Abdul Jabbar and Tunji Turner from the Germantown Masjid which, according to the Daily News, has become embroiled in an international controversy over its decision to not provide a burial service for a Muslim man killed during the botched bank robbery that left police officer Stephen Liczbinski dead. The City Paper was doing a three part series called “Politics Lost” focusing on what impact the impending Pennsylvania primary election might be having on some of the more isolated neighborhoods in the city. They pitched me with filling the third and final slot and left me with the decision about which neighborhood to cover. I immediately thought about one of the city’s many Masjids, and more specifically a Masjid whose constituents were primarily black American converts to Islam. This lead me to East Germantown, and to Abdul Jabbar and Tunji Turner.

I understood the mixed reputation on the streets about Philadelphia’s black Muslims going into the story; I’ve heard the allegations that their Masjids encourage polygamy, that domestic violence is rampant in their community, that the Masjids are little more than fronts for organized crime cartels. But at the same time I’d seen the positive impacts that groups like the Germantown Masjid have brought to their surrounding communities; business revitalization, educational services, moral guidance to the spiritually lost. There’s a rich and conflicted story unfolding in the city’s black Muslim community, and the Liczbinski tragedy and its aftermath embodies it in a number of ways. It’s a story of virtue versus violence, righteousness versus thuggery, legitimate hard work versus illegal fast money, and separation based on racial hate versus integration based on participation in a larger global religious community. It’s also a story that has primarily transpired behind closed doors in a very secretive world, leading to allegations and hearsay on the streets that only further confuse the story. In writing the article on the primary election for the City Paper, I was hoping to use politics as a wedge to pry the door open a little and shine some light on the men behind the beards that spill out onto Germantown Avenue in droves every afternoon at prayer call.

I spent a decent amount of time in East Germantown as a social worker, and had a client at one point who was a member of the Germantown Masjid. I had been in the Islamic bookstore not far from the Masjid previous to writing the article, though only in the company of other black community members, and even then my presence didn’t feel entirely welcome. I wasn’t surprised at the chilly, suspicious reception I described in the story’s opening paragraph; the black Muslim community is a historically separatist entity that really sees no use for or benefit from contact with the white world. I was initially snubbed by the man at the counter but persisted, telling him about the work I had done in the community, that I had met members of the Masjid previously. He relented and gave me Saddiq Abdul Jabbar’s number. When I contacted Abdul Jabbar I was surprised by the difference in tone that he took with respect to community relations.

Abdul Jabbar was quick to highlight some of the changes at work within his community. Separatism was the old way, he explained, and while some members still feel that black Muslims shouldn’t vote in elections, shouldn’t participate in organized community development plans working in tandem with city council members, etc., the leadership of the Germantown Masjid had made a clear decision to start working with the community at large, if only under certain circumstances. Part of this decision was forced by the logistics of a growing congregation; Philadelphia’s black Muslim community is substantial (he estimated 6,500 members) and growing quickly. The Germantown Masjid had far outgrown its capacity and needed a new space. Completing a project of that size and scale, purchasing and renovating an entire warehouse, required some political savvy. It necessitated relationships with people outside the Muslim community. It seemed to me that Abdul Jabbar was saying that his community had weighed the pros and cons of integrations versus separation and decided that integrating had become the better deal.

But, only when the laws of Islam and the powers of the machinery of the larger world were aligned, Abdul Jabbar repeatedly stressed, would the group consider working within the American social mainstream. Otherwise, they would simply abstain from the political process as they had for many years. He didn’t specify what kind of political situations that violate Islamic law would cause the group to abstain from interaction with the larger community. Regardless, integration does requires some moderation in rhetoric and a change in historical policies. Like, for example, meeting with a white writer to talk about how the group makes political decisions. It seemed like the group was taking a big step into the unknown when Turner and Abdul Jabbar met with me that afternoon. It’s a story that might not have made it to print ten years ago.

It’s important to note that during time I spent with Abdul Jabbar talking on the phone and during the tour of East Germantown that followed I never felt that I was in the presence of a man who was anything other than straightforward, sincere and pretty progressive considering the history of the black Muslim movement. He was a serious man who enjoyed discussing the ins-and-outs of Islamic law that guides his organization’s decisions. But he was also a warm and friendly man who laughed a lot and made easy conversations. The same went for his friend Tunji; they both struck me as interesting and intelligent guys who were committed to the strengthening of their community. I wrote the article as such, trying to convey the sense of willingness to build bridges coupled with a distinct moral sternness that I heard in their voices.

The City Paper loved the story but wanted to vet the sources a bit before proceeding. We don’t know much about these guys, the paper said, let’s make sure they’re not embroiled in anything. Let’s make sure there’s no corruption history, no pending indictments, no sweetheart arrangements with suspect council persons. So we vetted the sources as best we could and the Masjid came back clean as a whistle, at least as far as corruption and shady involvement in city politics went. Beyond this, there was very little in the press about the group, at all.

Less than two months later the group is under a media microscope for refusing to bury a cop killer, a fact that they can’t be happy about. While they were willing to discuss some of the group’s policy decision making processes with me, they weren’t very comfortable doing it. At various points during the time I spent with Abdul Jabbar he seemed to falter in his conviction that talking to the press was the right idea. He asked about my credentials. He wanted to know how the article was going to be written, what information it would include. He kept returning to the central suspicion of the white establishment that black Muslims have carried with them for decades now, that his organization is trying to shed, but clearly hasn’t yet shed entirely.

The group’s press statements regarding the refusal to bury Howard Cain so far are in line with what I heard from them previously. Everything in the Germantown Masjid goes back to Islamic law; the group does not make decisions based on opinion or emotion. Policy questions get kicked up to the group’s Imam, who reviews the problem in light of Koranic teaching and his decision filters down to the rest of theMasjid’s constituents through emissaries like Abdul Jabbar and Turner. This is how the process was described to me in early April.

The Germantown Masjid has repeatedly stated that the refusal to bury Cain wasn’t a political decision, but was based on Cain’s violation of Islamic laws. Considering that the Masjid’s decision process described in news coverage of the controversy follows exactly the model the group laid out for me two months before Cain killed a cop, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think it’s a political decision aimed at quelling the controversy the would surely follow if the group had buried Cain. But I could see how someone would come to that decision. Remember, this is a group in the late stages of completing a major urban development project that still needs the city’s cooperation in order to see their plans for East Germantown come to fruition.

Many, especially in law enforcement, have pointed out that Tariq El Shabazz, the Masjid’s managing director, is a prominent and very successful defense attorney who has made a lucrative living by defending some of the most feared and reprehensible criminals in the city. It’s not necessarily an empty claim, but it’s also an allegation that doesn’t really go anywhere. There’s an inference here of organized criminal activity, that El Shabazz is probably connected to his clients’ criminal contacts in the community somehow, that maybe he benefits from these street level connections. The news coverage of the story has repeatedly mentioned that many black Muslims convert to the religion in prison, adding to the sinister air of yet-undiscovered complicity in organized crime. Sure, that all seems to make sense that a prominent Muslim defense attorney would come up dirty; it’s a logical story with a logical arc. It’s almost like something you would see on Law and Order. But the fact is that El Shabazz , as far as I know, isn’t under suspicion of any illegal activity, and real life isn’t television. And I’m sure it’s not from lack of trying to find skeletons in El Shabazz’s closets. I would venture to guess that a prominent member of a black Muslim group who is a successful defense attorney probably has a pretty thick file in a drawer somewhere at the FBI. I think those suspicious of El Shabazz should either produce something substantial or recognize the fact that the American judicial system allows even the most heinous criminals legal representation. Shabazz may have a dirty job, but it’s a dirty job that someone’s got to do.

Personally, I think the Germantown Masjid and the larger black Muslim community should be lauded for both their decision not to bury a cop killer and their newfound willingness to discuss policies with the mainstream media. These groups have come to understand that cooperation with the community at large furthers their ability to positively impact their communities. In doing so, walls of social isolation that used to surround these communities have begun to come down. As social isolation has ebbed, these groups have moderated their messages. These groups are still staunchly socially conservative, and still have a long way to go before they could be considered mainstream. Their gender segregation policies are retrograde and out of place in America (the pizza shop off Germantown Avenue that serves the Masjid population has separate booths with curtains for women and children) and I can’t even imagine what gets said in private within Philadelphia’s Masjids about homosexuality. But the black Muslim community is taking baby steps towards the mainstream on a suddenly large and brightly lit stage in the wake of Stephen Liczbinski’s murder. I think the groups are moving in the right direction, and deserve applause for doing so.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeff Deeney is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in PW, City Paper and the Inquirer. He focuses on issues of urban poverty and drug culture. He is currently working on a book about life in the crossfire of poverty, drugs, guns, and the bureaucracies designed to remedy them, all of which informed his experiences as social workers in some of the city’s most dire and depleted neighborhoods.

The Valley of the Shadow is an ongoing series documenting how those in Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods publicly mourn and commemorate their dead. Jeff Deeney, the man who brought you Today I Saw, knows these neighborhoods well from his days as a social worker. The hope is to shine a light on the city’s untouchables, brighten the darkest corners and gather-and-share ultra-vivid and all-too-real stories of loss, grief and remembrance. Look for it every Tuesday on Phawker! Why? Because we love you!

[Photos via STUCK IN CUSTOMS]

NEW YORK TIMES: BEIJING — A powerful earthquake struck a mountainous region of western China on Monday, reportedly killing more than 8,700 people, including as many as 5,000 people in a single county, and trapping more than 900 students beneath a collapsed high school as tremors shook buildings throughout China and were felt as far away as Thailand and Vietnam, according to interviews and reports in China’s state media. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit in Sichuan Province on Monday afternoon, and the death toll steadily increased throughout the evening, raising concerns that the number could go far higher. By 9 p.m. local time, the state news agency Xinhua quoted provincial disaster relief officials as saying that 3,000 to 5,000 people were feared dead in Beichuan County. Roughly 80 percent of the buildings in the county were reportedly destroyed. An hour later, it reported 7,651 dead in Sichuan Province alone. MORE

UPDATE: DUJIANGYAN, China — The children who were considered fortunate escaped with a broken bone or a severed limb. The others, hundreds of them, were carried out to be buried, and their remaining classmates lay crushed beneath the rubble of the schoolhouse. “There’s no hope for them,” said Lu Zhiqing, 58, as she watched uniformed rescue workers trudge through mud and rain toward the mound of bricks and concrete that had once been a school. “There’s no way anyone’s still alive in there.” Little remained of the original structure of the school. No standing beams, no fragments of walls. The rubble lay low against the wet earth. Dozens of people gathered around in the schoolyard, clawing at the debris, kicking it, screaming at it. Soldiers kept others from entering. A man and woman walked away from the rubble together. He sheltered her under an umbrella as she wailed, “My child is dead! Dead!”

As dawn crept across this shattered town on Tuesday, it illuminated rows and rows of apartment blocks collapsed into piles, bodies wedged among the debris, homeless families and their neighbors clustered on the roadside, shielding themselves from the downpour with plastic tarps. The earthquake originated here in the lush farm fields and river valleys of Sichuan Province, killing almost 10,000 people and trapping thousands more. One of the most jarring tragedies of the disaster was the school collapse in a suburb of Dujiangyan. At least several hundred children were killed, perhaps as many as 900. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew here on Monday to survey the destruction, but he was powerless to ease the suffering of the survivors. MORE
NPR: Liveblogging The Quake

CORRECTION: A few weeks back we posted what were purported to be never-before-seen photos of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Since then, it has been revealed that these photos are actually of the The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 [pictured above]. Our bad. To wit:

“The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University contains ten photographs purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Mr. Capp was assigned to the occupation forces outside Hiroshima after World War II. According to to Mr. Capp’s oral history (available along with the photographs in the Robert L. Capp collection), he found these photos among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside of Hiroshima. Since making these photographs publicly available, I have received reliable proof that at least two of these photos are actually of the 1923 Kanto earthquake. While I cannot speak for the entire collection, this evidence raises doubts about all of the photos and raises the strong possibility that the identification provided by the Hoover Archives is incorrect. I take full responsibility for my own failure to take additional steps to verify that the original archival designation was correct. I have removed the photographs until and unless their source can be verified by further research.” – Sean L. Malloy, Author of Atomic Tragedy MORE