Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Philosophy - 1997 - 176 pages Page 36 - so totally .ANTIPIDAL* to my ears and habits of thought, that in my first impulse of rage on finding them, I wrote on the margin, "la niaiserie religieuse par excellence! "...
A Nietzsche Reader by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - 1978 - 288 pages Page 63 - ... be no more than foreground valuations, a certain species of niaiserie which may be necessary precisely for the preservation of beings such as us. ...
BGE 3
Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Philosophy - 2004 - 134 pages Page 109 - ... he had had such a hallucination, would be a genuine niaiserie on the part of a psychologist: Paul willed the end, consequently he willed also the means. ...
Culture | 25.03.2008
Coal Mining Venture May Force Removal of Nietzsche's Remains
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has been dead since 1900, but he could still be in for a move. A strip-mining company is taking samples of coal near his hometown of Roecken, where he's also buried.
As reported in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Mibrag, a mining company, has been carrying out exploratory drilling near the village in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt since 2006.
If the samples prove positive, the surrounding towns might have to be demolished to make room for strip-mining.
That could mean the destruction of the house where one of the 20th century's most influential thinkers was born and nurtured his adolescent will to power.
It would also likely force the philosopher's grave to be moved elsewhere
A fair number of Roecken's 170 residents seem unhappy about the possibility of an involuntary move. The Green party, the only party to oppose the drilling, recently polled 36.4 percent in elections -- and they posted even higher numbers in other neighboring hamlets.
But the larger surrounding area, which was part of communist former East Germany and suffers from high unemployment, has different priorities. In September 2007, the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt approved an energy policy that would allow for new mining operations near Roecken.
Local parliaments have also since voiced their support for continuing coal mining in the region.
"Around half of the visitors to the Nietzsche memorial here want to talk to us about coal," the pastor currently occupying Nietzsche's boyhood home told the ddp news agency.
Mibrag said it will try to respect the area's cultural heritage, should mining plans go ahead.
"If it's possible to dig around it, we will," company spokeswoman Angelika Diesener told ddp. "We're aware of the cultural and historical treasures here."
Diesener added that the company had not drawn up any concrete plans for moving the village -- or Nietzsche's final resting place.
Even if that situation changes, the philosopher will have a few more years of peace and quiet -- the earliest mining would commence would be 2025.
Still, it would be ironic if the philosopher-poet does have to make way for the backhoes and bulldozers since one of his most famous couplets reads: "Light is everything that I touch/ And coal everything I leave behind."
另一位英国音乐专家英国谢菲尔德大学（University of Sheffield）的西蒙•吉弗教授 （Prof. Simon Keefe）说，“这是一个非常令人兴奋的发现。无需说，这将使我们重新考虑这位著名音乐家的真实形象了。”
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(b Cesky Krumlov, Bohemia [now in Czech Republic], 19 March 1736; d Vienna, 28 March 1807). In 1756 he was accepted as a student at the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in Vienna, where he studied for about ten years. In 1768 he was commissioned by Empress Maria-Theresa to go to Italy to paint portraits of the nobility in Milan, Parma and Florence; he became a member of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1769. In 1772 he was appointed deputy head of the Vienna Gem?ldegalerie and in 1776 became painter to the imperial court. He was granted full membership of the Akademie in Vienna that same year, submitting the Portrait of a Man Aged 104 from Bohemia (Vienna, Akad. Bild. Kst.) on his admission.
In this age of memoir and thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, writers who take high dives into deeply imagined waters have become increasingly rare — and valuable. What a pleasure, then, to discover that Jennifer Cody Epstein, whose luminous first novel, “The Painter From Shanghai,” is based on the actual life of Pan Yuliang, a former child prostitute turned celebrated painter, also happens to be one such writer.
It doesn’t hurt that Yuliang’s life — buffeted by the seismic cultural and political shifts in China during the first half of the 20th century — makes for an irresistible story: born in 1895 and orphaned as a child, Yuliang was sold into sexual slavery at 14 by her opium-addicted uncle. After seven years in the brothel, she was bought out by Pan Zanhua, a progressive official who made her his concubine, then his second wife, and encouraged her painting. One of a handful of women accepted into the Shanghai Art School, she went on to win fellowships for study in Paris and Rome. After several years abroad, she returned to China, where success and scandal — thanks to her Western-influenced nude self-portraits — followed. In 1937, with Shanghai and Nanking under bloody assault by the Japanese, Yuliang fled China for good, settling alone in Paris, where she died, impoverished, in 1977.
In “The Painter From Shanghai,” Epstein concentrates on Yuliang’s time in the brothel — chillingly named the Hall of Eternal Splendor — and her early years with the devoted Pan Zanhua when, as Epstein imagines, Yuliang’s understanding of herself as a (relatively) free woman and artist began to emerge. The brothel sections are harrowing. Epstein, who clearly did vast amounts of research, brings palpably to life the degradations these young women are subjected to: the mock wedding of new “leaves” (or virgins) to the highest bidder; the enforced vinegar diets to lose weight; the “puffy ringed hands” of Godmother, who checks the girls for signs of “sex-sickness.”
Most vivid is Epstein’s portrait of the lovely Jinling, “trailing scent like an elegant scarf, an exotic blend of gardenia and musk.” The establishment’s top girl, she eats seed pearls crushed with sugar to enhance her complexion. Jinling befriends and protects Yuliang, bringing a bright insouciance to the brothel’s dark halls — until she is murdered, her throat slit by one of her clients. Her death reverberates throughout the novel. Indeed, Epstein suggests that Yuliang’s desire to repossess Jinling’s pale, beautiful, youthful flesh — and thereby her own — inspires the nude paintings that will later bring her such notoriety.
In an epigraph, Epstein quotes the English painter John Sloane, who wrote that “though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living.” In the end, this is precisely what Epstein illustrates in her moving characterization of Pan Yuliang, who even as an abused young girl notes the way a “slap mark glows red at first but fades slowly to peach-pink,” and as an adult, torn between her love for her husband and her desire to be unconstrained as an artist, chooses the nourishment of her work: “She cocks her head ... and starts anew. She paints until the light outside has seeped away into the black sky; until the monks go home and the mourners leave, and all that’s left is the soft click of the gamblers’ ivory.”
Sarah Towers teaches creative writing at the Bard Prison Initiative.
黃伯飛教授是基督徒，我在他的安息禮拜致憶念詞提到十七世紀玄學詩人鄧肯（John Donne）那首“Death Be Not Proud”的詩，基督徒相信永生，生有時限，死無時間，救世主二度降臨之時，眾生甦醒，猶似一夢。
我還提到自周策縱先生逝世後，有如黃粱一夢、花果凋零的「白馬社」詩人，此社眾人以黃伯飛詩作最豐碩、詩齡最持久，相反，又以盧飛白（筆名李經）命蹇詩 稀。盧為出色的艾略特研究學者，雖然出版了薄薄一冊T. S. Eliot: The Dialectical Structure of His Theory of Poetry（1966），圖書館裡卻是重量級著作。盧命坎坷，擇善固執、淡泊明志，一生未在學院爭得席位，但卻無損詩心。
BARACK OBAMA is on the defensive like never before. In the past week, news reports have aired sermons from his adviser and friend in Chicago, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, that repelled many moderates and independents who had been attracted to Mr Obama’s unifying presidential campaign. The candidate was under pressure to respond, and he finally did so on Tuesday March 18th with an ambitious and lengthy speech that attempted to go far beyond the issue of Mr Wright.
The clips that were aired of Mr Wright’s speeches were damning. Speaking of white racism, and after accusing the government of selling drugs to blacks in order to jail them, the pastor once said that blacks should sing not “God Bless America”, but “God damn America”. He said of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” Words on the page fail to do justice to Mr Wright’s anger; his fierce cadence has been played on television and computer screens all across America, again and again. Middle-of-the-road voters have, understandably, been shocked.
Mr Obama had to disown Mr Wright’s comments and he did, calling them not just “divisive” but “simply inexcusable”. But he took a risk in not disowning the man himself. He pointed to Mr Wright’s long service to the downtrodden in explaining what he saw in his church and his ministry. This will not be enough for many voters; on the other hand, disowning a man whom he has professed to admire for two decades would have been somewhat incredible.
Instead, Mr Obama sought ambitiously to lift the discussion far beyond his preacher’s comments to take on the far larger issues of racial frustration in America. He described the justifiable frustration of blacks in America, given their history of oppression and the lingering inequalities they face. But he also said that the black community is flawed by pockets of ignorance, decaying families and other ills. Mr Wright’s mistake, said Mr Obama, was focusing only on the past and on injustice, and not on the changes that have already been made and the possibility of a “more perfect union” in the future.
But Mr Obama spoke out against labelling whites as racist without realising that their “resentments...are grounded in legitimate concerns”. He said that past policies of welfare, which have gone disproportionately to blacks, may have done more harm than good. He empathised with struggling white parents who see children of minority groups win help through affirmative action to atone for crimes that they and their own children had not committed. He returned again and again to the weak economy, and to corporations which he said destroyed American dreams by shipping jobs overseas.
In other words he denied that he was trying to put race aside through his own candidacy, saying instead that it was an issue Americans could not afford to ignore. This rhetorical structure was ambitious: to criticise both whites and blacks, but to sympathise with both groups’ grievances, and implicitly to say that this made his candidacy even more necessary. No vague call for unity, this was Mr Obama pulling the fire alarm on racial tension in America and calling for an urgent reappraisal.
But will it work? Republicans hoping to win the White House in the autumn, and Hillary Clinton, who is battling him for the Democratic nomination now, have every reason to turn attention from his call to action back to his relationship with an inflammatory pastor. Mrs Clinton and John McCain themselves may step carefully around the issue, as they have so far, but their supporters will not be so subtle. Clinton boosters will hope that the types of downtrodden whites Mrs Clinton needs to win (including in the crucial Pennsylvania primary in April) will not be soothed by Mr Obama’s talk. And Republicans will pursue those same voters with the same tactics should Mr Obama become the nominee. Those opposed to Mr Obama will say that Tuesday’s oratory proves only what they already knew: that Mr Obama gives a fine speech, but that questions remain over the young candidate’s rush to the White House.
In 1960 another eloquent young candidate, John Kennedy, was suspected of belonging to a church with some attitudes that looked suspiciously un-American: the Catholic Church. He successfully defused that fear by stating that his faith was private and the church would never dictate his politics. Mitt Romney, a Mormon, was a competent and articulate Republican who toed the party line on all its big issues. Yet his run for the Republican nomination failed, perhaps partly as a result of his religious identity. For Mr Obama it appears that the words of Mr Wright are a bigger liability than was Kennedy’s Catholicism. But Mr Obama has shown considerable talent on the campaign trail thus far. If he fails to keep defining himself aggressively, his pastor’s paranoid and angry comments will let opponents do it for him.
The following is the text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign.
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.
There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.
There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.
Craig Barrett has been leading Intel with a steady hand for almost a decade, first as CEO and now as Chairman of the Board. He has seen the tech giant through thick and thin: the thickness of wallets during the dot-com bubble, and the thinness of demand when that bubble burst. * through thick and thin
But now Intel is on steady ground, holding its place as the world's largest chip-maker. He sat down with CNN's Maggie Lake in The Boardroom to discuss how he kept Intel on top when times got tough. Lake: Do you think Intel is a different company now than it was before the bursting of the tech bubble? Barrett: Probably the biggest difference is our worldwide influence, or the impact. We do more business outside the U.S. today than ever before and the international business is growing. Lake: What did you learn as CEO, how to steer the company through those times? Barrett: Regardless of how deep the depression, we know that we always have to invest our way out, we don't save our way out of the recession. New products are lifeblood, so you have to keep up the R&D stream, you have to keep up the new products, the new technology machine, keep that going full speed ahead. Lake: A lot of people are critical when you do that when times are tough though, they want to see you hoard some money. You came under some fire for that didn't you?
Barrett: Well, there were a few negative comments made that we should be having massive layoffs; we ought to cut our capital spend; we ought to cut our R&D spending, but in fact back in the '03-'04 timeframe, when in fact the markets started to rebound, we had the new products, the new technology in place. Lake: AMD is much smaller, but it's stealing market share, how does Intel ultimately win that? Is it going to come down to pricing? Barrett: We win by being technology leaders. It's the only way you win in our business. The simplest measure is that you look at January and then December the same year. The revenue in December (is) 90 percent from the products that weren't there in January. So unless you have that constant flow of new products, You can't be successful. Lake: Now when you look at your background you obviously have a passion for the technology, you don't just come from a sales and marketing background. You could have stayed in academia and yet you didn't, you made that transition to management, CEO and ultimately a leadership role. How hard was that? What was that learning curve like for you because they can be very different worlds. Barrett: Well it was on the job training, because I had never had a single marketing or business course in my life. I was educated as an engineer, I taught at Stanford engineering school for 10 years.
But you know the core of our business is in fact technology and I love the technology and I think that that's helped me in the business and if you really love what you do and you just want to get to work every morning and you want to be successful then I think the rest follows. Lake: Do you think America is losing its edge when it comes to being competitive in these fields? Barrett: There's no question that the trend is away from America as the only dominant source. We still have the best research universities -- the Stanfords, the MITs, the University of California campuses -- we still have the best research universities in the world. But the rest of the world is catching up from an education standpoint and from a research standpoint. Lake: What does that mean for a corporation like Intel, does that mean more operations move to those parts of the world? Barrett: It means, to be internationally competitive we have to hire the best and the brightest wherever they reside. We have operations in Russia, we have operations in India and we have operations in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, around the world, but we're trying to attract the best talent wherever it resides. We have to be competitive. Lake: What is your legacy to intel and technology, do you think? Barrett: We grew through the '80s and '90s to become the world's largest semi conducting company, by far, we are still the world's largest semi conducting company and I like being number one, that's a good legacy to live with as well.
hc論: 應該是"on- the- job",the Stanford, the MIT, tIntel 和 semiconductor company 本篇可能是電腦直接聽寫
20009
After Three Decades at Intel, Its Chairman Plans to Retire
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 23, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Intel Corporation, the chip maker, said Friday that its chairman, Craig R. Barrett,
who steered the company through the dot-com collapse and has become a
high-profile advocate for expanding computing in the developing world,
plans to retire in May.
Mr. Barrett, 69, has spent more than three decades at Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif. He served as its fourth chief executive, a position he held for seven years until Paul S. Otellini took over in 2005.
The
company said that Jane Shaw, a former pharmaceutical industry executive
who has served on Intel’s board since 1993, would succeed Mr. Barrett.
Ms. Shaw will serve as nonexecutive chairman.
Mr. Barrett’s tenure
as chief executive was marked by his commitment to sustaining Intel’s
aggressive investments in its factories during the prolonged slump that
followed the dot-com slump. The strategy was seen as foolhardy by some
investors as Intel’s profits shriveled, but it paid off: Intel’s
cutting-edge factories are critical to maintaining its advantage over
rivals like Advanced Micro Devices and making chips cheaper and more powerful.
In recent years, Mr. Barrett has worked with the United Nations
and humanitarian organizations on bringing computers and other
technologies to developing countries. That role also gave him an
opportunity to push the inexpensive Classmate PCs that Intel designed
for international schoolchildren. The Classmate has rivaled the
nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr.
Barrett, who joined Intel in 1974 and has held jobs ranging from
technology development manager to various vice president roles, has been
chairman since 2005.
Intel is the world’s largest semiconductor
company, with 80 percent of the world’s market for microprocessors, the
brains of personal computers.
其中推薦亞瑟米勒（Arthur Miller, 1915-2005）的After the Fall, (1964)宜翻譯為《失足之後》，因為這FALL 源於fall from grace （pp. 419-20）：犯罪而失去上帝之恩寵…… 我查一下，還有《墮落之後》（After the Fall，1964）; 《失樂園》（After the Fall） 等等翻譯......
Obituaries
George Kao; Writer-Translator Helped Readers in China, U.S. Share Cultures
George Kao, 95, translated American classics such as "The Great Gatsby." (Family Photo - Family Photo)
Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 7, 2008; Page B07
George Kao, 95, an author and translator who introduced Chinese readers to Jay Gatsby, Eugene Gant and other icons of American literature and who exposed American readers to Chinese wit and humor, died March 1 of pneumonia at the Mayflower Retirement Community in Winter Park, Fla. He maintained residences in Winter Park and Kensington.
His translations included American classics such as "The Great Gatsby," "Look Homeward, Angel" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night" as well as books of his own that demystified the vagaries of American-style English and the nation's culture.
"As one whose mother tongue is not English, I have had a none-too-private love affair with its American brand these many years," Mr. Kao wrote in a Washington Post letter to the editor in 1993. He noted that he started learning English at 8 and was still learning at 80-plus.
His letter gently chided Post columnist Colman McCarthy for having "dissed the robust and long-standing 'ain't' " in a column about a new edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
Mr. Kao wrote: "What lyrics would he have substituted for the popular Gershwin tune, 'It Ain't Necessarily So,' I wonder. And in what more emphatic way would he express himself, upon hearing that famous athletes have incomes in the seven figures, than to say, 'That ain't hay!' "
Mr. Kao was born in 1912 in Ann Arbor, Mich., where his parents were among the first group of the Boxer Rebellion indemnity scholarship students. The scholarships, compensation to the Chinese government for loss of life and property during the 1900 rebellion, allowed large numbers of young Chinese to study at U.S. colleges and universities.
His parents took him back to China when he was 3, and he grew up in Nanjing, Beijing and Shanghai. He graduated in 1933 from Yenching University, an institution founded by American missionaries, and received a master's degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1935. In 1937, he received a master's from Columbia University, where he studied international relations.
"His whole life embodied the two cultures," said his son Jeffrey Yu-teh Kao. "He sincerely believed that the key to good translation was not just knowing the language but having an understanding of the people and culture behind the words."
From 1937 to 1947, he served in the New York headquarters of the Chinese news service, coordinating contacts and publications. In 1945, he attended the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco as the information officer for the Chinese delegation.
From 1947 to 1949, he was director of the West Coast office of the Nationalist Chinese government's information agency and later editor in chief of "The Chinese Press." From 1951 to 1953, he was a supervisory instructor at the Monterey language institute. He moved to the Washington area in 1957 to become chief editor for the Voice of America's China broadcast.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Chinese reading public came to know Mr. Kao as the author of books and articles interpreting American popular culture. Books he wrote or edited include "Cathay by the Bay: San Francisco in 1950" (1988), "Two Writers and the Cultural Revolution: Lao She and Chen Jo-hsi" (1980) and "Chinese Wit and Humor" (1946).
The latter concept is not an oxymoron, literature scholar Michelle C. Sun wrote in a 2004 edition of "East-West Connections." She was convinced by Mr. Kao's argument that Taoism's influence in Chinese culture often expresses itself in subtle forms of humor that mock civil authority and Confucian puritanism.
Sun quoted Mr. Kao: "Chinese humor, to a greater degree than that of any other peoples, sees the ludicrous in the pathos of life. It is the result of a philosophical reaction to adversity coupled with innate optimism about the future."
After his retirement from the Voice of America in 1972, Mr. Kao was appointed visiting senior fellow at the new Chinese University of Hong Kong. There, he founded and served as the first editor of "Renditions," a journal devoted to translating classical and contemporary Chinese literature into English. He returned to Kensington in 1980.
In 1994, he co-edited with his brother, Irving K.Y. Kao, "A New Dictionary of Idiomatic American English," published by the Reader's Digest of Hong Kong. It was reissued in 2004 by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and republished in a mainland edition by the Peking University Press in 2006.
Mr. Kao's wife of 57 years, Maeching Li Kao, died in 2003.
Survivors, in addition to his brother of Ann Arbor and his son of Potomac, include another son, William Yu-wang Kao of Belfast, Maine; a sister, Laura Kao Loughridge of Gaithersburg; another brother, Edward Kao of Bowling Green, Ohio; and four grandchildren.
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Ashes to ashes or, um, coal?
之所以在大學選擇中文專業，與我想讓高中古漢語老師另眼相看有關。那位老師非常挑剔。而天生執拗的我就想取得好成績來讓他讚揚我。因此我就認真學習古 漢語，學著學著學出了樂趣。這使得我對中國的興趣越來越濃。儘管這樣，我高考的第一志願還是經營學。但是誰知第一志願沒考上，最終進入了為了保底而報考的 大阪外國語大學中文專業。
small talk 閑談, 世間話.