How Do You Parole Someone For Killing The Future?

A little-noted news item was espied today;



Killer of Malcolm X Granted Parole

Thomas Hagan has been held since moments after shots rang out in the Audubon Ballroom in 1965. He has been on work release for more than two decades, but he still spends two days a week locked up at the Lincoln Correctional Facility on West 110th Street in Manhattan.

[snip]

Mr. Hagan, who turned 69 in jail on Tuesday, was a militant member of the Nation of Islam on Feb. 21, 1965, when Malcolm X was shot while giving a speech at the Audubon, in Washington Heights. Mr. Hagan, then known as Talmadge X. Hayer, was captured by the crowd and shot at and beaten before being rescued by the police.

Two other men, Muhammad Abdul Aziz (then known as Norman 3X Butler) and Kahlil Islam (then Thomas 15X Johnson), were also charged with the murder. They maintained their innocence. Mr. Hagan did not, testifying at his trial in 1966 that he was responsible for the murder and that his co-defendants were innocent.

All three men were sentenced to 20 years to life.

Count me on the side that would have liked to see these guys serve out the "to life" part of the sentence.

Setting aside the internal politics, and disputes, of the Nation of Islam, at the time, in killing Malcom (Little) X, they snuffed out a piece of the future, possibly incredible greatness for the common good, and that should have been considered before freeing any of his killers.

Rebecca Solnit: How 9/11 Should Be Remembered

It was nearly two-years ago that we highlighted Rebecca Solnit here on The Garlic, and, on this specific day, we are compelled to have her return.



Over on TomDispatch, Ms. Solnit has a fantastic post, an excerpt from her new book, that should be read by one-and-all;

How 9/11 Should Be Remembered - The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People

For this eighth anniversary of that terrible day, the first post-Bush-era anniversary, let's remember what actually happened:

When the planes became missiles and the towers became torches and then shards and clouds of dust, many were afraid, but few if any panicked, other than the President who was far away from danger. The military failed to respond promptly, even though the Pentagon itself was attacked, and the only direct resistance that day came from inside Flight 93, which went down in a field in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington.

[snip]

We failed, however, when we let our own government and media do what that small band from the other side of the Earth could not. Some of us failed, that is, for there were many kinds of response, and some became more radical, more committed, more educated. Mark Fichtel, the president of the New York Coffee, Sugar, and Cocoa Exchange, who scraped his knees badly that morning of September 11th when he was knocked over in a fleeing crowd, was helped to his feet by "a little old lady." He nonetheless had his Exchange up and running the next day, and six months later quit his job, began studying Islam, and then teaching about it.

[snip]

Far more people could have died on September 11th if New Yorkers had not remained calm, had not helped each other out of the endangered buildings and the devastated area, had not reached out to pull people from the collapsing buildings and the dust cloud. The population of the towers was lower than usual that morning, because it was an election day and many were voting before heading to work; it seems emblematic that so many were spared because they were exercising their democratic powers. Others exercised their empathy and altruism. In the evacuation of the towers, John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant, was carried down 69 flights of stairs by his coworkers.

[snip]

Many New Yorkers that day committed similar feats of solidarity at great risk. In fact, in all the hundreds of oral histories I read and the many interviews I conducted to research my book, "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster", I could find no one saying he or she was abandoned or attacked in that great exodus. People were frightened and moving fast, but not in a panic. Careful research has led disaster sociologists to the discovery -- one of their many counter-stereotypical conclusions -- that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness

[snip]

New Yorkers triumphed on that day eight years ago. They triumphed in calm, in strength, in generosity, in improvisation, in kindness. Nor was this something specific to that time or place: San Franciscans during the great earthquake of 1906, Londoners during the Blitz in World War II, the great majority of New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina hit, in fact most people in most disasters in most places have behaved with just this sort of grace and dignity.

[snip]

After the 9/11 storm struck, the affected civilians in New York were seen as victims; after Katrina, those in New Orleans were portrayed as brutes. In both cities, the great majority of affected people were actually neither helpless nor savage; they were something else -- they were citizens, if by that word we mean civic engagement rather than citizenship status. In both places ordinary people were extraordinarily resourceful, generous, and kind, as were some police officers, firefighters, rescue workers, and a very few politicians. In both cases, the majority of politicians led us astray. All I would have wanted in that September moment, though, was politicians who stayed out of the way, and people who were more suspicious of the news and the newsmakers.

[snip]

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times. Civil society triumphed that morning in full glory. Look at it: remember that this is who we were and can be.

September 11th may never become the holiday, or, day-of-remembrance, it should be, chiefly due to the dwarf, finks, phonies and frauds of The Bush Grindhouse, and all the cronies - the Flying Monkeys of the Right Wing Freak Show, and the cheerleading Corporate Media - how they exploited the tragedy for the masturbation of their own warped ideology (ironically, killing hundreds-of-thousands more).

It takes ordinary people - like Rebecca Solnit, and many, many others - to put it in the right perspective.

Go read Rebecca Solnit's "How 9/11 Should Be Remembered - The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People", and leave a comment, if you were able to keep your eyes dry while absorbing it.

And, you can go here to purchase her book, "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster"

We Always Knew The Big Apple Was Expensive ...

That was one of the cleaner titles we came up for this post ...

Pretty amazing, that there are xenophobes protecting the urinals of America's ballparks

On Yankee Stadium Restroom Dispute, the City Settles

New York City will pay $10,001 to settle a federal lawsuit on behalf of a Queens man who was ejected from the old Yankee Stadium last August after trying to use the bathroom during the playing of “God Bless America.” In addition, the team has publicly declared that it has no policy prohibiting fans from moving about during the playing of the patriotic song, which the team began playing during games after 9/11.

[snip]

But in a stipulation [pdf] as part of the settlement of the lawsuit against the team and the city, the Yankees declared “that they have no policy or practice at the new Yankee Stadium that imposes any restrictions on fans wishing to move about the Stadium during the playing of ‘God Bless America’ to do not also apply during the rest of the game.” The team also said it had no intention of instituting such a policy.

Gee, thanks Yankee Management, and the City of New York ...

I am relieved to know people won't be thrown in jail, for not worshiping the flag, every single moment of the day, and, especially, when they gotta go ...

A Head-Shaker, For Sure ...

Way back when, one was taught the "5 W's of Journalism" (Who, What, When, Where, and Why - with some throwing in an "H", for How).

For this one, we have to add another - WTF!

NY Car Ticketed Repeatedly With Dead Body Inside

The daughter of 58-year-old George Morales wants everyone to remember her handyman father in a different way, not as a decomposed body found in a van under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on Wednesday. He'd been dead a month, in a van with four parking tickets.

[snip]

Morales' daughter said her father left their apartment in Washington Heights on May 5 in a van owned by a friend. George Morales was headed for Long Island, but he just vanished.

His daughter suspects George Morales, who suffered from diabetes and heart problems, may have felt ill, and pulled off the road for a nap. A window was cracked. The odor became overpowering. After the car was ticketed each Monday for a month, a marshal, about to tow the van, noticed a body in the back seat.

I sure hope this isn't a case, of the ticket writers, be it NYPD, a meter maid, or someone from the N.Y. Traffic Dept. - particularly, from Week #2, and after - seeing (and, no doubt, smelling) the dead body and doing a "Not My Job" thing (at minimum, they could have hit a pay phone and made an anonymous call).

I mean, you gotta shake your head, and ask, how do you not notice a body, a dead body, sitting in car?