WBBJ TV
January 20, 2021
JACKSON, Tenn. – Just hours after President Joe Biden was sworn-in, West Tennesseans are reacting to the historical inauguration.
The transfer of power took place in Washington Wednesday afternoon, among heightened security and a pandemic that has claimed thousands of lives in the United States.
In West Tennessee, many shared their thoughts on Wednesday’s inauguration that was televised nationwide.
“Well, I think the whole thing was pretty tight with the security and everything. It was good, but it was just reduced to a smaller number because of all the security and recent events,” said resident, Horace Taylor.
Why we need more DIY government.
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The House of Representatives, by Samuel F.B. Morse, c. 1821. Smithsonian American Art Museum, museum purchase through a grant from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, 1978.
It takes a lot of gall to represent anyone else, even in so humble a thing as a school board, much less in the U.S. House, and less still in our U.S. Senate, with all its gaseous grandees. In the now plutocratic United States, once in theory so free of caste, it’s still hard to bear why anyone should be above you and me, with the right to “represent” us on the issues of the day. When I ran in the House primary in 2009 and got clobbered, I used to wonder: How could I justify going to Washington, DC, for two years and claiming to represent 600,000 people back in Chicago? It seemed all the more illegitimate since, in the special election to fill Rahm Emanuel’s seat, only 50,000 of that number voted. I would brood about it in the backseat of the car when
W.E.B. Du Bois on the evil that the privileged may exercise.
What is the cause of the undoubted reaction and alarm that the citizens of democracy continually feel?
It is, I am sure, the failure to feel the full significance of the change of rule from a privileged minority to that of an omnipotent majority, and the assumption that mere majority rule is the last word of government; that majorities have no responsibilities, that they rule by the grace of God. Granted that government should be based on the consent of the governed, does the consent of a majority at any particular time adequately express the consent of all? Has the minority, even though a small and unpopular and unfashionable minority, no right to respectful consideration?
know. and he goes on to be you see lots of political cartoons. he s labeled a czar, you see historians writing about him as a czar. they don t really notice the fact that that was a real dig at him. it was not a complimentary reference, so this is a way they are trying to get jews charged up to vote against lomazny by calling him a czar. they re organizing this meeting in a synagogue. and look at the bottom of the flyer. you have the english account and down here you have hebrew. i can t tell you what it says but i m guessing it says about the same thing that it says up here. so this is about, again, mobilizing russian or eastern european jews, most of the jews in the west end were from russia. mobilizing them in their own native tongue, meeting in a synagogue, voting for a jewish candidate, so you re both jewish and an active citizen at the same time, once again. this is very similar to what you saw with the irish in the 19th century, this effort to be both a citizen and
only very gradual did they mobilize. it was not a process where they discard their old world identity and become american citizens. it s different where they re jewish and american at the same time. you see this is another newspaper that is actually in his district again. good italians become good americans. i ll read you an editorial. it says a person of italian nativity in order to become a good american must necessarily be a good italian. again, italian and american is not contradictions. what starts to happen at the beginning of the 20th century, maybe a few years into the 20th century, as we ve read about, nativism kicks in again. there s this massive wave of immigrants. the growth of darwinian thinking about racial groups. all of which feeds nativist concerns. the campaign for restrictions is picking up steam over the first couple decades of the 20th century. it will become much more significant in the period around world war i, the first real immigration restriction, a