In Mississippi, the state fair will feature an appearance by Edgar Ray Killen the preacher who (allegedly) directed the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964:
"Visitors to next month's Mississippi State Fair may gawk at their reflections in the Fun House, witness the Mississippi State Championship Mule Pull or shake hands with the key suspect in the Klan's 1964 killings of three civil rights workers."
Killen will appear at the booth of the Nazi group the Nationalist Movement.
"Those attending the fair can support Killen by signing a 3-foot-tall card that reads 'Edgar Ray Killen Unreconstructed' and has quotes from the preacher saying he hasn't changed his beliefs like George Wallace did: 'I sure will never do that. People come up to me, all the time, and hug my neck.' "
The more things change...You can read the whole thing here.
And speaking of the bad old days, there's an interesting piece in the L.A. Times today about surviving Kamikazes who resent being compared to today's suicide bombers. You can read it here (if you're registered, or go to Bugmenot.com if you're not).
The Kamikazes offer the following arguments for why the suicide bombers are a different breed altogether:
• They were ready to die out of love for their country, they say; suicide bombers are driven by hatred and revenge.
• The Shinto religion offers no reward of life after death. Islamic suicide bombers are promised a place in an afterlife.
• They were volunteers, motivated solely by patriotism. Suicide bombers often are recruited by militia leaders who offer money to their families.
Which sounds all well and good, utnil you hear what some of the pilots believed, and the way the martyrs are depicted in the memorial mural at the Peace museum:
"We would tell each other, 'We'll meet in Yasukuni,' " says survivor Den, describing how he and others found solace in the belief that their souls would be "interred" at Yasukuni as gods. "The phrase had great significance for us."
"The Peace Museum in Chiran bestows the same posthumous heroism on the kamikazes. The tens of thousands of visitors each year are greeted in the lobby by a mural depicting a dead Japanese pilot being lifted from his watery grave by six angelic women."Not entirely unlike hordes of virgins waiting for young Muslim men in heaven. Some academic somewhere must be working on a book on comparative suicide-martyr ideology and imagery. If it's not already out there.
On a more positive note, peace is on a roll: there's a holy man, the "rolling saint," rolling across India for peace. Literally...rolling. Of course he got stopped at the Pakistani border. I guess we'll have to see how this bodes for the world. You can read about it here (note as well the titilating headline in the sidebar: "NRI doctor in big boob bust-up" It's everything it promises).
