Jul 3, 2006
Rumsfeld's Mount Misery
[Rebecca briefly lifts her head out of her dissertation.]
The new flap over the New York Times' travel section article about the small vacation community on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney have their summer homes is reaching ridiculous proportions, with some bloggers encouraging their readers to track down and photograph New York Times editors' children at school. But it seems to me we're missing the really interesting information in the article.
The houses have names. Mr. Rumsfeld's is Mount Misery and is just across Rolles Creek from a house called Mount Pleasant...there is some historical gravity to the name, too. By 1833, Mount Misery's owner was Edward Covey, a farmer notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers. One who wouldn't be broken was Frederick Douglass, then 16 and later the abolitionist orator. Covey assaulted him, so Douglass beat him up and escaped."
I find it oddly appropriate that the Defense Secretary who has endorsed torture lives on a plantation where another man once beat and tortured slaves.
[Rebecca, having enjoyed this brief bloggy reprieve, puts her head back down in her dissertation.]
[Partial H/T to Andrew Sullivan]
The new flap over the New York Times' travel section article about the small vacation community on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney have their summer homes is reaching ridiculous proportions, with some bloggers encouraging their readers to track down and photograph New York Times editors' children at school. But it seems to me we're missing the really interesting information in the article.
The houses have names. Mr. Rumsfeld's is Mount Misery and is just across Rolles Creek from a house called Mount Pleasant...there is some historical gravity to the name, too. By 1833, Mount Misery's owner was Edward Covey, a farmer notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers. One who wouldn't be broken was Frederick Douglass, then 16 and later the abolitionist orator. Covey assaulted him, so Douglass beat him up and escaped."
I find it oddly appropriate that the Defense Secretary who has endorsed torture lives on a plantation where another man once beat and tortured slaves.
[Rebecca, having enjoyed this brief bloggy reprieve, puts her head back down in her dissertation.]
[Partial H/T to Andrew Sullivan]