Bury My Heart...

...at Wounded Knee. That was the site of the 1890 massacre of the Oglala Sioux by the US cavalry. As the news is full of talk about whether Canadian First Nations will blockade highways and rail lines as part of a national day of action on June 29, I'm reading about the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the site of the Wounded Knee atrocity. The New York Times article has a picture of a Station of the Cross in the Holy Rosary Catholic Church on the reserve - the Romans are represented as American cavalrymen.

Bopha!

Watched the 1993 film Bopha!, about a black police sergeant and his family in 1980 South Africa. Most powerful were the scenes of dancing, singing protesters confronting the South African Police with their rifles, batons, whips and tear gas, and the funeral of the protesters killed by the police.

Lectures About Heaven

That's the title Thomas Laqueur gives to his review of Fritz Stern's Five Germanys I Have Known in London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n11/laqu01_.html):
"There is a joke about a crowd of Germans pouring out of a tourist bus that has stopped in front of the Pearly Gates. They see two signs. One points to the left: ‘Heaven.’ The other points right: ‘Lectures about Heaven.’ The Germans all head to the right."

This joke needn't be about Germans, of course.