From: jeffreydrubard42@gmail.com   
      
   From a blog:   
      
      
   Very glad to be associated with this project, if only as a man who somehow   
   looks like the “David W. Blight” who appears in videos associated with the   
   project. (Perhaps not the only person ever associated with the pen name, that   
   happens sometimes.)   
      
   Frederick Douglass is something like “the most interesting Republican”, an   
   American figure with enduring relevance for African-American rights and much   
   more besides. The country he needed? He made it him self, by fashioning a   
   social movement to    
   accompany and guide the Union effort to crush chattel slavery in the Southern   
   states that still maintained it.   
      
   He was an American success by the standards of his era, which were exacting   
   and unforgiving. (The newer TV program devoted to him shows more of this.) He   
   was also a sharp political mind, perhaps the first to adumbrate a sensible   
   radical egalitarian    
   program cutting across racial divisions for a United States he somehow   
   belonged to, even if he belonged to no one else.   
      
   And yet in talking about Frederick Douglass I somehow end up talking about the   
   “Q-Tip tautology”, i.e. Q-Tip’s words in De La Soul’s “Me, Myself,   
   and I”: “black is black”, something Douglass was and which I am not. It   
   — is — really —   
    best — not — to — be — the — expert — on — others.   
      
   Jeffrey Rubard   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)