Real Slavery, Book Slavery and Retail Slavery
I realize I've been little remiss in posting, but I've been occupied with the trifling matter of the end of slavery and deciding how best to put my useless carcass to work. Perhaps a sign of my morbid disposition, reading about how a motley combination of Quakers and Evangelical Anglicans helped end slavery has been the more interesting of the two subjects.
The book in question is Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild. He also wrote King Leopold's Ghost, which is a history of the Belgian colonization and enslavement of the African Congo. He is my favorite historian, and with good reason. I find these topics fascinating, and he has a clear, concise style that Dave Eggers and his ilk will never be able to improve upon or destroy. "Bury the chains" is interesting, because as the book explains, the abolitionist movement was unprecedented in human history. These twelve men essentially got together under the common conviction that slavery was wrong, and didn't stop agitating for its end until the British parliament outlawed it in the early 19th century. Granted they were favored by historical circumstance, such as the French Revolution and the bloody slave revolts of St. Domingo, but these events only encouraged them, and were not their original impetus. While the two most dedicated abolitionists were Tom Clarkson and Granville Sharp, my favorite one out of the twelve has to be William Wilberforce, who was so tender hearted he couldn't bear to fire any of his servants. At one point he had seven or eight octogenarian maids and butlers wandering around his house, not doing much in particular.
The heroic selflessness of these men is sharply contrasted by the vulgar self-serving of the people who were anti-abolition. I know Susannah has been rightly irritated by some of the Labour party's ridiculous Newspeak, but take a look at what at least one pro-slavery writer was considering doing about the "slave-problem":
Gross. I know it's naive of me, because slavery was an age-old practice that even the Bible took for granted, but what the hell were the anti-abolitionists thinking? While I don't think I would've been as heroic as the original twelve, I'd like to think that if they talked to me about it my reaction would've been somewhere along the line of "Hey, you're right. Gimme one of them there anti-slavery buttons". The description of what the conditions were like on the slave ships should've been enough to upset people of even the most basic sensibility. This is a really fascinating book and I'd encourage any one to pick it up and read it. It's real Good vs. Evil stuff. Next on the chopping block for me is Titus Groan, which I've been meaning to read for ages, and Constantine's Sword. The latter is a history of how the Catholic Church has treated the Jewish people over the centuries. I'm going to guess "Not Well".
As to what I've decided to do with myself, after much hemming and hawing I've decided to enroll in Seneca College's Library and Information Technology program in the fall. It's a two-year program, and at the end of it I should be able to get a real job and not return to hated retail, something which I have to do now as a temporary stop-gap measure. What the program will be training me to do is operate and manage the different type of information retrieval systems and programs that most libraries, public and private, now use. I wouldn't be a librarian, but a "library technician". Basically, I'd be capable of running a library on a day to day basis, while the librarians would make policy decisions in their ivory towers, while simultaneously drinking mint juleps and doing cocaine off strippers. Of course, I wouldn't be limited to working in a public library. I just like to imagine librarians having decadent, coke-fueled orgies. I'm not sure why. That's for my therapist to decide.
Having been lacking direction for say, I don't know, two and a half years now, I'm relieved that I've managed to find something that sounds interesting and challenging. Although I've been assured that by a friend that I can always drop out if I find I don't like it, I hope that that won't be the case. I'd like to stick with this.
The book in question is Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild. He also wrote King Leopold's Ghost, which is a history of the Belgian colonization and enslavement of the African Congo. He is my favorite historian, and with good reason. I find these topics fascinating, and he has a clear, concise style that Dave Eggers and his ilk will never be able to improve upon or destroy. "Bury the chains" is interesting, because as the book explains, the abolitionist movement was unprecedented in human history. These twelve men essentially got together under the common conviction that slavery was wrong, and didn't stop agitating for its end until the British parliament outlawed it in the early 19th century. Granted they were favored by historical circumstance, such as the French Revolution and the bloody slave revolts of St. Domingo, but these events only encouraged them, and were not their original impetus. While the two most dedicated abolitionists were Tom Clarkson and Granville Sharp, my favorite one out of the twelve has to be William Wilberforce, who was so tender hearted he couldn't bear to fire any of his servants. At one point he had seven or eight octogenarian maids and butlers wandering around his house, not doing much in particular.
The heroic selflessness of these men is sharply contrasted by the vulgar self-serving of the people who were anti-abolition. I know Susannah has been rightly irritated by some of the Labour party's ridiculous Newspeak, but take a look at what at least one pro-slavery writer was considering doing about the "slave-problem":
Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS; and we shall not hear such violent outcries against the slave trade by pious divines, tender hearted poetesses, and short sighted politicians.
Gross. I know it's naive of me, because slavery was an age-old practice that even the Bible took for granted, but what the hell were the anti-abolitionists thinking? While I don't think I would've been as heroic as the original twelve, I'd like to think that if they talked to me about it my reaction would've been somewhere along the line of "Hey, you're right. Gimme one of them there anti-slavery buttons". The description of what the conditions were like on the slave ships should've been enough to upset people of even the most basic sensibility. This is a really fascinating book and I'd encourage any one to pick it up and read it. It's real Good vs. Evil stuff. Next on the chopping block for me is Titus Groan, which I've been meaning to read for ages, and Constantine's Sword. The latter is a history of how the Catholic Church has treated the Jewish people over the centuries. I'm going to guess "Not Well".
As to what I've decided to do with myself, after much hemming and hawing I've decided to enroll in Seneca College's Library and Information Technology program in the fall. It's a two-year program, and at the end of it I should be able to get a real job and not return to hated retail, something which I have to do now as a temporary stop-gap measure. What the program will be training me to do is operate and manage the different type of information retrieval systems and programs that most libraries, public and private, now use. I wouldn't be a librarian, but a "library technician". Basically, I'd be capable of running a library on a day to day basis, while the librarians would make policy decisions in their ivory towers, while simultaneously drinking mint juleps and doing cocaine off strippers. Of course, I wouldn't be limited to working in a public library. I just like to imagine librarians having decadent, coke-fueled orgies. I'm not sure why. That's for my therapist to decide.
Having been lacking direction for say, I don't know, two and a half years now, I'm relieved that I've managed to find something that sounds interesting and challenging. Although I've been assured that by a friend that I can always drop out if I find I don't like it, I hope that that won't be the case. I'd like to stick with this.
posted by Sam at
4:10 PM
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